Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 2 (of 3)
Georg Hegel · en
Aristotle (De Anima, II. 2, 3) further states that the soul is to
be determined in three ways, namely as nutrient or vegetable, as
sensitive, and as intelligent, corresponding with plant life, animal
life and human life. The nutrient soul, when it is alone, belongs to
plants; when it is at the same time capable of sense-perception, it is
the animal soul; and when at once nutrient, sensitive and intelligent,
it is the mind of man. Man has thus three natures united in himself; a
thought which is also expressed in modern Natural Philosophy by saying
that a man is also both an animal and a plant, and which is directed
against the division and separation of the differences in these
forms. That difference has also been revived in recent times in the
observation of the organic, and it is highly important to keep these
sides separate. The only question (and it is Aristotle who raises it)
is how far these, as parts, are separable. As to what concerns more
nearly the relation of the three souls, as they may be termed (though
they are incorrectly thus distinguished), Aristotle says of them, with
perfect truth, that we need look for no one soul in which all these are
found, and which in a definite and simple form is conformable with any
one of them. This is a profound observation, by means of which truly
speculative thought marks itself out from the thought which is merely
logical and formal. Similarly among figures only the triangle and the
other definite figures, like the square, the parallelogram, &c., are
truly anything; for what is common to them, the universal figure, is
an empty thing of thought, a mere abstraction. On the other hand,
the triangle is the first, the truly universal figure, which appears
also in the square, &c., as the figure which can be led back to the
simplest determination. Therefore, on the one hand, the triangle stands
alongside of the square, pentagon, &c., as a particular figure, but—and
this is Aristotle’s main contention—it is the truly universal figure.
In the same way the soul must not be sought for as an abstraction, for
in the animate being the nutritive and the sensitive soul are included
in the intelligent, but only as its object or its potentiality;
similarly, the nutritive soul, which constitutes the nature of plants,
is also present in the sensitive soul, but likewise only as being
implicit in it, or as the universal. