Hegel's Psychology (The Oxford Handbook of Hegel), draft

Hegel’s Psychology Heikki Ikäheimo UNSW Australia, Sydney h.ikaheimo@unsw.edu.au Forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Hegel, ed. Dean Moyar (Oxford University Press, 2016) Contents 1. The structure of the text ....................................................................................................................... 2 2. A holistic account of the human person as the concrete subject of knowledge and action .................... 8 2.1. The .-level characterized by immediate unity—primitive and cultivated........................................ 8 2.2. The differentiated .-level of intentionality and the corresponding mental activities ..................... 14 2.3. Transcending or accommodating differences at the -level........................................................... 18 Literature ............................................................................................................................................... 21 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, 1 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”,2 has mostly ignored this text3— 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 Jenawritings 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 Rosenkranz 1837, Michelet 1840. For an early overview of this movement in Hegel-studies, see Ameriks 1992. 3 For one important exception, see Halbig 2002. 1 2 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.4 Whatever the truth about Hegel’s metaphysics,5 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”6 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. 1. The structure of the text As soon as one starts studying Subjective Spirit, one easily gets the impression that the general neglect of and ignorance about this part of Hegel’s work may have something to do also with the qualities of the text itself. There is at first sight something rather confusing and thus disappointing about it—namely the apparently sporadic way in which closely connected themes are scattered here and there, without any apparent reason other than some excessively formalistic systematics that Hegel utilizes without ever really explaining it. For example, whatever exactly Hegel means by “sensation”, “desire” and “practical feeling”, these seem to be closely connected themes, yet in the text they are for some obscure reason discussed very far apart from each other. (See Table 1.) Also, though broadly speaking Subjective Spirit begins (in Anthropology) with simpler phenomena that humans share with non-human animals, and ends (in Psychology) with more advanced or demanding phenomena unique to cultivated humans, looked more closely there are puzzling details in the thematic order of the text. Why, for example, does Hegel discuss “intuition” after ‘reason’, or “practical feeling” after “thinking”, even if in both cases he clearly means by the last mentioned member of the pair something more advanced or demanding than See Habermas 1999. For a balanced rehabilitation of Hegel as a metaphysician, see Bowman 2013. 6 For Hegel’s use of the term “concrete subject”, “concrete subjectivity” and “concrete I”, see PS, §§398, 400, 405, 456 and 457. 4 5 with the first?7 Such questions about the thematic order of the text are related to a question about the relation of Phenomenology and Psychology: they seem thematically closely interconnected, yet the precise nature of this interconnection seems unclear. All in all, even if what Hegel writes in the individual chapters of the text is often easier to follow than, say, most parts of the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, due to its puzzling architectonics the overall impression is fragmentary and confusing. Secondary literature on Subjective Spirit is scarce, and so far it has not been successful in solving these fundamental architectonic questions that are crucial for understanding the substantive content of the text. Table 1 The list of contents of Subjective Spirit in the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1830) A. Anthropology. Soul. § 388 a. The natural soul. § 391 . Natural qualities. § 392 . Natural alterations. § 396 . Sensation. § 399 b. The feeling soul. § 403 . The Feeling soul in its immediacy. § 405 . Self-feeling. § 407 . Habit. § 409 c. The actual soul. § 411 B. Phenomenology of mind. Consciousness. § 413 a. Consciousness as such. § 418 . Sensuous consciousness. § 418 . Perception. § 420 . Understanding. § 422 b. Self-consciousness. § 424 . Desire. § 426 . Recognitive self-consciousness. § 430 . Universal self-consciousness. § 436 c. Reason. § 438 C. Psychology. Spirit. § 440 a. Theoretical spirit. § 445 . Intuition. § 446 . Representation. § 451 1. Recollection. § 452 2. Imagination. § 455 3. Memory. § 461 . Thinking. § 465 b. Practical spirit. § 469 . Practical feeling. § 471 . Drives and wilfulness. § 473 7 Vittorio Hösle voices these puzzles in Hösle 1987, 348-9, 371, 389. . Happiness. § 479 c. Free spirit. § 481 Which architectonic principle or principles then organize the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit in general or the sections Phenomenology and Psychology in particular? Two candidates immediately come to mind: developmental and logical. First, Hegel did not subscribe to evolutionism of any kind and thus did not have the evolution of the human species in mind, yet, as said broadly speaking simpler phenomena seem to be followed by more complex or more advanced ones in the text. Hence given its general topic it seems not too far-fetched to expect that the text at least in some respects reflects the development of the human individual. Secondly, the logical concepts explicated by Hegel in his logic clearly have some important role to play in his discussion of the various phenomena at issue in this text, as they do in his discussion of everything in the Realphilosophien. For Hegel they are the logical structures of reality, and thus obviously at issue in a scientific or philosophical grasp of reality. Yet, neither of these candidates takes one very far. With regard to the developmental explanation, many of the details indeed actually defy the assumption of at least a simple, straightforwardly linear developmental ordering of themes in the text. As to the logical explanation, the problem is that there are simply too many logical categories at work in everything that Hegel writes, and none in particular seems to offer a key for understanding the overall thematic structure of the text.8 Where to turn then? We are best served by taking a lead from what Hegel writes in the introduction to the whole of Philosophy of Spirit (including Subjective, Objective and Absolute Spirit). On Hegel’s broadly Aristotelian normative essentialism things have essences which they can actualize to different degrees, and the more they actualize them the better or more perfect they are. In the introduction to Philosophy of Spirit Hegel declares “spirit” as the “essence of man/the human” (Mensch), and “freedom” as the “essence of spirit”.9 By saying that the essence of man/the human is spirit, Hegel is referring to the constellation of phenomena, structures and relations that are the topic of Philosophy of Spirit, and saying that they are what distinguish humans from merely animal beings. Since he means essence in a normative sense this means that the human telos and task is the actualization and perfection of these defining phenomena of humanity. By saying that the essence of “spirit” is freedom Hegel means that perfection for all of the distinctively spiritual phenomena, and thus for humanity, means increase in their realizing freedom: becoming (increasingly) what we are, not merely animals (though we are that too), but, as one would say in contemporary terms, persons, means our becoming free. The Philosophy of Spirit as a whole and thus also the sections of the text at issue here are organized and written with this essentialist normative principle, telos and task in mind. To understand what this means more concretely we need to understand, what exactly Hegel means by ‘freedom’ here. He makes clear in the introduction that he is not talking about freedom in the “abstract” sense of freedom from determination, but rather in the “concrete” sense of freedom in relation to what necessarily determines one. 10 The idea of freedom from determination by something whose determination is essential to what one is is obviously nonsense and on Hegel’s account attempts to realize it are counterproductive if not destructive. For an extended discussion of the relationship of the structure of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit to Hegel’s logic, see Stederoth 2001. 