Hegel's Philosophy of Mind

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In that total process of the mind's liberation and self-realisation the portion specially called Morals is but one, though a necessary, stage. There are, said Porphyry and the later Platonists, four degrees in the path of perfection and self-accomplishment. And first, there is the career of honesty and worldly prudence, which makes the duty of the citizen. Secondly, there is the progress in purity which casts earthly things behind, and reaches the angelic height of passionless serenity. And the third step is the divine life which by intellectual energy is turned to behold the truth of things. Lastly, in the fourth grade, the mind, free and sublime in self-sustaining wisdom, makes itself an “exemplar” of virtue, and is even a “father of Gods.” Even so, it may be said, the human mind is the subject of a complicated Teleology,—the field ruled by a multifarious Ought, psychological, aesthetical, social and religious. To adjust their several claims cannot be the object of any science, if adjustment means to supply a guide in practice. But it is the purpose of such a teleology to show that social requirements and moral duty as ordinarily conceived do not exhaust the range of obligation,—of the supreme ethical Ought. How that can best be done is however a question of some difficulty. For the ends under examination do not [pg xxi] fall completely into a serial order, nor does one involve others in such a way as to destroy their independence. You cannot absolve psychology as if it stood independent of ethics or religion, nor can aesthetic considerations merely supervene on moral. Still, it may be said, the order followed by Hegel seems on the whole liable to fewer objections than others.

Mr. Herbert Spencer, the only English philosopher who has even attempted a System of Philosophy, may in this point be compared with Hegel. He also begins with a First Principles,—a work which, like Hegel's Logic, starts by presenting Philosophy as the supreme arbiter between the subordinate principles of Religion and Science, which are in it “necessary correlatives.” The positive task of philosophy is (with some inconsistency or vagueness) presented, in the next place, as a “unification of knowledge.” Such a unification has to make explicit the implicit unity of known reality: because “every thought involves a whole system of thoughts.” And such a programme might again suggest the Logic. But unfortunately Mr. Spencer does not (and he has Francis Bacon to justify him here) think it worth his while to toil up the weary, but necessary, mount of Purgatory which is known to us as Logic. With a naïve realism, he builds on Cause and Power, and above all on Force, that “Ultimate of Ultimates,” which seems to be, however marvellously, a denizen both of the Known and the Unknowable world. In the known world this Ultimate appears under two forms, matter and motion, and the problem of science and philosophy is to lay down in detail and in general the law of their continuous redistribution, of the segregation of motion from matter, and the inclusion of motion into matter.

Of this process, which has no beginning and no end,—the rhythm of generation and corruption, attraction [pg xxii] and repulsion, it may be said that it is properly not a first principle of all knowledge, but the general or fundamental portion of Natural Philosophy to which Mr. Spencer next proceeds. Such a philosophy, however, he gives only in part: viz. as a Biology, dealing with organic (and at a further stage and under other names, with supra-organic) life. And that the Philosophy of Nature should take this form, and carry both the First Principles and the later portions of the system with it, as parts of a philosophy of evolution, is what we should have expected from the contemporaneous interests of science[2]. Even a one-sided attempt to give speculative unity to those researches, which get—for reasons the scientific specialist seldom asks—the title of biological, is however worth noting as a recognition of the necessity of a Natur-philosophie,—a speculative science of Nature.

The third part of the Hegelian System corresponds to what in the Synthetic Philosophy is known as Psychology, Ethics, and Sociology. And here Mr. Spencer recognises that something new has turned up. Psychology is “unique” as a science: it is a “double science,” and as a whole quite sui generis. Whether perhaps all these epithets would not, mutatis mutandis, have to be applied also to Ethics and Sociology, if these are to do their full work, he does not say. In what this doubleness consists he even finds it somewhat difficult to show. For, as his fundamental philosophy does not on this point go beyond noting some pairs of verbal antitheses, and has no sense of unity except in the imperfect shape of a “relation[3]” between two things which are “antithetical [pg xxiii] and inseparable,” he is perplexed by phrases such as “in” and “out of” consciousness, and stumbles over the equivocal use of “inner” to denote both mental (or non-spatial) in general, and locally sub-cuticular in special. Still, he gets so far as to see that the law of consciousness is that in it neither feelings nor relations have independent subsistence, and that the unit of mind does not begin till what he calls two feelings are made one. The phraseology may be faulty, but it shows an inkling of the a priori. Unfortunately it is apparently forgotten; and the language too often reverts into the habit of what he calls the “objective,” i.e. purely physical, sciences.

