Essays on Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit

Awakening to Madness and Habituationto Death in Hegel’s “Anthropology”

Awakening to Madness and Habituation to Death in Hegel’s “Anthropology” Nicholas Mowad In this chapter I will examine sleeping and waking in Hegel, including madness, which is, I will argue, not just sleeping while awake, but sleeping in virtue of the character of the awakening. Thus, the condition of sleeping while awake cannot be corrected through another awakening. Sleep and waking belong to Hegel’s discussion of the natural soul in the “Anthropology ” section of “Subjective Spirit,” the first part of the Philosophy of Spirit, volume 3 of the Encyclopedia. An examination of sleep and waking must be prefaced, therefore, by a brief explanation of spirit’s emergence from nature and the relevant structures from the Logic. Preface: Logic, Nature, and Spirit Hegel’s philosophy of spirit (Geist) is an examination of what it is to be human.1 The human for Hegel is finite spirit, the object of the “Subjective Spirit” section of the Philosophy of Spirit. What “spirit” means for Hegel is best understood by relating it to his conception of “nature.” Nature for Hegel is essentially parts outside of parts.2 The human is natural insofar as it is merely corporeal, spread out into various parts, each of which is external to the others and internally unrelated to them (though it may enter into relation with them mechanically or even organically while remaining merely natural). That the human is spirit means that the human knows 87 88 / Nicholas Mowad itself, even in its difference from itself, to be identical with itself. Thus, the difference inherent in the human as natural is qualified, and the human is (and knows itself to be) reunited with itself. Spirit emerges from nature therefore as the soul:3 the ideality of the diversity and mutual indifference of nature. By “the ideality” of nature we mean the unity of nature: nature’s connectedness and belonging-together, the omnipresent principle in virtue of which its variations are contextualized as moments, or aspects of one simple totality.4 The soul is thus to be distinguished from consciousness (Bewußtsein), which belongs to a later stage: the soul, unlike consciousness, has not separated itself from nature, its own corporeality; rather, the soul permeates nature such that the soul is present everywhere in nature, identified with every part. Just how the soul can be the single and simple principle that is present in any and all of the variations in nature (without these latter ceasing to be variations) is not meant to be clear from the beginning; rather, it is progressively worked out over the course of the anthropology. The “Anthropology” has three parts: “Natural Soul,” “Feeling Soul,” and “Actual Soul.” To explain these I will use the moments of the concept (Begriff) (which are also the terms of the syllogism) that Hegel gives in his Logic: universality (Allgemeinheit), particularity (Besonderheit), and singularity (Einzelheit).5 Hegel’s Logic is the first part of his Encyclopedia, in which he gives the fundamental structures of everything (in spirit and nature, in subject and object, and in their identity). I cannot discuss here the details of the subjective concept (the part of the Logic where Hegel discusses judgment and syllogism, the structures I will make use of in this chapter), but the legitimacy of my use of these terms is guaranteed by their ubiquity in the anthropology itself.6 Hegel’s Logic is not a formal logic to be filled in with natural and spiritual content: it is an onto-logic. Judgment and syllogism are not for Hegel forms of thought or language abstracted from but applicable to reality . Rather, they are structures actually constitutive of the things themselves: “all things are a judgment.”7 In German “judgment” (Urteil) means literally original (Ur-) division (Teilung). Hegel exploits the etymology of the word to show that judgment, ostensibly simply a union (as “S is P” unites S and P), is also equally a division (since S and P remain distinct even as they are identified).8 Linguistically, or “logically” (in the formal sense) the subject and predicate are at once linked and separated by the copula. Ontologically, this involves a real division within a thing’s own identity with itself: when we say, “God is love” or “the human is reason,” in each case the two terms are at once distinguished and identified. Likewise, “syllogism” (Schluß) Awakening to Madness and Habituation to Death / 89 can also mean “closing...