9 See PS, §382, LPS, 3-5, and Ikäheimo 2014, chapter 4.1. 10 LPS, 14. 8 The only real or realizable freedom with regard to such essential determinants—internal and external nature, social institutions, and other humans—is freedom ‘in relation to’ or ‘with regard to’ them. Importantly, Hegel conceives of the structure of concrete freedom in terms of the concept of “absolute negativity”, “negation of negation”,11 or “double negation”12, where the first ‘negation’ means differentiation or distinction from something that determines one as one’s opposite, and the second negation the overcoming of its alienness or hostility to one. Another formula for concrete freedom is “unity of unity and difference”, and metaphorically Hegel characterizes it as “being with oneself in otherness”, and more exactly as “being conscious of oneself in otherness”. The double-negation-structure of concrete freedom also provides the key for understanding many of the details of the architectonics of Hegel’s text organized in triads (within Subjective Spirit A-B-C, a-b-c, and - - , see Table 1). Almost all of the triads forming the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences are instantiations of the double-negation-structure of concrete freedom in the sense that the first member instantiates immediate unity, the second one differentiation or distinction that bifurcates the immediate unity (first negation), and the third a mediated unity incorporating the difference or distinction in question (second negation). This is of course a very general structure and what it means more exactly to instantiate it varies greatly in each case depending on the thematic content of the triad in question. Even the most general triad Logic—Philosophy of Nature—Philosophy of Spirit forming Hegel’s Encyclopaedia instantiates it in a particular way, and so does the Subjective Spirit—Objective Spirit—Absolute Spirit-triads forming the Philosophy of Spirit. As to our topic, Subjective Spirit instantiates the structure in the sense that the Anthropology discusses levels of organization of the concrete subject that are immediate in the more exact sense of pre-intentional; Phenomenology discusses then intentionality or the subject-object-relation, or in other words the differentiation of the objective world and the subject for the subject itself; and finally Psychology discusses psychological processes and activities responsible for the various aspects and dimensions of the subject-object-relation, and thus, taken formally, a unity that incorporates the difference. However, though also Phenomenology and Psychology are both organized triadically, the ‘immediate unity—differentiation—mediated unity’-structure does not seem decisive for the most general triads organizing them, namely B.a. Consciousness as such—B.b. Selfconsciousness—B.c. Reason, and C.a. Theoretical spirit—C.b. Practical spirit—C.c. Free spirit. Rather, here we find a more straightforwardly substantial organizing principle stemming directly from the thematic content of the chapters in question. As to Phenomenology, the first chapter B.a. Consciousness as such discusses theoretical subject-object-relation, the second chapter B.b. Self-consciousness discusses practical subject-object-relation, and the third chapter B.c. Reason draws the results of these chapters together and provides the transition on the one hand to Psychology, and on the other hand to Objective Spirit. The structure of Psychology is thematically analogous with that of Phenomenology: the first chapter C.a. Theoretical spirit discusses the processes and activities of the mind corresponding to the various moments of theoretical intentionality, whereas C.b. Practical spirit discusses the processes and activities of the mind corresponding to the various moments of practical intentionality. Finally, C.c. Free spirit 11 12 PS, §382. SL, 531. draws the results of the Theoretical spirit and Practical spirit together and provides another perspective to the transition to Objective Spirit. What this means is that the analogy or parallelism of the a.- and the b.-chapters of Phenomenology and Psychology is not merely structural, but also thematic, in that C.a. Theoretical spirit discusses the mental activities responsible for the forms of theoretical intentionality discussed in B.a. Consciousness as such, and C.b. Practical spirit discusses those responsible for the forms of practical intentionality discussed in B.b. Self-consciousness.13 This parallelism can be followed down to the details of the .- .- .-sequences of each of the four a.- and b.-chapters of Phenomenology and Psychology, and here it is both structural and thematic. As to the structural side, the immediate unity—differentiation—mediated unitystructure applies here again. Though at the level of the Anthropology—Phenomenology— Psychology-triad Phenomenology instantiates differentiation in the sense of the subject-objectdifference, within Phenomenology both .-sub-chapters Sensuous consciousness and Desire discuss modes or moments of intentionality that are in certain ways characterized by immediacy or lack of differentiation. Both .-sub-chapter then introduce differentiations lacking at the .level, and finally the .-sub-chapters discuss modes of intentionality in which the differences in question are sublated into a mediated unity. The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for the two .- .- .sequences in Psychology: in both cases the mental processes discussed in the .-sub-chapter are characterized by immediacy or lack of differentiation, the .-sub-chapters discuss processes or activities that involve different forms of differentiation lacking at the .-level, and finally the .sub-chapters discuss mental activities in which the differences are somehow sublated into a mediated unity. But here there is also another organizing principle at work, giving the parallelism of the .- .- .-sequences a more clearly thematic or substantial character. This is the developmental principle mentioned earlier. Though a simple, purely linear developmental reading of Subjective Spirit in general does lead to obvious problems of the kind mentioned above, a parallel developmental reading of the four .- .- .-sequences of the Phenomenology and Psychology does make much sense of the text. It also allows one to see something one desperately misses on the simple linear reading: the different chapters and sub-chapters contributing to a unified, holistic picture of the human person. It is importantly a picture that allows for development, and is thus true to the nature of the human person as the “concrete”, changing and developing subject of knowledge and action. This picture also involves a close intertwinement or mutual determination of the theoretical and the practical aspects of the being of this concrete subject. This becomes visible as soon as one sees the theoretical and practical .- .- .-sequences thematically parallel to each other, or in other words each .-subchapter discussing different aspects of a closely interconnected whole. Similarly with the .- and the .-sub-chapters. In short, the four .- .- .sequences of the Phenomenology and Psychology can be read as describing one developmental Already Iring Fetcher (1970, 105, 194) notes this parallel structure. Hösle (1987) is aware of the various puzzles facing a linear reading (see note 7), but strangely never doubts that the thematic order of the text might not be purely linear. See Ikäheimo 2004. Michael Inwood (2007, xv-xvi) shows awareness of some kind of mutual dependence of the topics of Phenomenology and Psychology, but does not follow this clue systematically in his otherwise excellent commentary. Winfield 2010 and 2011 are often very illuminating companions for reading of the Subjective Spirit, yet harmed by an unquestioned linearity of reading. 13 sequence from four mutually complementary points of view. This developmental sequence is, to be sure, highly idealized, corresponding to real development of the human individual (or of the species though this was not Hegel’s concern) only in a very general, ideal-typical way. (See Table 2.) There is one more crucial structural fact one needs to be aware of when reading and interpreting the actual content of the text. This is the fact that the sequence can be read from two mutually complementary ‘directions’: bottom-up and top-down. Read from the bottom-updirection, the four .-sub-chapters discuss intertwined aspects of a developmental level which can take place without the further .