Hegel's Philosophy of Mind Part 8

A cognate question is that of the _community of soul and body_. This community (interdependence) was a.s.sumed as a _fact_, and the only problem was how to _comprehend_ it. The usual answer, perhaps, was to call it an _incomprehensible_ mystery; and, indeed, if we take them to be absolutely ant.i.thetical and absolutely independent, they are as impenetrable to each other as one piece of matter to another, each being supposed to be found only in the pores of the other, i.e. where the other is not: whence Epicurus, when attributing to the G.o.ds a residence in the pores, was consistent in not imposing on them any connexion with the world. A somewhat different answer has been given by all philosophers since this relation came to be expressly discussed. Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibnitz have all indicated G.o.d as this _nexus_. They meant that the finitude of soul and matter were only ideal and unreal distinctions; and, so holding, these philosophers took G.o.d, not, as so often is done, merely as another word for the incomprehensible, but rather as the sole true ident.i.ty of finite mind and matter. But either this ident.i.ty, as in the case of Spinoza, is too abstract, or, as in the case of Leibnitz, though his Monad of monads brings things into being, it does so only by an act of judgment or choice. Hence, with Leibnitz, the result is a distinction between soul and the corporeal (or material), and the ident.i.ty is only like the _copula_ of a judgment, and does not rise or develop into system, into the absolute syllogism.

-- 390. The Soul is at first-

(_a_) In its immediate natural mode-the natural soul, which only _is_.

(_b_) Secondly, it is a soul which _feels_, as individualised, enters into correlation with its immediate being, and, in the modes of that being, retains an abstract independence.

(_c_) Thirdly, its immediate being-or corporeity-is moulded into it, and with that corporeity it exists as _actual_ soul.

(a) The Physical Soul(119).

-- 391. The soul universal, described, it may be, as an _anima mundi_, a world-soul, must not be fixed on that account as a single subject; it is rather the universal _substance_ which has its actual truth only in individuals and single subjects. Thus, when it presents itself as a single soul, it is a single soul which _is_ merely: its only modes are modes of natural life. These have, so to speak, behind its ideality a free existence: i.e. they are natural objects for consciousness, but objects to which the soul as such does not behave as to something external. These features rather are _physical qualities_ of which it finds itself possessed.

(a) Physical Qualities(120).

-- 392. While still a "substance" (i.e. a physical soul) the mind (1) takes part in the general planetary life, feels the difference of climates, the changes of the seasons and the periods of the day, &c. This life of nature for the main shows itself only in occasional strain or disturbance of mental tone.

In recent times a good deal has been said of the cosmical, sidereal, and telluric life of man. In such a sympathy with nature the animals essentially live: their specific characters and their particular phases of growth depend, in many cases completely, and always more or less, upon it.

In the case of man these points of dependence lose importance, just in proportion to his civilisation, and the more his whole frame of soul is based upon a substructure of mental freedom. The history of the world is not bound up with revolutions in the solar system, any more than the destinies of individuals with the positions of the planets.

The difference of climate has a more solid and vigorous influence. But the response to the changes of the seasons and hours of the day is found only in faint changes of mood, which come expressly to the fore only in morbid states (including insanity) and at periods when the self-conscious life suffers depression.

In nations less intellectually emanc.i.p.ated, which therefore live more in harmony with nature, we find amid their superst.i.tions and aberrations of imbecility _a few_ real cases of such sympathy, and on that foundation what seems to be marvellous prophetic vision of coming conditions and of events arising therefrom. But as mental freedom gets a deeper hold, even these few and slight susceptibilities, based upon partic.i.p.ation in the common life of nature, disappear. Animals and plants, on the contrary, remain for ever subject to such influences.

-- 393. (2) According to the concrete differences of the terrestrial globe, the general planetary life of the nature-governed mind specialises itself and breaks up into the several nature-governed minds which, on the whole, give expression to the nature of the geographical continents and const.i.tute the diversities of _race_.

The contrast between the earth's poles, the land towards the north pole being more aggregated and preponderant over sea, whereas in the southern hemisphere it runs out in sharp points, widely distant from each other, introduces into the differences of continents a further modification which Trevira.n.u.s (_Biology_, Part II) has exhibited in the case of the flora and fauna.

