Hegel's Philosophy of MindHegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
state which is not yet personality to a state which is more than can be
described as personality—lies the mental movement. So Fichte, too, had
regarded the power of the somnambulist as laying open a world underlying
the development of egoity and self-consciousness(89): “the merely sensuous
man is still in somnambulism,” only a somnambulism of waking hours: “the
true waking is the life in God, to be free in him, all else is sleep and
dream.” “Egoity,” he adds, “is a merely _formal_ principle, utterly, and
never qualitative (i.e. the essence and universal force).” For
Schopenhauer, too, the experiences of animal magnetism had seemed to prove
the absolute supernatural power of the radical will in its superiority to
the intellectual categories of space, time, and causal sequence: to prove
the reality of the metaphysical which is at the basis of all conscious
divisions.
(iii.) The Development of Inner Freedom.
The result of the first range in the process of psycho-genesis was to make
the body a sign and utterance of the Soul, with a fixed and determinate
type. The “anthropological process” has defined and settled the mere
general sentiency of soul into an individualised shape, a localised and
limited self, a bundle of habits. It has made the soul an Ego or self: a
power which looks out upon the world as a spectator, lifted above
immanence in the general tide of being, but only so lifted because it has
made itself one in the world of objects, a thing among things. The Mind
has reached the point of view of reflection. Instead of a general
identifiability with all nature, it has encased itself in a limited range,
from which it looks forth on what is now other than itself. If previously
it was mere inward sensibility, it is now sense, perceptive of an object
here and now, of an external world. The step has involved some price: and
that price is, that it has attained independence and self-hood at the cost
of surrendering the content it had hitherto held in one with itself. It is
now a blank receptivity, open to the impressions of an outside world: and
the changes which take place in its process of apprehension seem to it to
be given from outside. The world it perceives is a world of isolated and
independent objects: and it takes them as they are given. But a closer
insistance on the perception develops the implicit intelligence, which
makes it possible. The percipient mind is no mere recipiency or
susceptibility with its forms of time and space: it is spontaneously
active, it is the source of categories, or is an apperceptive power,—an
understanding. Consciousness, thus discovered to be a creative or
constructive faculty, is strictly speaking self-consciousness(90).
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