- and .-level phenomena. The four .-chapters then discuss intertwined aspects of a second developmental level which requires that the .-level phenomena, but not the .-level phenomena are in place. Finally, the .-chapters discuss intertwined aspects of a third developmental level that presupposes both the .-level and the .-level phenomena. Read from the top-down-direction on the other hand, the ‘lower’ levels already presuppose or are intertwined with the ‘higher’ ones. This duality of directions immanent in Hegel’s text reflects the temporal being of the human person which ideally follows a developmental course beginning with simpler or ‘lower level’ phenomena or activities, gradually progressing to more complex or higher level ones, and ending up in a fully cultivated human person whose constitution the lower level phenomena are still part of, only now infused with the higher level ones and accommodated in a thoroughly cultivated unity. This, very schematically presented, is the course of the realization of concrete freedom and thus the human essence from the point of view of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, which is to say abstracting from the social and institutional world discussed in Objective Spirit in which the human person is of course in reality embedded. 14 Reflecting the duality of directions from which the text has been written and thus can be read, we find Hegel discussing, for example, both primitive intuition that can take place without the mental processes and activities discussed in the .- and .-chapters, and cultivated intuition influenced by or interwined with these higher level phenomena (see section 2 of this article).15 Unfortunately Hegel makes none of these architectonic features of the text explicit to the reader, but as soon as one starts reading it with them in mind, pieces in the puzzle start falling in their places, and the text sheds at least much of the impression of fragmentariness that inevitably burdens it on a simple linear reading. “We examine [in Philosophy of Spirit] the series of stages through which spirit liberates itself, and the goal is that spirit comes to be free, as free spirit.” (LPS, p. 61) 15 A similar duality of perspectives is present also, for example, in Hegel’s discussions of sensation and habit in the Anthropology. Hegel comments on this issue, though in a rather off-hand way, in PS, §380. 14 Table 2 The parallel architectonics of Phenomenology and Psychology Theoretical moment Practical moment Intentionality Mental activity Intentionality Mental activity B. Phenomenology C Psychology B. Phenomenology C. Psychology a. Consciousness as such . Sensuous consciousness . Perception . Understanding a. Theoretical spirit . Intuition . Presentation . Thinking b. Self-consciousness . Desire . Recognitive s.-c. . Universal s.-c. b. Practical spirit . Practical feeling . Drives and wilfulness . Happiness c. Reason/c. Free spirit Or Intentionality Mental activity B. Phenomenology C. Psychology Theoretical moment Practical moment Theoretical moment Practical moment a. Consciousness as such . Sensuous consciousness . Perception . Understanding b. Self-consciousness . Desire . Recognitive s.-c. . Universal s.-c. a. Theoretical spirit . Intuition . Representation . Thinking b. Practical spirit .Practical feeling . Drives and wilfulness . Happiness c. Reason c. Free spirit 2. A holistic account of the human person as the concrete subject of knowledge and action In what follows I will present a selective overview of the themes of the Psychology-section, in their intertwinement with those of the Phenomenology, utilizing the reconstruction of the text’s structure presented above. The aim of this overview is to reconstruct the outlines of Hegel’s account of the human person as the concrete subject of knowledge and action. To understand the wholly ‘detranscendentalized’ character on this account, it is eventually important to conceive of Hegel’s discussion of the mental processes and activities that are the topic of Psychology in tandem also with his discussion of the bodily aspects or embodiment of the mind discussed in the Anthropology, but here references to the Anthropology will be kept to minimum. 2.1. The .-level characterized by immediate unity—primitive and cultivated In the Anthropology Hegel develops a highly elaborate account of the organization of the sentient body. Both the Phenomenology and Psychology proceed from that discussion in that the four .-chapters focus on the organization of the sensations (Empfindung) (PS, §§399-402) of the embodied subject into the intentional form defining of what Hegel calls consciousness (Bewusstsein), or in other words into a form in which the subject experiences the sensations as being about independent objects and thereby itself as distinct from those objects. The subject of consciousness, the “I” (Ich) is in this sense, as Hegel puts it in the introduction to the Phenomenology-section, “one side of the [subject-object-] relationship, and the whole relationship” (PS, §413). Importantly, just as the subject of sentience that Hegel calls the “self” (Selbst) in the Anthropology, also the I as the subject of intentional consciousness is not transcendental in the Kantian sense, neither is it some sort of homunculus inhabiting the body. It is rather a structure or form of being of the concrete flesh and blood subject embedded in the world. Hegel discusses in the Anthropology both “external sensations”, that is the deliverances of the five senses, and “internal sensations”, that is sensations or feelings of the embodied subject’s internal states, including the hedonic value of “the pleasant” and “the unpleasant” which register the “comparison”, or accord or disaccord of the body’s actual state with its needs or constitution (PS, §401). The outer and inner sensations, and the sensations of pleasure and displeasure form a concrete interwoven whole of “the soul’s natural life”, and Hegel has the ‘objectification’ of all of these “content[s] of the natural soul” in mind in the following passage in the Phenomenology: “[T]he content of the natural soul is object for this reflection that is for itself. Pure abstract freedom for itself discharges from itself its determinacy, the soul's natural life, to an equal freedom as an independent object. It is of this object, as external to it, that I is initially aware, and is thus consciousness.” (PS, §413) Consciousness at its most rudimentary level discussed in the .-chapters (read from the bottomup perspective) is simply sensations, both the external and the internal ones, having attained an intentional form, or in other words being appearances of external objects for the subject. By “abstract freedom” Hegel refers here to what I called the ‘first negation’ of concrete freedom, in this case the originary division or “Urteil” (PS, §415) of objectivity from the subject, and thus the simultaneous setting free of subject and object from each other and their mutual determination as subject and object. “Concrete freedom” will be eventually achieved by the ‘second negation’ which negates the object’s alienness for the subject. The objectified form of external sensations is the topic of B.a. . Sensuous consciousness, whereas the B.b. . Desire discusses the objectified form of internal sensations, most importantly felt needs. Though Hegel does not say this explicitly, as the external and the internal sensations, also their objectifications discussed in these two chapters obviously form an interconnected whole which is the whole of the concrete subject’s intentional relations with the world. We grasp the general function of the Psychology-section, when we understand that Hegel is not satisfied with leaving the forms or structures that consciousness or the subject-objectrelation takes as “facts of consciousness” which allow no further explanation.16 On the contrary, he wants to scrutinize how they are produced by the mental activities of “intelligence” (Intelligenz) and “will” (Wille) of the concrete subject. This is the general topic of the Psychology-section. In the Zusatz to §441 in the introduction to Psychology we read: 16 See Inwood 2007, 458 on “facts of consciousness”. “when people speak of 'facts of consciousness' which for the mind are what is primary and must remain an unmediated given for it, it is to be noted on this that of course at the standpoint of consciousness a great deal of such given material is found, but the free spirit has to demonstrate and so explain these facts as deeds of the spirit, as