Hegel's Philosophy of Mind Part 7

So far as it is concerned, there is no nation, but a federation of shopkeepers. Such an one is the _bourgeois_ (the _Burger_, as distinct from the peasant or _Bauer_ and the _Adel_). As an artisan-i.e. a mere industrial, he knows no country, but at best the reputation and interest of his own guild-union with its partial object. He is narrow, but honest and respectable. As a mere commercial agent, he knows no country: his field is the world, but the world not in its concreteness and variety, but in the abstract aspect of a money-bag and an exchange. The larger totality is indeed not altogether out of sight. But if he contribute to the needy, either his sacrifice is lifeless in proportion as it becomes general, or loses generality as it becomes lively. As regards his general services to the great life of his national state(115), they are unintelligently and perhaps grudgingly rendered.

Of the peasant order Hegel has less to say. On one side the "country" as opposed to the "town" has a closer natural sympathy with the common and general interest: and the peasantry is the undifferentiated, solid and sound, basis of the national life. It forms the submerged ma.s.s, out of which the best soldiers are made, and which out of the depths of earth brings forward nourishment as well as all the materials of elementary necessity. Faithfulness and loyalty are its virtues: but it is personal allegiance to a commanding superior,-not to a law or a general view-for the peasant is weak in comprehensive intelligence, though shrewd in detailed observation.

Of the purely political function of the state Hegel in this sketch says almost nothing. But under the head of the general government of the state he deals with its social functions. For a moment he refers to the well-known distinction of the legislative, judicial and executive powers.

But it is only to remark that "in every governmental act all three are conjoined. They are abstractions, none of which can get a reality of its own,-which, in other words, cannot be const.i.tuted and organised as powers.

Legislation, judicature, and executive are something completely formal, empty, and contentless.... Whether the others are or are not bare abstractions, empty activities, depends entirely on the executive power; and this is absolutely the government(116)." Treating government as the organic movement by which the universal and the particular in the commonwealth come into relations, he finds that it presents three forms, or gives rise to three systems. The highest and last of these is the "educational" system. By this he understands all that activity by which the intelligence of the state tries directly to mould and guide the character and fortunes of its members: all the means of culture and discipline, whether in general or for individuals, all training to public function, to truthfulness, to good manners. Under the same head come conquest and colonisation as state agencies. The second system is the judicial, which instead of, like the former, aiming at the formation or reformation of its members is satisfied by subjecting individual transgression to a process of rectification by the general principle. With regard to the system of judicature, Hegel argues for a variety of procedure to suit different ranks, and for a corresponding modification of penalties. "Formal rigid equality is just what does not spare the character. The same penalty which in one estate brings no infamy causes in another a deep and irremediable hurt." And with regard to the after life of the transgressor who has borne his penalty: "Punishment is the reconciliation of the law with itself. No further reproach for his crime can be addressed to the person who has undergone his punishment. He is restored to members.h.i.+p of his estate(117)."

In the first of the three systems, the economic system, or "System of wants," the state seems at first hardly to appear in its universal and controlling function at all. Here the individual depends for the satisfaction of his physical needs on a blind, unconscious destiny, on the obscure and incalculable properties of supply and demand in the whole interconnexion of commodities. But even this is not all. With the acc.u.mulation of wealth in inequality, and the growth of vast capitals, there is subst.i.tuted for the dependence of the individual on the general resultant of a vast number of agencies a dependence on one enormously rich individual, who can control the physical destinies of a nation. But a nation, truly speaking, is there no more. The industrial order has parted into a mere abstract workman on one hand, and the _grande richesse_ on the other. "It has lost its capacity of an organic absolute intuition and of respect for the divine-external though its divinity be: and there sets in the b.e.s.t.i.a.lity of contempt for all that is n.o.ble. The mere wisdomless universal, the ma.s.s of wealth, is the essential: and the ethical principle, the absolute bond of the nation, is vanished; and the nation is dissolved(118)."

It would be a long and complicated task to sift, in these ill-digested but profound suggestions, the real meaning from the formal statement. They are, like Utopia, beyond the range of practical politics. The modern reader, whose political conceptions are limited by contemporary circ.u.mstance, may find them archaic, medieval, quixotic. But for those who behind the words and forms can see the substance and the idea, they will perhaps come nearer the conception of ideal commonwealth than many reforming programmes. Compared with the maturer statements of the _Philosophy of Law_, they have the faults of the Romantic age to which their inception belongs. Yet even in that later exposition there is upheld the doctrine of the supremacy of the eternal State against everything particular, cla.s.s-like, and temporary; a doctrine which has made Hegel-as it made Fichte-a voice in that "professorial socialism" which is at least as old as Plato.

INTRODUCTION.

-- 377. The knowledge of Mind is the highest and hardest, just because it is the most "concrete" of sciences. The significance of that "absolute"

commandment, _Know thyself_-whether we look at it in itself or under the historical circ.u.mstances of its first utterance-is not to promote mere self-knowledge in respect of the _particular_ capacities, character, propensities, and foibles of the single self. The knowledge it commands means that of man's genuine reality-of what is essentially and ultimately true and real-of mind as the true and essential being. Equally little is it the purport of mental philosophy to teach what is called _knowledge of men_-the knowledge whose aim is to detect the _peculiarities_, pa.s.sions, and foibles of other men, and lay bare what are called the recesses of the human heart. Information of this kind is, for one thing, meaningless, unless on the a.s.sumption that we know the _universal_-man as man, and, that always must be, as mind. And for another, being only engaged with casual, insignificant and _untrue_ aspects of mental life, it fails to reach the underlying essence of them all-the mind itself.

-- 378. Pneumatology, or, as it was also called, Rational Psychology, has been already alluded to in the Introduction to the Logic as an _abstract_ and generalising metaphysic of the subject. _Empirical_ (or inductive) psychology, on the other hand, deals with the "concrete" mind: and, after the revival of the sciences, when observation and experience had been made the distinctive methods for the study of concrete reality, such psychology was worked on the same lines as other sciences. In this way it came about that the metaphysical theory was kept outside the inductive science, and so prevented from getting any concrete embodiment or detail: whilst at the same time the inductive science clung to the conventional common-sense metaphysic, with its a.n.a.lysis into forces, various activities, &c., and rejected any attempt at a "speculative" treatment.

The books of Aristotle on the Soul, along with his discussions on its special aspects and states, are for this reason still by far the most admirable, perhaps even the sole, work of philosophical value on this topic. The main aim of a philosophy of mind can only be to re-introduce unity of idea and principle into the theory of mind, and so re-interpret the lesson of those Aristotelian books.

-- 379. Even our own sense of the mind's _living_ unity naturally protests against any attempt to break it up into different faculties, forces, or, what comes to the same thing, activities, conceived as independent of each other. But the craving for a _comprehension_ of the unity is still further stimulated, as we soon come across distinctions between mental freedom and mental determinism, ant.i.theses between free _psychic_ agency and the corporeity that lies external to it, whilst we equally note the intimate interdependence of the one upon the other. In modern times especially the phenomena of _animal magnetism_ have given, even in experience, a lively and visible confirmation of the underlying unity of soul, and of the power of its "ideality." Before these facts, the rigid distinctions of practical common sense were struck with confusion; and the necessity of a "speculative" examination with a view to the removal of difficulties was more directly forced upon the student.

-- 380. The "concrete" nature of mind involves for the observer the peculiar difficulty that the several grades and special types which develop its intelligible unity in detail are not left standing as so many separate existences confronting its more advanced aspects. It is otherwise in external nature. There, matter and movement, for example, have a manifestation all their own-it is the solar system; and similarly the _differentiae_ of sense-perception have a sort of earlier existence in the properties of _bodies_, and still more independently in the four elements.

The species and grades of mental evolution, on the contrary, lose their separate existence and become factors, states and features in the higher grades of development. As a consequence of this, a lower and more abstract aspect of mind betrays the presence in it, even to experience, of a higher grade. Under the guise of sensation, e.g., we may find the very highest mental life as its modification or its embodiment. And so sensation, which is but a mere form and vehicle, may to the superficial glance seem to be the proper seat and, as it were, the source of those moral and religious principles with which it is charged; and the moral and religious principles thus modified may seem to call for treatment as species of sensation. But at the same time, when lower grades of mental life are under examination, it becomes necessary, if we desire to point to actual cases of them in experience, to direct attention to more advanced grades for which they are mere forms. In this way subjects will be treated of by antic.i.p.ation which properly belong to later stages of development (e.g. in dealing with natural awaking from sleep we speak by antic.i.p.ation of consciousness, or in dealing with mental derangement we must speak of intellect).

What Mind (or Spirit) is.

-- 381. From our point of view Mind has for its _presupposition_ Nature, of which it is the truth, and for that reason its _absolute prius_. In this its truth Nature is vanished, and mind has resulted as the "Idea" entered on possession of itself. Here the subject and object of the Idea are one-either is the intelligent unity, the notion. This ident.i.ty is _absolute negativity_-for whereas in Nature the intelligent unity has its objectivity perfect but externalised, this self-externalisation has been nullified and the unity in that way been made one and the same with itself. Thus at the same time it is this ident.i.ty only so far as it is a return out of nature.