-- 394. This diversity descends into specialities, that may be termed _local_ minds-shown in the outward modes of life and occupation, bodily structure and disposition, but still more in the inner tendency and capacity of the intellectual and moral character of the several peoples.

Back to the very beginnings of national history we see the several nations each possessing a persistent type of its own.

-- 395. (3) The soul is further de-universalised into the individualised subject. But this subjectivity is here only considered as a differentiation and singling out of the modes which nature gives; we find it as the special temperament, talent, character, physiognomy, or other disposition and idiosyncrasy, of families or single individuals.

() Physical Alterations.

-- 396. Taking the soul as an individual, we find its diversities, as alterations in it, the one permanent subject, and as stages in its development. As they are at once physical and mental diversities, a more concrete definition or description of them would require us to antic.i.p.ate an acquaintance with the formed and matured mind.

The (1) first of these is the natural lapse of the ages in man's life. He begins with _Childhood_-mind wrapt up in itself. His next step is the fully-developed ant.i.thesis, the strain and struggle of a universality which is still subjective (as seen in ideals, fancies, hopes, ambitions) against his immediate individuality. And that individuality marks both the world which, as it exists, fails to meet his ideal requirements, and the position of the individual himself, who is still short of independence and not fully equipped for the part he has to play (_Youth_). Thirdly, we see man in his true relation to his environment, recognising the objective necessity and reasonableness of the world as he finds it,-a world no longer incomplete, but able in the work which it collectively achieves to afford the individual a place and a security for his performance. By his share in this collective work he first is really _somebody_, gaining an effective existence and an objective value (_Manhood_). Last of all comes the finis.h.i.+ng touch to this unity with objectivity: a unity which, while on its realist side it pa.s.ses into the _inertia_ of deadening habit, on its idealist side gains freedom from the limited interests and entanglements of the outward present (_Old Age_).

-- 397. (2) Next we find the individual subject to a _real_ ant.i.thesis, leading it to seek and find _itself_ in _another_ individual. This-the _s.e.xual relation_-on a physical basis, shows, on its one side, subjectivity remaining in an instinctive and emotional harmony of moral life and love, and not pus.h.i.+ng these tendencies to an extreme _universal_ phase, in purposes political, scientific or artistic; and on the other, shows an active half, where the individual is the vehicle of a struggle of universal and objective interests with the given conditions (both of his own existence and of that of the external world), carrying out these universal principles into a unity with the world which is his own work.

The s.e.xual tie acquires its moral and spiritual significance and function in the _family_.

-- 398. (3) When the individuality, or self-centralised being, distinguishes itself from its _mere_ being, this immediate judgment is the _waking_ of the soul, which confronts its self-absorbed natural life, in the first instance, as one natural quality and state confronts another state, viz. _sleep_.-The waking is not merely for the observer, or externally distinct from the sleep: it is itself the _judgment_ (primary part.i.tion) of the individual soul-which is self-existing only as it relates its self-existence to its mere existence, distinguis.h.i.+ng itself from its still undifferentiated universality. The waking state includes generally all self-conscious and rational activity in which the mind realises its own distinct self.-Sleep is an invigoration of this activity-not as a merely negative rest from it, but as a return back from the world of specialisation, from dispersion into phases where it has grown hard and stiff,-a return into the general nature of subjectivity, which is the substance of those specialised energies and their absolute master.