a content posited by it, not leave them as independent things given to it.” It is these “deeds of spirit” or of the mind discussed in Psychology that are responsible for bringing about both the ‘first negation’ of the subject-object-Urteil and the ‘second negation’ of a unity which incorporates the divide, or in other words both grasping sensations as being about independent objects and doing away with their alienness. Overcoming the alienness of objectivity takes place on the one hand by comprehending its rational structure (intelligence, the theoretical aspect), and on the other hand by learning to will contents that are not simply given but mediated by rational reflection, and eventually institutionalized in the “system of freedom” that is the state (will, the practical aspect). The development of intelligence and will, the respective general topics of Theoretical and Practical spirit hence both contribute to the attainment of concrete freedom and thus the human essence, and Hegel thinks of them as closely intertwined (see his Remark to §445), even if he does not explicitly work out the interconnections in any detail. Again, the “deeds of spirit” do not have any Kantian-style transcendental role as constituting or structuring the world which otherwise would have no structure (at least one we can know of). This would be impossible since the subject really is a “concrete subject” embedded in the world and thus, unlike the transcendental subject, not in a position to determine its structure. In the lecture-material included in the Zusätze Hegel makes clear that on his account both spatiotemporal and conceptual structures are ‘out there’, independently of the concrete subject, and intelligence is merely its activity of comprehending them. As to space and time, we can read in the chapter on Intuition the following: “[W]hen we said that what is sensed receives from the intuiting mind the form of the spatial and temporal,17 this statement must not be understood to mean that space and time are only subjective forms. This is what Kant wanted to make space and time. However, things are in truth themselves spatial and temporal; this double form of asunderness is not onesidedly imposed on them by our intuition, it has already been originally imparted to them by the infinite spirit that is in itself, by the creative eternal Idea.” (PS, §448Z.) The reference here is to the main-text of §448 where Hegel writes: “Intelligence hereby determines the content of sensation as a being that is outside itself, casts it out into space and time, which are the forms in which intelligence is intuitive. According to consciousness the material is only an object of consciousness, a relative other; from spirit it receives the rational determination of being the other of itself (cf. §§247, 254)”. “Being the other of itself” means having spatio-temporal structure and Hegel refers here to paragraphs in his Philosophy of Nature on space and time. Note that this passage suggests that consciousness somehow independently gives sensations the form of objectivity, and that spirit or intelligence only gives this objectivity spatiotemporal form. Yet this is in contradiction with Hegel’s explicit statements elsewhere that also the first task belongs to spirit (“the activity of intuition initially produces in general a shifting of intuition away from us”, §448Z.), and more broadly not in line with Hegel’s general division of roles consciousness and intelligence in which all organizing activities belong to the latter, the former being the result of these. 17 Here we get a glimpse of Hegel’s larger metaphysical picture in which the structure of both being and thought is ultimately the structure of “the Idea” or “infinite spirit”,18 and at the same time a clear statement that with regard to the finite spirit, or the concrete human individual that is, the spatiotemporal organization of the world exists independently of it. Saying that the preintentional contents of sensations “receive” the spatiotemporal form “from the intuiting mind” is only saying that the mental activities Hegel discusses under the title ‘intuition’ grasp preexisting spatiotemporal structures of the world and thus organize it for the subject. Similarly with conceptual or “rational” structures: “what the intelligence seems to receive from outside is, in truth, none other than the rational and is consequently identical with the mind and immanent in it. The activity of mind has, therefore, no other aim than, by sublation of the ostensible being-external-to-itsown-self of the implicitly rational object, to refute even the semblance of the object's externality to mind.” (PS, §447Z.) Here again Hegel refers to his larger metaphysical picture in which the intelligible structures discussed in the logic are structures of both being and thinking. From the point of view of the human person as the concrete subject of knowledge about the world this means however that the world in which she lives and is confronted with in consciousness is intelligibly structured and that the goal of the theoretical activities of the mind (that is, of her theoretical or epistemic activities) is comprehending these structures and thus the world which she is part of. This realism of Hegel’s is at the same time compatible with a spatio-temporal and conceptual perspectivism or ‘pragmatism’. The concrete subject does not occupy a ‘view from nowhere’ but is embedded in the world as a finite living being with particular needs which structure its relations with the world. This becomes explicit when one draws together Hegel’s discussions in the four -chapters. The simplest form of ‘theoretical’ givenness of objects, discussed in the chapter Sensuous consciousness, is the deliverances of the sense-organs being synthetized into spatio-temporally unified singular objects and thereby characterized as “being, something, existing thing, singular and so on” (PS, §418), without yet appearing as things with multiple properties. In Desire, the -chapter of Self-consciousness, Hegel discusses the practical aspect of same level (or from the top town perspective, element) of intentionality. The singular objects in question are objects of desire, or in other words objects that the concrete subject instinctively experiences as promising satisfaction of its immediately felt bodily needs. These “singular” (PS, §428) objects are “determined as nullity” (PS, §426) for the subject, which is to say that they have for it no other determinations than those relevant for satisfying its needs. This is what it means that an object is not at all differentiated for the subject as a thing with properties: it is in the subject’s perspective simply identical with whatever sensed property or undifferentiated bundle of properties (say, a particular scent, pattern of movement, and so forth) makes it desirable for it. Nothing else about the subject, no other properties or relations, are of interest for the primitive subject and thus they are not even present in its perspective. In other words, at the -level things are indeed given as objects for the subject and thus there is a minimal differentiation between the object and the subject for the subject, yet objects still lack genuinely Absolute negation (and thus concrete freedom) is arguably also the central principle of Hegel’s metaphysics. See Bowman 2013. 18 independent existence in its view in that their ‘meaning’ and the qualities in terms of which they appear are fully determined by relevance for immediate need-satisfaction.19 Attention (Aufmerksamkeit) (PS, §448), discussed in Intuition, the -chapter of Theoretical spirit is arguably central in this primitive spatio-temporal object-constitution at issue in the chapters (read bottom-up). That this is so is not immediately apparent in the text. In the published 1830 Encyclopaedia-text Hegel seems in fact to be saying that attention and the spatiotemporal organizing of objects are two different functions. 20 Yet, on the other hand, in his lectures from 1827-8 attention seems responsible for the spatio-temporal organizing of objectivity into singular objects. 21 Hegel’s explicit statements on this issue leave room for uncertainty, perhaps signifying his own hesitation about it, but on a rational reconstruction it makes good sense to think that synthesizing the sensuous material of the five senses into singular objects requires grasping them as spatio-temporal wholes, and that this means attending to the clusters of sensations of the different senses that each spatio-temporally separate thing produces in the subject. As Hegel puts it, one needs “attention, the abstract identical direction of spirit in feelings […] without which nothing has being for it” (PS, §448, emphasis H.I.)