-- 382. For this reason the essential, but formally essential, feature of mind is Liberty: i.e. it is the notion's absolute negativity or self-ident.i.ty. Considered as this formal aspect, it _may_ withdraw itself from everything external and from its own externality, its very existence; it can thus submit to infinite _pain_, the negation of its individual immediacy: in other words, it can keep itself affirmative in this negativity and possess its own ident.i.ty. All this is possible so long as it is considered in its abstract self-contained universality.

-- 383. This universality is also its determinate sphere of being. Having a being of its own, the universal is self-particularising, whilst it still remains self-identical. Hence the special mode of mental being is "_manifestation_." The spirit is not some one mode or meaning which finds utterance or externality only in a form distinct from itself: it does not manifest or reveal _something_, but its very mode and meaning is this revelation. And thus in its mere possibility Mind is at the same moment an infinite, "absolute," _actuality_.

-- 384. _Revelation_, taken to mean the revelation of the _abstract_ Idea, is an unmediated transition to Nature which _comes_ to be. As Mind is free, its manifestation is to _set forth_ Nature as _its_ world; but because it is reflection, it, in thus setting forth its world, at the same time _presupposes_ the world as a nature independently existing. In the intellectual sphere to reveal is thus to create a world as its being-a being in which the mind procures the _affirmation_ and _truth_ of its freedom.

_The Absolute is Mind_ (Spirit)-this is the supreme definition of the Absolute. To find this definition and to grasp its meaning and burthen was, we may say, the ultimate purpose of all education and all philosophy: it was the point to which turned the impulse of all religion and science: and it is this impulse that must explain the history of the world. The word "Mind" (Spirit)-and some glimpse of its meaning-was found at an early period: and the spirituality of G.o.d is the lesson of Christianity. It remains for philosophy in its own element of intelligible unity to get hold of what was thus given as a mental image, and what implicitly is the ultimate reality: and that problem is not genuinely, and by rational methods, solved so long as liberty and intelligible unity is not the theme and the soul of philosophy.

Subdivision.

-- 385. The development of Mind (Spirit) is in three stages:-

(1) In the form of self-relation: within it it has the _ideal_ totality of the Idea-i.e. it has before it all that its notion contains: its being is to be self-contained and free. This is _Mind Subjective_.

(2) In the form of _reality_: realised, i.e. in a _world_ produced and to be produced by it: in this world freedom presents itself under the shape of necessity. This is _Mind Objective_.

(3) In that unity of mind as objectivity and, of mind as ideality and concept, which essentially and actually is and for ever produces itself, mind in its absolute truth. This is _Mind Absolute_.

-- 386. The two first parts of the doctrine of Mind embrace the finite mind. Mind is the infinite Idea; thus finitude here means the disproportion between the concept and the reality-but with the qualification that it is a shadow cast by the mind's own light-a show or illusion which the mind implicitly imposes as a barrier to itself, in order, by its removal, actually to realise and become conscious of freedom as _its_ very being, i.e. to be fully _manifested_. The several steps of this activity, on each of which, with their semblance of being, it is the function of the finite mind to linger, and through which it has to pa.s.s, are steps in its liberation. In the full truth of that liberation is given the identification of the three stages-finding a world presupposed before us, generating a world as our own creation, and gaining freedom from it and in it. To the infinite form of this truth the show purifies itself till it becomes a consciousness of it.

A rigid application of the category of finitude by the abstract logician is chiefly seen in dealing with Mind and reason: it is held not a mere matter of strict logic, but treated also as a moral and religious concern, to adhere to the point of view of finitude, and the wish to go further is reckoned a mark of audacity, if not of insanity, of thought. Whereas in fact such a _modesty_ of thought, as treats the finite as something altogether fixed and _absolute_, is the worst of virtues; and to stick to a post which has no sound ground in itself is the most unsound sort of theory. The category of finitude was at a much earlier period elucidated and explained at its place in the Logic: an elucidation which, as in logic for the more specific though still simple thought-forms of finitude, so in the rest of philosophy for the concrete forms, has merely to show that the finite _is not_, i.e. is not the truth, but merely a transition and an emergence to something higher. This finitude of the spheres so far examined is the dialectic that makes a thing have its cessation by another and in another: but Spirit, the intelligent unity and the _implicit_ Eternal, is itself just the consummation of that internal act by which nullity is nullified and vanity is made vain. And so, the modesty alluded to is a retention of this vanity-the finite-in opposition to the true: it is itself therefore vanity. In the course of the mind's development we shall see this vanity appear as _wickedness_ at that turning-point at which mind has reached its extreme immersion in its subjectivity and its most central contradiction.

