Hegel's Philosophy of MindHegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
In this way, for Fichte, and through Fichte still more decidedly for
Hegel, both psychology and ethics breathe an opener and ampler air than
they often enjoy. Psychology ceases to be a mere description of psychic
events, and becomes the history of the self-organising process of human
reason. Ethics loses its cloistered, negative, unnatural aspect, and
becomes a name for some further conditions of the same development,
essentially postulated to complete or supplement its shortcomings.
Psychology—taken in this high philosophical acceptation—thus leads on to
Ethics; and Ethics is parted by no impassable line from Psychology. That,
at least, is what must happen if they are still to retain a place in
philosophy: for, as Kant says(55), “under the government of reason our
cognitions cannot form a rhapsody, but must constitute a system, in which
alone can they support and further its essential aims.” As parts of such a
system, they carry out their special work in subordination to, and in the
realisation of, a single Idea—and therefore in essential interconnexion.
From that interconnecting band we may however in detail-enquiry dispense
ourselves; and then we have the empirical or inductive sciences of
psychology and ethics. But even with these, the necessity of the situation
is such that it is only a question of degree how far we lose sight of the
philosophical horizon, and entrench ourselves in special enquiry.
Something of the philosophic largeness must always guide us; even when, to
further the interests of the whole, it is necessary for the special
enquirer to bury himself entirely in his part. So long as each part is
sincerely and thoroughly pursued, and no part is neglected, there is an
indwelling reason in the parts which will in the long run tend to
constitute the total.
A philosophical psychology will show us how the sane intelligence and the
rational will are, at least approximately, built up out of elements, and
through stages and processes, which modify and complement, as they may
also arrest and perplex, each other. The unity, coherence, and
completeness of the intelligent self is not, as vulgar irreflectiveness
supposes and somewhat angrily maintains, a full-grown thing or agent, of
whose actions and modes of behaviour the psychologist has to narrate the
history,—a history which is too apt to degenerate into the anecdotal and
the merely interesting. This unity of self has to be “deduced,” as Fichte
would say: it has to be shown as the necessary result which certain
elements in a certain order will lead to(56). A normal mind,
self-possessed, developed and articulated, yet thoroughly one, a real
microcosm, or true and full monad, which under the mode of its
individuality still represents the universe: that is, what psychology has
to show as the product of factors and processes. And it is clearly
something great and good, something valuable, and already possessing, by
implication we may say, an ethical character.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account