—suggesting thus here that it is attention that construes the deliverances of sensations (of the five senses) into objects of sensuous consciousness, characterized as “being, something, existing thing, singular and so on” (PS, §418). Related to this discussion, in the introduction to Practical spirit Hegel talks of a “double ought” of practical spirit or of the practical dimension of mental activities. The first “ought” is “the opposition of the determinacy posited from out of itself to the immediate determinedness that thereby enters again, the opposition to its reality and condition, what in consciousness develops at the same time into the relationship towards external objects.” (PS, §470) What is at issue here is the felt unpleasant “opposition” between what the living animal organism needs (nutrients) and its present condition (lack of them), and the development of this opposition into a desiring relation to “external objects” in the environment that are instinctively identified, based on their sensed properties, as promising satisfaction. Though Hegel does not say it explicitly, it seems obvious that this, the topic of the extremely condensed sub-chapter Practical feeling, is what provides motivation and orientation for the “identical direction” of primitive attention, or in other words for tracking interesting objects over time and in space while moving in ways that are appropriate for satisfying one’s needs with the objects. A full reconstruction of Hegel’s theory of object-constitution at this still basically animal level would require drawing also on his discussion of animal movement and the animal’s relation to its See Redding 1996, pp. 104-10 and Ikäheimo 2011. PS, §448: “The one moment in this diremption of the immediately found [i.e. in the objectivation of sensational matter] is attention […]. The other moment is, that intelligence posits […] the feelingdeterminations as something negative, as the abstract otherness of itself.” 21 E, 194-5: “Space and time are the forms of the sensible, forms of intuition. […] They are […] ideal forms that do not belong to determinations of feeling as such. This is the activity of intelligence, attention to self, the act that posits this content outside of itself in order to make itself free. [Emphasis H.I.]” Note also (see note 17) that here Hegel grasps positing the sensational material as an object outside the subject, and giving it spatio-temporal order, as one and the same function. For a contrary view, see de Vries 1988, p. 112. 19 20 environment (Umwelt) in the Philosophy of Nature, but this cannot be done here.22 Suffice it to say that his reconstructed account is arguably compatible with contemporary “enactive” accounts of perception that put a heavy emphasis on the role of movement and bodily action in objectconstitution.23 As I hinted earlier, in the chapter Intuition Hegel speaks—in addition to ‘intuition’ as this simple, instinctive and thus basically animal form of spatiotemporal synthesis of objects—also of cultivated intuition involving all the learning of a cultivated adult human being. Whereas the spatiotemporal synthesis alone grasps objects in terms of the simple logical determinations of “being, something, existing thing, singular and so on”, or in other words according to the conceptual structures Hegel discusses in the Logic of Being, cultivated intuition is seeing objects in light of the more complex conceptual structures which they also instantiate: “Only by cultivation of the mind does attention acquire strength and fulfilment. The botanist, for example, notices incomparably more in a plant than one ignorant of botany does in the same time. The same is naturally true in regard to all other objects of knowledge. A man of great discernment and education has at once a complete intuition of what is at issue; with him sensation has the character of recollection throughout.” (PS, §448Z.) The scientifically cultivated person sees or ‘intuits’ objects in his environment immediately, that is to say habitually, in light of what he has learned about them through the tortuous path of scientific and philosophical education. For him, intuition of objectivity therefore has the character of “recollection” (Erinnerung), or consciousness of something he already knows, and thus in a sense of consciousness of “himself” in the objects. Analogously, Hegel also talks, in contrast to primitive practical feeling which seeks satisfaction in immediately given objects of uncultivated desire, of cultivated practical feelings which are motivationally affective felt qualities attached to mental contents that presuppose a higher level of mental processing. (See PS, §472 and §472Z.) The practical feelings of cultivated human persons are not limited to mere seeking of immediate satisfaction and thus to desires for immediately given objects promising it. Rather, they are mediated by the more refined forms of practical and theoretical processing that Hegel discusses in the - and -chapters of Psychology, and the more refined kinds of object-relations at issue in the - and -chapters of Phenomenology. One of the recent philosophical debates concerning Hegel, and his relation to Kant, has turned around the question whether all intuition is conceptually structured according to these thinkers, and in truth. Attempts to determine Hegel’s view on the matter have mostly drawn on Hegel’s discussion of ‘sense certainty’ in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, where Hegel argues that trying to base knowledge-claims about the world, and eventually a philosophical system, on purely non-conceptual sensory givenness are self-contradictory. In the wake of John McDowell’s Mind and World (1994) an influential line of thought on this question has been that the world is given for individuals in intuition mediated through conceptual structures embodied in their language and culture, and internalized in socialization as a habitual “second nature”. As a result, the world given in intuition is structured according to the same conceptual structures in terms of 22 23 See Ikäheimo 2011 and 2012. See Noë 2004 and Inwood 2011, 68. which it is also thought and talked about, and this means that intuition can verify or falsify beliefs about the world. This, according to McDowell and others, is also Hegel’s view on the matter. These debates have arguably been doubly misled. Firstly, Hegel’s real theorizing on intuition is not to be found in the Phenomenology of Spirit which is an introduction to his system with a very particular argumentative task and method, 24 but in his actual ‘realphilosophical’ treatment of the theme in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit—including his discussion of external and internal sensations in the Anthropology, and the chapter titled ‘Intuition’ in Psychology, which I have argued needs to be read in conjunction with the three other a-subchapters of Phenomenology and Psychology. Secondly, Hegel’s real view on the mentioned question is more complex than the view attributed to him. That view only grasps the ‘top down’ perspective to intuition exemplified by the Hegel’s “botanist” who immediately intuits the world in terms of conceptual structures in terms of which he has learned to think and talk about the world (of plants) through (botanical) education and which for him have become habitual ‘second nature’. But as we saw, Hegel also thinks of intuition from the ‘bottom up’ perspective prior to socialization. This, at the most rudimentary level, is the intuition of the (human) animal directed by immediate physiological needs. On Hegel’s account, already this primitive intuition does indeed grasp the world in terms of conceptual structures, yet only very rudimentary ones discussed in his Logic of Being. These structures are structures of the world which the primitive subject needs to grasp in order to survive. There is thus a sort of epistemic normativity involved already at this rudimentary level, but not one of making and communicating epistemic claims about it, and thus not something to which the argumentation of the Phenomenology of Spirit applies. 2.2. The differentiated .