Mr. Spencer's conception of Psychology restricts it to the more general physics of the mind. For its more concrete life he refers us to Sociology. But his Sociology is yet unfinished: and from the plan of its inception, and the imperfect conception of the ends and means of its investigation, hardly admits of completion in any systematic sense. To that incipiency is no doubt due its excess in historical or anecdotal detail—detail, however, too much segregated from its social context, and in general its tendency to neglect normal and central theory for incidental and peripheral facts. Here, too, there is a weakness in First Principles and a love of catchwords, which goes along with the fallacy that illustration is proof. Above all, it is evident that the great fact of religion overhangs Mr. Spencer with the attraction of an unsolved and unacceptable problem. He cannot get the religious ideas of men into co-ordination with their scientific, aesthetic, and moral doctrines; and only betrays his sense of the high importance of the former by placing them in the forefront of inquiry, as due to the inexperience and limitations of the so-called primitive man. That is hardly adequate recognition of [pg xxiv] the religious principle: and the defect will make itself seriously felt, should he ever come to carry out the further stage of his prospectus dealing with “the growth and correlation of language, knowledge, morals, and aesthetics.”

(ii.) Mind and Morals.

A Mental Philosophy—if we so put what might also be rendered a Spiritual Philosophy, or Philosophy of Spirit—may to an English reader suggest something much narrower than it actually contains. A Philosophy of the Human Mind—if we consult English specimens—would not imply much more than a psychology, and probably what is called an inductive psychology. But as Hegel understands it, it covers an unexpectedly wide range of topics, the whole range from Nature to Spirit. Besides Subjective Mind, which would seem on first thoughts to exhaust the topics of psychology, it goes on to Mind as Objective, and finally to Absolute mind. And such combinations of words may sound either self-contradictory or meaningless.

The first Section deals with the range of what is usually termed Psychology. That term indeed is employed by Hegel, in a restricted sense, to denote the last of the three sub-sections in the discussion of Subjective Mind. The Mind, which is the topic of psychology proper, cannot be assumed as a ready-made object, or datum. A Self, a self-consciousness, an intelligent and volitional agent, if it be the birthright of man, is a birthright which he has to realise for himself, to earn and to make his own. To trace the steps by which [pg xxv] mind in its stricter acceptation, as will and intelligence, emerges from the general animal sensibility which is the crowning phase of organic life, and the final problem of biology, is the work of two preliminary sub-sections—the first entitled Anthropology, the second the Phenomenology of Mind.

The subject of Anthropology, as Hegel understands it, is the Soul—the raw material of consciousness, the basis of all higher mental life. This is a borderland, where the ground is still debateable between Nature and Mind: it is the region of feeling, where the sensibility has not yet been differentiated to intelligence. Soul and body are here, as the phrase goes, in communion: the inward life is still imperfectly disengaged from its natural co-physical setting. Still one with nature, it submits to natural influences and natural vicissitudes: is not as yet master of itself, but the half-passive receptacle of a foreign life, of a general vitality, of a common soul not yet fully differentiated into individuality. But it is awaking to self-activity: it is emerging to Consciousness,—to distinguish itself, as aware and conscious, from the facts of life and sentiency of which it is aware.

From this region of psychical physiology or physiological psychology, Hegel in the second sub-section of his first part takes us to the “Phenomenology of Mind,”—to Consciousness. The sentient soul is also conscious—but in a looser sense of that word[4]: it has feelings, but can scarcely be said itself to know that it has them. As consciousness, the Soul has come to separate what it is from what it feels. The distinction emerges of a subject which is conscious, and an object of which it [pg xxvi] is conscious. And the main thing is obviously the relationship between the two, or the Consciousness itself, as tending to distinguish itself alike from its subject and its object. Hence, perhaps, may be gathered why it is called Phenomenology of Mind. Mind as yet is not yet more than emergent or apparent: nor yet self-possessed and self-certified. No longer, however, one with the circumambient nature which it feels, it sees itself set against it, but only as a passive recipient of it, a tabula rasa on which external nature is reflected, or to which phenomena are presented. No longer, on the other hand, a mere passive instrument of suggestion from without, its instinct of life, its nisus of self-assertion is developed, through antagonism to a like nisus, into the consciousness of self-hood, of a Me and Mine as set against a Thee and Thine. But just in proportion as it is so developed in opposition to and recognition of other equally self-centred selves, it has passed beyond the narrower characteristic of Consciousness proper. It is no longer mere intelligent perception or reproduction of a world, but it is life, with perception (or apperception) of that life. It has returned in a way to its original unity with nature, but it is now the sense of its self-hood—the consciousness of itself as the focus in which subjective and objective are at one. Or, to put it in the language of the great champion of Realism[5], the standpoint of Reason or full-grown Mind is this: “The world which appears to us is our percept, therefore in us. The real world, out of which we explain the phenomenon, is our thought: therefore in us.”