Essays on Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction The present volume of essays is the first English-language collection devoted to Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. The Philosophy of Subjective Spirit is the first section of the third part of Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. First published in 1817, Hegel published two additional editions of the Encyclopedia in his lifetime, one in 1827 and the third in 1830, just a year before his untimely death. That he saw fit to devote his efforts to revising, expanding, and republishing the Encyclopedia provides a clear indication of the importance Hegel attached to the Encyclopedia, something not lost on Hegel scholars. But this recognition notwithstanding, the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit has remained until very recently what one scholar has justifiably called a “less-well-known, less well-understood area in Hegel’s thought.”1 For a variety of reasons, including the editorial work associated with the publication of the new edition of Hegel’s Gesammelte Werke, recent textual discoveries, and the saliency of issues in the philosophy of mind in contemporary philosophy generally, we have recently witnessed renewed interest in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. The essays in the present volume, all prepared for publication here, contribute to a growing body of new scholarship on the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and Hegel’s thought on some issues of central concern in contemporary philosophy of mind. Prior to the 1970s there were virtually no studies of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit in English. In 1975, John Findlay brought out a new edition of the 19th-century translation of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit into English,2 followed some three years later by the three-volume edition of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit by Michael Petry.3 Both of these included for the first time English translations of the Zusätze or supplementary material that Hegel’s 19th century editor, Ludwig Boumann, compiled from notes, lecture transcripts, and other sources. Drawing on this new editorial ix x / Editor’s Introduction and translation work, Willem deVries published an important study, Hegel’s Theory of Mental Activity, in 1987, and Daniel Bertold-Bond authored Hegel’s Theory of Madness in 1995.4 It is generally agreed that these supplementary materials enhance the intelligibility of the materials published by Hegel in the Encyclopedia, which was intended by him to serve as an outline for his lecture courses, and these English-language scholarly works may have been stimulated by the translation of the materials in English. Nonetheless, the editorial methods Boumann used in compiling the materials have confounded scholars. In creating the Zusätze he combined varying sources from different hands that were drawn from different years, based on as many as five different lecture courses offered by Hegel between 1816 and 1830 and that in some cases were based on the first edition of the Encyclopedia but were published together as Additions to the text of the third edition. Many of the materials available to Boumann have, alas, been lost or destroyed. Though Hegel lectured on the philosophy of spirit five times between 1820 and 1830, we have available five transcripts based on three of the lecture courses. Three of the transcripts—by Hotho from 1822 and Griesheim and Kehler from 1825—have been known to scholars for quite some time and were reissued and translated into English by M. J. Petry in his invaluable three-volume edition noted just above. More recently, they have been definitively edited and published as a volume in Hegel’s Gesammelete Werke.5 None, however, presents a transcript of a complete lecture course. In 1994 two transcripts lost during World War II were rediscovered in Polish libraries. The publication of these transcripts by Franz Hespe and Burhard Tuschling constituted a major addition to the resources for understanding Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, constituting the first publication of a complete transcript of one of Hegel’s lecture courses from 1827 through 1828.6 That transcript has now been translated into English by Robert Williams, who has also provided a very useful introduction.7 The editorial and philological stage has thus been set for a fresh philosophical encounter in English with Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. The present volume of new essays, by scholars from the United States, Canada, Australia, Macau, and Italy constitutes a significant contribution to that encounter. As these essays reveal, there are far more than philological and historical reasons why such a new encounter is warranted. The Philosophy of Subjective...