-level of intentionality and the corresponding mental activities As we have seen, though in contrast to the pre-intentional layers of subjectivity discussed in the Anthropology, the -sub-chapters do introduce differentiation in the sense of the subject-objectdivide, the particular mode of subject-object-relation discussed in these sub-chapters is itself characterized by immediacy or lack of differentiation: the primitive -level mental processes and forms of intentionality constitute a sort of ‘one-track-mind’ incapable of distancing the concrete subject from the constraints of what immediate physiological need and instinct determine as salient in its environment (say, the breast for the human infant, or a particular plant or animal for a non-human animal). In contrast, in the chapter ‘Representation’ (Vorstellen) in Theoretical spirit Hegel discusses mental processes and activities that achieve distance from the immediately given and thereby also a more comprehensive epistemic or cognitive grasp of the world. In the parallel chapter ‘Drives and wilfulness’ in Practical Spirit Hegel analogously discusses modes of the “will” that are more advanced than “practical feeling” in that they involve freedom from determination by the immediately given felt needs. In short, “wilfulness” (Willkür) is the capacity to choose A standard mistake in readings of the Phenomenology-section of Subjective Spirit is projecting the method of the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit onto it. The chapters and sub-chapters of the Phenomenology of Subjective Spirit do not describe “patterns of consciousness” (Gestalten des Bewusstseins) in the sense central for the method of the Phenomenology of Spirit (see chapter 3 of this volume), but are structural descriptions of developmental layers (bottom up) and constitutive elements (top down) of the human person. 24 otherwise, or to choose between alternative motivations and courses of action, whereas “drive” (Trieb) means in this context a temporally extended ‘futural’ mode of motivation whose content has some generality. Whereas the contents of “desires” are fully determinate (‘that desirable object over there’) and thus no choice or “wilfulness” is involved in relating to them, due to the generality of their contents or objects (say, ‘comfortable life at 50’ or ‘bringing about the revolution’) the realization of “drives” necessarily requires choice between different specifications of the content and different means to achieve it.25 On a rational reconstruction it is clear that the theoretical and practical aspects of the mind are again closely intertwined. For one thing, whereas the spatio-temporal objectconstitution discussed in Intuition is at the uncultivated level simply instinctive, the mental activities discussed in Representation involve increasing degrees of freedom of choice or “wilfulness”: any object has many properties and a multitude of internal and external relations, and part of the cultivation of the mind is to develop the capacity to wilfully change perspectives and choose what exactly in the object or objects to attend to. Secondly, the mental activities discussed in Representation require, as activities of the concrete subject (see PS, §445), a form of motivation that transcends the uncultivated immediate “practical feeling” and thus “desire”. Only a subject with at least some degree of the long-term future-directed mode of motivation that Hegel calls in shorthand “drive” has an interest in cognitively grasping anything else than the immediately given. Looked from the opposite side, the capacity to choose presupposes the capacity to represent or imagine alternative states of affairs that are not given in present intuition. Similarly with the long-term form of practical motivation of “drive”: it involves experiencing possible future states of affairs as motivating ends and thus presupposes the capacity to represent them in the first place. The chapter on Representation is perhaps the richest in content of all the chapters of Subjective Spirit. Yet, read in abstraction from the other -sub-chapters it seems in a certain way disappointing, painting a strangely atomistic picture of the mental activities it discusses—as if they were all uninfluenced by, or merely externally related to other thinking, knowing and acting human beings, or the social and historical world more broadly. This ‘Cartesian’ impression is largely due to the general division of labour between the Philosophy of Subjective and Objective Spirit: Subjective Spirit abstracts from the social reality to which the human person constitutively belongs, and Hegel mostly sticks to his architectonics even if thematically this often seems rather contrived. And yet, he does make one highly significant deviation from this aspect of his architectonic strictures. This is the -sub-chapter of Self-consciousness titled Recognitive selfconsciousness and the subsequent -sub-chapter Universal self-consciousness. Here Hegel explicitly discusses the intersubjective mediation of human subjectivity and appears to give it a major role in the coming about and constitution of what he thinks of as a genuinely human form of practical intentionality. It is striking that Hegel makes this move, one which clearly violates his own architectonic strictures, at the exact centre-point of Subjective Spirit—chapter B.b. .—and at the same time disappointing that he says barely anything about the significance of the intersubjective mediation discussed in this and the subsequent chapter for everything else discussed in Subjective Spirit. Some interpreters have concluded that everything that comes after B.b. . Recognitive self-consciousness involves intersubjective mediation, thereby assuming a purely linear thematic 25 See Yeomans 2011, 30. development.26 But this is too hasty as the linear order of the text is not the order of its thematic development: the -level phenomena discussed in Psychology are no more developed than the level phenomena discussed in Phenomenology, and (from the bottom-up-perspective) none of them necessarily involve intersubjective mediation or need any input from the social and historical world. Yet, and though Hegel gives very little explicit indication of this in the text, on a rational reconstruction the intersubjective mediation explicitly introduced in Recognitive selfconsciousness is decisive for the difference between the - and the -level chapters in all of the four parallel chapters of Phenomenology and Psychology. It is also essential for understanding the thoroughly detranscendentalized nature of Hegel’s account of the concrete subject by clearly thematizing how the constitution of objectivity for the subject by its mental activities (discussed in Psychology) is influenced by the world which is robustly independent from it. Whereas the objects of desire are on Hegel’s account incapable of resisting their reduction in the subject’s viewpoint to what is relevant to the satisfaction of the subject’s immediate needs (see PS, §427), and thus incapable of challenging its desiring one-track mind, another subject as a “free object” (PS, §429) will resist such reduction and thus thematize to the first subject its (the first subject’s) viewpoint as a particular viewpoint. In addition to this ‘decentering’ of the subject for itself, the chapter Recognitive self-consciousness also discusses the intersubjective or social conditions in which the short-term temporality of desire is transcended in the long-term, future-directed or plan-like temporality and practical orientation, which Hegel in Practical Spirit calls (perhaps somewhat counterintuitively) “drive”. Hegel discusses this by means of the familiar figures of the “master” and the “bondsman”, which illustrate the thematization of the subject’s vulnerability for himself through the challenge and threat of another subject with a practical viewpoint (PS, §432-433), and the consequent concern for future well-being, or as Hegel puts it “taking care and securing the future” (PS, §434), which in the bondsman’s case means working for the master. This also returns us to Hegel’s talk of the “double ought” in the Introduction to Practical Spirit (PS, §470): the first “ought” of uncultivated practical feeling and desire is now subordinated under a second ought, which at this level means social normativity in the form of normative expectations by the relevant other subject or subjects—“the master”. The contents of the bondsman’s “drives”, if he is to live, must be harmonious enough with the master’s commands.27 These are concrete processes in the world that affect the subject from the outside, but Hegel does not allow himself enough leeway to thematize them in his Psychology the focus of which is strictly intrasubjective. He does give however one indirect hint of the importance of the intersubjective mediation for the transition from intuition