Hegel's Philosophy of MindHegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
§ 452. Intelligence, as it at first recollects the intuition, places the
content of feeling in its own inwardness—in a space and a time of its own.
In this way that content is (1) an _image_ or picture, liberated from its
original immediacy and abstract singleness amongst other things, and
received into the universality of the ego. The image loses the full
complement of features proper to intuition, and is arbitrary or
contingent, isolated, we may say, from the external place, time, and
immediate context in which the intuition stood.
§ 453. (2) The image is of itself transient, and intelligence itself is as
attention its time and also its place, its when and where. But
intelligence is not only consciousness and actual existence, but _quâ_
intelligence is the subject and the potentiality of its own
specialisations. The image when thus kept in mind is no longer existent,
but stored up out of consciousness.
To grasp intelligence as this night-like mine or pit in which is stored a
world of infinitely many images and representations, yet without being in
consciousness, is from the one point of view the universal postulate which
bids us treat the notion as concrete, in the way we treat e.g. the germ as
affirmatively containing, in virtual possibility, all the qualities that
come into existence in the subsequent development of the tree. Inability
to grasp a universal like this, which, though intrinsically concrete,
still continues _simple_, is what has led people to talk about special
fibres and areas as receptacles of particular ideas. It was felt that what
was diverse should in the nature of things have a local habitation
peculiar to itself. But whereas the reversion of the germ from its
existing specialisations to its simplicity in a purely potential existence
takes place only in another germ,—the germ of the fruit; intelligence
_quâ_ intelligence shows the potential coming to free existence in its
development, and yet at the same time collecting itself in its inwardness.
Hence from the other point of view intelligence is to be conceived as this
sub-conscious mine, i.e. as the _existent_ universal in which the
different has not yet been realised in its separations. And it is indeed
this potentiality which is the first form of universality offered in
mental representation.
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