The distinction between sleep and waking is one of those _posers_, as they may be called, which are often addressed to philosophy:-Napoleon, e.g., on a visit to the University of Pavia, put this question to the cla.s.s of ideology. The characterisation given in the section is abstract; it primarily treats waking merely as a natural fact, containing the mental element _implicite_ but not yet as invested with a special being of its own. If we are to speak more concretely of this distinction (in fundamentals it remains the same), we must take the self-existence of the individual soul in its higher aspects as the Ego of consciousness and as intelligent mind. The difficulty raised anent the distinction of the two states properly arises, only when we also take into account the dreams in sleep and describe these dreams, as well as the mental representations in the sober waking consciousness, under one and the same t.i.tle of mental representations. Thus superficially cla.s.sified as states of mental representation the two coincide, because we have lost sight of the difference; and in the case of any a.s.signable distinction of waking consciousness, we can always return to the trivial remark that all this is nothing more than mental idea. But the concrete theory of the waking soul in its realised being views it as _consciousness_ and _intellect_: and the world of intelligent consciousness is something quite different from a picture of mere ideas and images. The latter are in the main only externally conjoined, in an unintelligent way, by the laws of the so-called _a.s.sociation of Ideas_; though here and there of course logical principles may also be operative. But in the waking state man behaves essentially as a concrete ego, an intelligence: and because of this intelligence his sense-perception stands before him as a concrete totality of features in which each member, each point, takes up its place as at the same time determined through and with all the rest. Thus the facts embodied in his sensation are authenticated, not by his mere subjective representation and distinction of the facts as something external from the person, but by virtue of the concrete interconnexion in which each part stands with all parts of this complex. The waking state is the concrete consciousness of this mutual corroboration of each single factor of its content by all the others in the picture as perceived. The consciousness of this interdependence need not be explicit and distinct. Still this general setting to all sensations is implicitly present in the concrete feeling of self.-In order to see the difference of dreaming and waking we need only keep in view the Kantian distinction between subjectivity and objectivity of mental representation (the latter depending upon determination through categories): remembering, as already noted, that what is actually present in mind need not be therefore explicitly realised in consciousness, just as little as the exaltation of the intellectual sense to G.o.d need stand before consciousness in the shape of proofs of G.o.d's existence, although, as before explained, these proofs only serve to express the net worth and content of that feeling.

(?) Sensibility(121).

-- 399. Sleep and waking are, primarily, it is true, not mere alterations, but _alternating_ conditions (a progression _in infinitum_). This is their formal and negative relations.h.i.+p: but in it the _affirmative_ relations.h.i.+p is also involved. In the self-certified existence of waking soul its mere existence is implicit as an "ideal" factor: the features which make up its sleeping nature, where they are implicitly as in their substance, are _found_ by the waking soul, in its own self, and, be it noted, for itself.

The fact that these particulars, though as a mode of mind they are distinguished from the self-ident.i.ty of our self-centred being, are yet simply contained in its simplicity, is what we call sensibility.

-- 400. Sensibility (feeling) is the form of the dull stirring, the inarticulate breathing, of the spirit through its unconscious and unintelligent individuality, where every definite feature is still "immediate,"-neither specially developed in its content nor set in distinction as objective to subject, but treated as belonging to its most special, its natural peculiarity. The content of sensation is thus limited and transient, belonging as it does to natural, immediate being,-to what is therefore qualitative and finite.

_Everything is in sensation_ (feeling): if you will, everything that emerges in conscious intelligence and in reason has its source and origin in sensation; for source and origin just means the first immediate manner in which a thing appears. Let it not be enough to have principles and religion only in the head: they must also be in the heart, in the feeling.

What we merely have in the head is in consciousness, in a general way: the facts of it are objective-set over against consciousness, so that as it is put in me (my abstract ego) it can also be kept away and apart from me (from my concrete subjectivity). But if put in the feeling, the fact is a mode of my individuality, however crude that individuality be in such a form: it is thus treated as my _very own_. My own is something inseparate from the actual concrete self: and this immediate unity of the soul with its underlying self in all its definite content is just this inseparability; which however yet falls short of the ego of developed consciousness, and still more of the freedom of rational mind-life. It is with a quite different intensity and permanency that the will, the conscience, and the character, are our very own, than can ever be true of feeling and of the group of feelings (the heart): and this we need no philosophy to tell us. No doubt it is correct to say that above everything the _heart_ must be good. But feeling and heart is not the form by which anything is legitimated as religious, moral, true, just, &c., and an appeal to heart and feeling either means nothing or means something bad.

This should hardly need enforcing. Can any experience be more trite than that feelings and hearts are also bad, evil, G.o.dless, mean, &c.? That the heart is the source only of such feelings is stated in the words: "From the heart proceed evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, blasphemy, &c." In such times when "scientific" theology and philosophy make the heart and feeling the criterion of what is good, moral, and religious, it is necessary to remind them of these trite experiences; just as it is nowadays necessary to repeat that thinking is the characteristic property by which man is distinguished from the beasts, and that he has feeling in common with them.