to representation, even if only in the lecture material. In the Zusatz to §449 we read: “Only when I make the reflexion that it is I who have the intuition, only then do I occupy the standpoint of representation.” When or why do I make the reflection? Hegel’s answer in the parallel chapter Recognitive self-consciousness is clear: in being confronted with another subject with another perspective. It is the clash of perspectives that makes me aware of myself as a subject with a perspective, or as “having an intuition”. This suggests what seems fairly clear also otherwise, namely that whereas the mental processes that Hegel calls by the umbrella term intuition are not necessarily intersubjectively mediated, the See Hespe 1991. The master’s commands are general in the same way as “drives” are: they require specification and thus choice or “wilfulness” by the one who executes them. 26 27 activities that he calls representation are.28 It is because the subject is now becoming conscious of itself as a subject, that we are also witnessing a gradual transition in the text from unconscious mental processes to mental activities that the subject can in principle be conscious of and thus deliberately rehearse and cultivate—just as the bondsman is forced to cultivate its own capacities. In the Representation-chapter Hegel starts with the process or activity of storing contents given in intuition as “images” and thus abstracting them from the place and moment in time in which they were originally present for the subject (PS, §452). He then continues by discussing the comparison of already stored images and new intuitions, and the gradual grasp of differences and similarities between them, or in other words grasping “what is universal” in them (PS, §454). He describing here the simplest form of the mental processing that produces the mode of objectivity discussed in the chapter Perception in the Phenomenology, a mode in which objects are not anymore identical with whatever feature makes them immediately desirable, but are things with many properties, and thus related with each other in terms of qualitative similarities and differences (PS, §420-421). As Hegel puts it there (PS, §420), the subject is now making “experiences” (Erfahrung), or in other words learning about the world. The discussion of these mental processes or activities continues in Psychology with “reproductive imagination”, the first instinctive but gradually more wilful cognitive handling of the stored images, of associating them and organizing them under empirical concepts, or “universal representations” (allgemeine Vorstellung) (PS, §455-456) as he calls them. The perspectival and pragmatic nature of this organizing or subsuming of the given under empirical concepts is clear in §456 where Hegel says it is an activity of “concrete subjectivity” with “interest”—pointing to the fact that the world can be carved, or phenomena subsumed under empirical concepts in many different ways, and that it depends on interest which way a subject will follow. This connects with Hegel’s remarks in the parallel chapter Drives and wilfulness, where he says that “[t]he subject is [now, after having overcome the immediacy of the -level] the activity of satisfying drives”, and that “nothing comes about […] without interest” (PS, §475). This is to say, very much in pragmatist vein29 (or of Heidegger30), that we are constitutively engaged in goal-directed activities, and thus driven by ends that are our interest, and it suggests that the epistemic activities of carving the world in terms of empirical concepts are both motivated by and serve these drives and interests. Hegel does not allow himself (or bother) to say the obvious: that such interests in human persons are influenced by their social environment, and that any organized co-existence and communication—such as that between the illustrative figures of the master and bondsman— requires that subjects carve the world in similar enough ways and so can understand each other. The bondsman’s life depends on understanding the master, and thus it is in his interest to try to carve the world similarly enough with him. The human infant learns the ways to carve the world particular to her culture from the adults, but it would learn nothing without suitable futuredirected interests. Hegel discusses next the production of symbols and signs (PS, §457-460), mostly abstracting from the fact which he is of course aware of31 that these are in reality social and historical processes and that each new generation is introduced into an already existing world of symbols and signs by the previous ones. Whereas symbolism depends on a similarity between the This does not necessarily mean that they are linguistically mediated; see below. For a classical pragmatist reading of Subjective Spirit, see Dewey 2010. 30 See Ikäheimo 2012. 31 “That language is gradually formed and developed is self-evident.” (1827-8, 229). See also PS, §459. 28 29 symbol and the symbolized, a sign’s signification is ideally completely dependent on wilfulness, or in other words on convention. Hegel puts heavy emphasis on “mechanical memory” (mechanische Gedächtnis) which is the capacity to bind words or “names” to what they signify, and thus to operate in thought and speech with names without the need of actually recalling the referred representations (of different degrees of abstraction and complexity) from the “nocturnal pit” of unconsciousness in which they are stored (PS, §453). Hegel’s discussion of symbols, signs and language is probably the part of Psychology most discussed in secondary literature, and though Hegel’s brief discussion does not really amount to a theory of language, attempts have been made to reconstruct Hegel’s, or a Hegelian theory of language from ingredients in what he writes. 32 This part of the Psychology has also attracted attention by authors who want to question Hegel’s claims on the capacity (in principle) of philosophical language and thought to be independent of the perspectivity of intuition and representation and of the uncontrollable contingence of symbolic meaning—and thus its capacity to be “pure” in the sense Hegel takes it to be in his Logic. One of the important questions concerning the themes discussed in the chapter Representation concerns the relation of language to the psychological processes and activities discussed earlier in the chapter. Though from the ‘top down’ perspective all of them may involve language (and of course already the “botanist’s” erudite intuition does), nothing in the text commits Hegel to the view that all of them necessarily do. Hegel is clearly not a ‘linguistic a priorist’ on human psychology. Whatever his explicit views on the difference between human psychology and that of non-human animals33, the architectonics of his text makes his account in principle compatible with sophisticated contemporary views on pre-linguistic processes of thinking in great apes and human infants.34 Humans are born as animals and have to be equipped from the beginning with psychological capacities that enable them to orient in their environment before learning language, and—centrally—make it possible for them to interact with adults in ways that enable learning a language and human culture and to thus develop the more refined, specifically human psychological capacities dependent on these.35 The ‘bottom up’ reading of Representation makes justice to these developmental necessities. 2.3. Transcending or accommodating differences at the -level The -sub-chapters of Phenomenology and Psychology discuss finally mental activities and modes of intentionality where the various differentiations present at the -level are incorporated into an overarching unity (see PS, §465Z.), and in which the relations between the different elements are conceived of as internal rather than external. Also, the perspectivity of the -level is left behind at the -level so that now we are dealing with perspective-independent determinations of things and processes in the world, or their “interior” (PS, §420) as Hegel puts it in the parallel sub-chapter Understanding (Der Verstand) which discusses the form of objectivity that is the See, for example, Bodammer 1969, Vernon 2007, and the collection Surber 2006. See Ikäheimo 2011. 34 See Bermudez 2003 and Tomasello 2014. 35 Here I agree with Winfield 2011, 184. Winfield’s purely linear reading commits him however to some highly artificial conclusions, such as that Hegel’s account of the master and bondsman in the Phenomenology involve neither thought nor language (idem, 213). After all, these themes are thematized only ‘later’ in Psychology. On my reading, Hegel’s architectonics is flexible enough to accommodate both pre-linguistic and linguistically mediated ‘master-bondsman-relations’. 