SECTION I. MIND SUBJECTIVE.

-- 387. Mind, on the ideal stage of its development, is mind as _cognitive_: Cognition, however, being taken here not as a merely logical category of the Idea (-- 223), but in the sense appropriate to the _concrete_ mind.

Subjective mind is:-

(A) Immediate or implicit: a soul-the Spirit in _Nature_-the object treated by _Anthropology_.

(B) Mediate or explicit: still as identical reflection into itself and into other things: mind in correlation or particularisation: consciousness-the object treated by the _Phenomenology of Mind_.

(C) Mind defining itself in itself, as an independent subject-the object treated by _Psychology_.

In the Soul is the _awaking of Consciousness_: Consciousness sets itself up as Reason, awaking at one bound to the sense of its rationality: and this Reason by its activity emanc.i.p.ates itself to objectivity and the consciousness of its intelligent unity.

For an intelligible unity or principle of comprehension each modification it presents is an advance of _development_: and so in mind every character under which it appears is a stage in a process of specification and development, a step forward towards its goal, in order to make itself into, and to realise in itself, what it implicitly is. Each step, again, is itself such a process, and its product is that what the mind was implicitly at the beginning (and so for the observer) it is _for itself_-for the special form, viz. which the mind has in that step. The ordinary method of psychology is to narrate what the mind or soul is, what happens to it, what it does. The soul is presupposed as a ready-made agent, which displays such features as its acts and utterances, from which we can learn what it is, what sort of faculties and powers it possesses-all without being aware that the act and utterance of what the soul is really invests it with that character in our conception and makes it reach a higher stage of being than it explicitly had before.

We must, however, distinguish and keep apart from the progress here studied what we call education and instruction. The sphere of education is the individual's only: and its aim is to bring the universal mind to exist in them. But in the philosophic theory of mind, mind is studied as self-instruction and self-education in very essence; and its acts and utterances are stages in the process which brings it forward to itself, links it in unity with itself, and so makes it actual mind.

Sub-Section A. Anthropology. The Soul.

-- 388. Spirit (Mind) _came into_ being as the truth of Nature. But not merely is it, as such a result, to be held the true and real first of what went before: this becoming or transition bears in the sphere of the notion the special meaning of "_free judgment_." Mind, thus come into being, means therefore that Nature in its own self realises its untruth and sets itself aside: it means that Mind presupposes itself no longer as the universality which in corporal individuality is always self-externalised, but as a universality which in its concretion and totality is one and simple. At such a stage it is not yet mind, but _soul_.

-- 389. The soul is no separate immaterial ent.i.ty. Wherever there is Nature, the soul is its universal immaterialism, its simple "ideal" life.

Soul is the _substance_ or "absolute" basis of all the particularising and individualising of mind: it is in the soul that mind finds the material on which its character is wrought, and the soul remains the pervading, identical ideality of it all. But as it is still conceived thus abstractly, the soul is only the _sleep_ of mind-the pa.s.sive ???? of Aristotle, which is potentially all things.

The question of the immateriality of the soul has no interest, except where, on the one hand, matter is regarded as something _true_, and mind conceived as a _thing_, on the other. But in modern times even the physicists have found matters grow thinner in their hands: they have come upon _imponderable_ matters, like heat, light, &c., to which they might perhaps add s.p.a.ce and time. These "imponderables," which have lost the property (peculiar to matter) of gravity and, in a sense, even the capacity of offering resistance, have still, however, a sensible existence and outness of part to part; whereas the "vital"_ matter_, which may also be found enumerated among them, not merely lacks gravity, but even every other aspect of existence which might lead us to treat it as material. The fact is that in the Idea of Life the self-externalism of nature is _implicitly_ at an end: subjectivity is the very substance and conception of life-with this proviso, however, that its existence or objectivity is still at the same time forfeited to the sway of self-externalism. It is otherwise with Mind. There, in the intelligible unity which exists as freedom, as absolute negativity, and not as the immediate or natural individual, the object or the reality of the intelligible unity is the unity itself; and so the self-externalism, which is the fundamental feature of matter, has been completely dissipated and trans.m.u.ted into universality, or the subjective ideality of the conceptual unity. Mind is the existent truth of matter-the truth that matter itself has no truth.