-- 401. What the sentient soul finds within it is, on one hand, the naturally immediate, as "ideally" in it and made its own. On the other hand and conversely, what originally belongs to the central individuality (which as further deepened and enlarged is the conscious ego and free mind) get the features of the natural corporeity, and is so felt. In this way we have two spheres of feeling. One, where what at first is a corporeal affection (e.g. of the eye or of any bodily part whatever) is made feeling (sensation) by being driven inward, memorised in the soul's self-centred part. Another, where affections originating in the mind and belonging to it, are in order to be felt, and to be as if found, invested with corporeity. Thus the mode or affection gets a place in the subject: it is felt in the soul. The detailed specification of the former branch of sensibility is seen in the system of the senses. But the other or inwardly originated modes of feeling no less necessarily systematise themselves; and their corporisation, as put in the living and concretely developed natural being, works itself out, following the special character of the mental mode, in a special system of bodily organs.

Sensibility in general is the healthy fellows.h.i.+p of the individual mind in the life of its bodily part. The senses form the simple system of corporeity specified. (_a_) The "ideal" side of physical things breaks up into two-because in it, as immediate and not yet subjective ideality, distinction appears as mere variety-the senses of definite _light_, -- 287-and of _sound_, -- 300. The "real" aspect similarly is with its difference double: (_b_) the senses of smell and taste, ---- 321, 322; (_c_) the sense of solid reality, of heavy matter, of heat and shape. Around the centre of the sentient individuality these specifications arrange themselves more simply than when they are developed in the natural corporeity.

The system by which the internal sensation comes to give itself specific bodily forms would deserve to be treated in detail in a peculiar science-a _psychical physiology_. Somewhat pointing to such a system is implied in the feeling of the appropriateness or inappropriateness of an immediate sensation to the persistent tone of internal sensibility (the pleasant and unpleasant): as also in the distinct parallelism which underlies the symbolical employment of sensations, e.g. of colours, tones, smells. But the most interesting side of a psychical physiology would lie in studying not the mere sympathy, but more definitely the bodily form adopted by certain mental modifications, especially the pa.s.sions or emotions. We should have, e.g., to explain the line of connexion by which anger and courage are felt in the breast, the blood, the "irritable" system, just as thinking and mental occupation are felt in the head, the centre of the 'sensible' system. We should want a more satisfactory explanation than hitherto of the most familiar connexions by which tears, and voice in general, with its varieties of language, laughter, sighs, with many other specialisations lying in the line of pathognomy and physiognomy, are formed from their mental source. In physiology the viscera and the organs are treated merely as parts subservient to the animal organism; but they form at the same time a physical system for the expression of mental states, and in this way they get quite another interpretation.

-- 402. Sensations, just because they are immediate and are found existing, are single and transient aspects of psychic life,-alterations in the substantiality of the soul, set in its self-centred life, with which that substance is one. But this self-centred being is not merely a formal factor of sensation: the soul is virtually a reflected totality of sensations-it feels _in itself_ the total substantiality which it _virtually_ is-it is a soul which feels.

In the usage of ordinary language, sensation and feeling are not clearly distinguished: still we do not speak of the sensation,-but of the feeling (sense) of right, of self; sentimentality (sensibility) is connected with sensation: we may therefore say sensation emphasises rather the side of pa.s.sivity-the fact that we find ourselves feeling, i.e. the immediacy of mode in feeling-whereas feeling at the same time rather notes the fact that it is _we ourselves_ who feel.

(b) The Feeling Soul.-(Soul as Sentiency.)(122)

-- 403. The feeling or sentient individual is the simple "ideality" or subjective side of sensation. What it has to do, therefore, is to raise its substantiality, its merely virtual filling-up, to the character of subjectivity, to take possession of it, to realise its mastery over its own. As sentient, the soul is no longer a mere natural, but an inward, individuality: the individuality which in the merely substantial totality was only formal to it has to be liberated and made independent.

Nowhere so much as in the case of the soul (and still more of the mind) if we are to understand it, must that feature of "ideality" be kept in view, which represents it as the _negation_ of the real, but a negation, where the real is put past, virtually retained, although it does not _exist_.