32 33 product of “thinking”, or more exactly of “thinking over” (Nachdenken, see below) objects of perception and their determinations. The analogy between the theoretical and the practical chapters of Psychology—C.a. . Thinking and C.b. . Happiness—is however not perfect in this respect. Whereas Hegel’s discussion of thinking is mainly positive, conceiving of it as a level of mental activity which achieves a genuine unity of differences and leaves behind particularity of perspective, his discussion of happiness is mainly negative, pointing out the inadequacy of “happiness” as an end of willing in these regards. Let me begin with thinking and the theoretical dimension. On Hegel’s account the cognitive or epistemic activities of “representation” are only able to produce a comprehension of the world which is a “mixture” of “individuality” and “universality”, or in other words a mixture of the thing conceived of as a singular thing on the one hand and its “various properties” on the other hand (PS, §421). According to Hegel, this is “in general the standpoint of ordinary consciousness and more or less of the sciences” (PS, §420). The point here is that the cognitive activities of “representation” are incapable, or insufficiently capable of grasping objects as unities of necessarily interrelated determinations. In Hegel’s jargon this is to say that they remain at the level of the “abstract universal”. Things are different with the cognitive activities that he calls “thinking”: they are “intelligence comprehending the concrete universal of objects” (PS, §445Z.). In §465, the first paragraph of the Thinking-chapter Hegel refers back to paragraphs 5 and 21 at the beginning of the Encyclopaedia where he discusses thinking as the activity of “thinking over” (Nachdenken) representations and thereby “generating concepts of them” (EL, §1). What he has in mind is ultimately philosophical comprehension of the world, which is what he is himself engaged in in his Realphilosophien, or in other words the Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Spirit. In the Thinking-chapter Hegel utilizes in an extremely condensed form his discussion of the concept, judgment and syllogism in the Logic of the Concept (PS, §467). He does not explicitly introduce different kinds of concepts, judgment and syllogism here, but it is clear that the internality of the relations between determinations of an object that is distinctive of ‘thinking’ comes in degrees and is achieved ideally only in the highest forms. 36 Merely “qualitative judgments” and “qualitative syllogisms” operate with accidental properties, such as when we say “this rose is red” (EL, §172), and involve no necessary connection between the individual and the universal, or the thing and the property, nor establish anything concerning other properties of the thing, or its relations to other things. Judgments and syllogisms “of reflection” operate in contrast with properties that imply something about the thing’s other properties and its relations with other things, such as when we judge a particular plant, or some or all plants of certain kind as having healing powers (EL, §174). Further on the scale of concreteness in Hegel’s sense are judgments and syllogisms “of necessity” which connect an individual with a species concept, such as in “Caius is a human being” (EL, §177 Z.). The species concept is a “concrete universal” establishing a concrete unity in many respects. It determines the individual’s essential properties (say, rationality), generic judgments and related syllogisms that apply to individuals of that genus (say, humans are rational), as well as determines which properties of things of this kind have “value and meaning” (EL, §177 Z.) (say, Caius’ being learned or brave). As Hegel says, it would make “no sense to assume that Caius could somehow not be human being, but be brave, learned, and so forth” (EL, §175 Z.). The final form of judgment, “the judgment of the concept” finally 36 See DeVries 1988, 179-202. articulates explicitly Hegel’s normative essentialism. Judgments of this kind judge something as being “good or bad, true, beautiful and so forth” (EL, §178), which Hegel understands in terms of their correspondence to their concept which is their norm or “ought” (SL, 582). In other words, the species concept determines what it is to be a good or bad individual of that species, or to be “true” in the ontological sense of truth as correspondence with the species concept. It is here that we reach a truly “concrete universal” unifying exemplars of the species, allowing them to differ in their qualities (both in time and relative to each other), while at the same time being their norm or measure of goodness. The relations of Hegel’s telegraphic discussion in Theoretical Spirit of thinking as an activity that grasps the “concrete universal” of objects, or their concept as their principle of unity and perfection, his more extended discussion of the forms of such thinking in the Logic of Concept, and his own actual philosophical “thinking over” of the various realms of being in his Realphilosophien are not easy to determine. Suffice it to say that his normative essentialist treatment of subjective spirit in terms of the “concept of spirit” is an example of what he means.37 Thinking which adequately grasps the intelligible structure of things, or the “objective reason” (PS, §441, §467Z.) in them is the consummation of intelligence not only by grasping things and their particular determinations and relations in their “self-developing concept(s)” (PS, §467Z.), but also in thereby achieving an “overarching unity of itself and its other, being” (PS, §465). In other words, philosophical comprehension of the world is the ultimate, though by no means self-sufficient, form of concrete freedom in cognition. It is not self-sufficient, since human life requires equally the - and -level cognitive activities, and since it only comes about by “thinking over” the products of these ‘lower’ activities. Furthermore, as we saw in Hegel’s discussion of intuition, philosophical comprehension does not remain in the proverbial ivory tower, but can, and should be inbuilt in the everyday cognitive life of the cultivated human person. Hegel’s discussion of the -level of Practical Spirit consists of two short paragraphs (PS, §§479-480) discussing happiness as a general end of willing. Here Hegel’s architectonic breaks down somewhat as happiness is—analogically to the -level in the theoretical side—a “mixture of qualitative and quantitative determinations (PS, §479). An individual may have various interests and whether they can be integrated, or what is their ideal “mixture”, is highly contingent, dependent on external circumstances and subjective idiosyncrasy. As Hegel puts it, “[h]appiness is only the represented, abstract universality of the contents, a universality which only ought to be (PS, §480). “Actually free will” (idem.) does not have such indeterminate representations as its object, but rather the objective system of freedom which is the topic of the Philosophy of Objective Spirit. The individual sheds his “abstract individuality” and becomes a “concrete subject” with a stable “character” (PS, §482) in the practical dimension by willing contents that are in harmony with and contribute to the rational state whose goodness and rationality he recognizes in feeling and—if he is philosophically educated—in knowledge, thereby being ‘conscious of himself’ in it and thus concretely free with regard to it. Hegel’s mainly negative discussion of “happiness” thus introduces the necessity of the ideal state as the “realm of actualized freedom” (PR, § 4) for the full realization of concrete freedom and thus the human essence. It is in the state that the “second ought” of practical spirit ceases to be something which “only ought to be”, and takes the form of normative expectations inbuilt in the concrete social 37 See also Hegel’s discussion of this theme in the context of his Philosophy of Nature in PN1, 201-205. roles in which individuals lead their lives and realize themselves in harmony with and contributing to the whole. In the parallel chapter Universal self-consciousness Hegel discusses the state of mutual recognition in which the dissymmetry and coerciveness of the master-bondsman-type relationship is overcome. 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