Hegel's Philosophy of MindHegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
If the scope of Natural Philosophy be thus expanded to make it the unity
and more than the synthetic aggregate of the several physical sciences—to
make it the whole which surpasses the addition of all their fragments, the
purpose of Ethics has not less to be deepened and widened. Ethics, under
that title, Hegel knows not. And for those who cannot recognise anything
unless it be clearly labelled, it comes natural to record their censure of
Hegelianism for ignoring or disparaging ethical studies. But if we take
the word in that wide sense which common usage rather justifies than
adopts, we may say that the whole philosophy of Mind is a moral
philosophy. Its subject is the moral as opposed to the physical aspect of
reality: the inner and ideal life as opposed to the merely external and
real materials of it: the world of intelligence and of humanity. It
displays Man in the several stages of that process by which he expresses
the full meaning of nature, or discharges the burden of that task which is
implicit in him from the first. It traces the steps of that growth by
which what was no better than a fragment of nature—an intelligence located
(as it seemed) in one piece of matter—comes to realise the truth of it and
of himself. That truth is his ideal and his obligation: but it is
also—such is the mystery of his birthright—his idea and possession.
He—like the natural universe—is (as the _Logic_ has shown) a principle of
unification, organisation, idealisation: and his history (in its ideal
completeness) is the history of the process by which he, the typical man,
works the fragments of reality (and such mere reality must be always a
collection of fragments) into the perfect unity of a many-sided character.
Thus the philosophy of mind, beginning with man as a sentient organism,
the focus in which the universe gets its first dim confused expression
through mere feeling, shows how he “erects himself above himself” and
realises what ancient thinkers called his kindred with the divine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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