The feature is one with which we are familiar in regard to our mental ideas or to memory. Every individual is an infinite treasury of sensations, ideas, acquired lore, thoughts, &c.; and yet the ego is one and uncompounded, a deep featureless characterless mine, in which all this is stored up, without existing. It is only when _I_ call to mind _an_ idea, that I bring it out of that interior to existence before consciousness. Sometimes, in sickness, ideas and information, supposed to have been forgotten years ago, because for so long they had not been brought into consciousness, once more come to light. They were not in our possession, nor by such reproduction as occurs in sickness do they for the future come into our possession; and yet they were in us and continue to be in us still. Thus a person can never know how much of things he once learned he really has in him, should he have once forgotten them: they belong not to his actuality or subjectivity as such, but only to his implicit self. And under all the superstructure of specialised and instrumental consciousness that may subsequently be added to it, the individuality always remains this single-souled inner life. At the present stage this singleness is, primarily, to be defined as one of feeling-as embracing the corporeal in itself: thus denying the view that this body is something material, with parts outside parts and outside the soul. Just as the number and variety of mental representations is no argument for an extended and real multeity in the ego; so the "real" outness of parts in the body has no truth for the sentient soul. As sentient, the soul is characterised as immediate, and so as natural and corporeal: but the outness of parts and sensible multiplicity of this corporeal counts for the soul (as it counts for the intelligible unity) not as anything real, and therefore not as a barrier: the soul is this intelligible unity _in existence_,-the existent speculative principle. Thus in the body it is one simple, omnipresent unity. As to the representative faculty the body is but _one_ representation, and the infinite variety of its material structure and organisation is reduced to the _simplicity_ of one definite conception: so in the sentient soul, the corporeity, and all that outness of parts to parts which belongs to it, is reduced to _ideality_ (the _truth_ of the natural multiplicity). The soul is virtually the totality of nature: as an individual soul it is a monad: it is itself the explicitly put totality of its particular world,-that world being included in it and filling it up; and to that world it stands but as to itself.

-- 404. As _individual_, the soul is exclusive and always exclusive: any difference there is, it brings within itself. What is differentiated from it is as yet no external object (as in consciousness), but only the aspects of its own sentient totality, &c. In this part.i.tion (judgment) of itself it is always subject: its object is its substance, which is at the same time its predicate. This _substance_ is still the content of its natural life, but turned into the content of the individual sensation-laden soul; yet as the soul is in that content still particular, the content is its particular world, so far as that is, in an implicit mode, included in the ideality of the subject.

By itself, this stage of mind is the stage of its darkness: its features are not developed to conscious and intelligent content: so far it is formal and only formal. It acquires a peculiar interest in cases where it is as a _form_ and appears as a special _state_ of mind (-- 350), to which the soul, which has already advanced to consciousness and intelligence, may again sink down. But when a truer phase of mind thus exists in a more subordinate and abstract one, it implies a want of adaptation, which is _disease_. In the present stage we must treat, first, of the abstract psychical modifications by themselves, secondly, as morbid states of mind: the latter being only explicable by means of the former.

(a) The Feeling Soul in its Immediacy.

-- 405. (aa) Though the sensitive individuality is undoubtedly a monadic individual, it is because immediate, not yet as _its self_ not a true subject reflected into itself, and is therefore pa.s.sive. Hence the individuality of its true self is a different subject from it-a subject which may even exist as another individual. By the self-hood of the latter it-a substance, which is only a non-independent predicate-is then set in vibration and controlled without the least resistance on its part. This other subject by which it is so controlled may be called its _genius_.

In the ordinary course of nature this is the condition of the child in its mother's womb:-a condition neither merely bodily nor merely mental, but psychical-a correlation of soul to soul. Here are two individuals, yet in undivided psychic unity: the one as yet no _self_, as yet nothing impenetrable, incapable of resistance: the other is its actuating subject, the _single_ self of the two. The mother is the _genius_ of the child; for by genius we commonly mean the total mental self-hood, as it has existence of its own, and const.i.tutes the subjective substantiality of some one else who is only externally treated as an individual and has only a nominal independence. The underlying essence of the genius is the sum total of existence, of life, and of character, not as a mere possibility, or capacity, or virtuality, but as efficiency and realised activity, as concrete subjectivity.