Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit ed. by Marina F. Bykova (review)

This new critical guide to Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit aims to orient readers in the text as well as to “present and assess the state of art in understanding and evaluating” it (5). This is no easy task. One reason why is the multiple meanings Geist takes on in the text and the variety of topics Hegel addresses, which range from embodiment to the unconscious, from cognitive psychology to bodily expressions, from race, madness, and habit to practical philosophy. Indeed, for Hegel morality, the state, art, religion, and philosophy all belong to the spiritual domain, and this makes the Philosophy of Spirit, as Hegel himself acknowledges, “the sublimest and most difficult” part of his system (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §377). Another difficulty is textual: Hegel notably used the Encyclopedia as a handout accompanying his Lectures, and the paragraphs often have a sketchy structure. There are strong interpretive divergences regarding his views and how to read them. This guide tries to walk a difficult path among such difficulties and does so with considerable success, as it provides an overall understanding of this part of Hegel’s philosophy.

The volume has a fourfold structure: there is an introductory section on spirit with two chapters, followed by three sections respectively on Subjective Spirit, Objective Spirit, and Absolute Spirit. The chapters are diverse in focus, and the volume represents a balanced mix of topic-oriented and text-oriented essays.

In part 1, Paul Redding offers an original reconstruction of the progression of Hegel’s Logic and briefly points to how it applies to the Philosophy of Spirit. Michael Forster takes up the main aspects of Hegel’s conception of Geist and shows that they “have their origins either mainly or at least partly in Herder” (48).

In part 2, we find three essays on Subjective Spirit: two (by Kenneth Westphal and Markus Gabriel) are general in scope, while one is more textually oriented (by Allegra De Laurentiis). Westphal outlines Subjective Spirit as a whole to argue that Hegel develops Kant’s functionalist cognitive psychology in a broader context of embodied psychophysiology; Gabriel advances the idea that Hegel is pursuing a “meta-metaphysical” project (106), premised in second-order conceptions of “modes of thinking of human mind that fall short of a coherent account” (116). For Gabriel, Hegel’s theory of subjective Geist is “a theory of our mentalistic vocabulary designed from the stance of action-explanation” (116n12). De Laurentiis elaborates Hegel’s theory of derangement and connects it to current taxonomies of mental disorders.

Unfortunately, the section on Subjective Spirit ends here: a lot of rich and important Hegelian interpretative frameworks and discussions of other fundamental aspects of the text are left out—including Hegel’s account of race in the Anthropology, which seems particularly urgent in a critical guide, as well as his ideas on habits and the theory of embodiment.

Part 3 is devoted to Objective Spirit. A pugnacious and interesting paper by Christian Krijnen argues that the doctrine of objective spirit should not be read as Hegel’s practical philosophy, since “freedom is neither primarily nor mostly conceivable as practical” (131), and only the idea is free. Krijnen, however, does not dwell much on how we should understand this insight. Taking an opposing stance, Terry Pinkard returns to his famous post-Kantian reading of Hegel’s practical and historical conception of freedom, while Stephen Houlgate argues we should interpret Hegel’s theory of the rational state as monarchic in a weak sense that is “not incompatible” (201) with universal adult suffrage. Marina Bykova explores in detail the socially constructed nature of “Selfhood,” isolating various dimensions of how it is constituted.

In part 4, Angelica Nuzzo brilliantly surveys the notion of “absoluteness” starting from Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic in the Critique of Pure Reason, arguing that Hegel’s use of “absolute” in the Encyclopedia “starts where Kant has left off” (214). Allen Speight focuses on the Encyclopedia’s account of...