Hegel's Philosophy of MindHegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
Thus, for the third time, but now on a higher plane, that of intelligence
and rationality, is traced the process of development or realisation by
which reason becomes reasoned knowledge and rational will, a free or
autonomous intelligence. And, as before, the starting-point, alike in
theoretical and practical mind, is feeling—or immediate knowledge and
immediate sense of Ought. The basis of thought is an immediate
perception—a sensuous affection or given something, and the basis of the
idea of a general satisfaction is the natural claim to determine the
outward existence conformably to individual feeling. In intelligent
perception or intuition the important factor is attention, which raises it
above mere passive acceptance and awareness of a given fact. Attention
thus involves on one hand the externality of its object, and on the other
affirms its dependence on the act of the subject: it sets the objects
before and out of itself, in space and time, but yet in so doing it shows
itself master of the objects. If perception presuppose attention, in
short, they cease to be wholly outward: we make them ours, and the space
and time they fill are projected by us. So attended to, they are
appropriated, inwardised and recollected: they take their place in a
mental place and mental time: they receive a general or de-individualised
character in the memory-image. These are retained as mental property, but
retained actually only in so far they are revivable and revived. Such
revival is the work of imagination working by the so-called laws of
association. But the possession of its ideas thus inwardised and
recollected by the mind is largely a matter of chance. The mind is not
really fully master of them until it has been able to give them a certain
objectivity, by replacing the mental image by a vocal, i.e. a sensible
sign. By means of words, intelligence turns its ideas or representations
into quasi-realities: it creates a sort of superior sense-world, the world
of language, where ideas live a potential, which is also an actual, life.
Words are sensibles, but they are sensibles which completely lose
themselves in their meaning. As sensibles, they render possible that
verbal memory which is the handmaid of thought: but which also as merely
mechanical can leave thought altogether out of account. It is through
words that thought is made possible: for it alone permits the movement
through ideas without being distracted through a multitude of
associations. In them thought has an instrument completely at its own
level, but still only a machine, and in memory the working of that
machine. We think in names, not in general images, but in terms which only
serve as vehicles for mental synthesis and analysis.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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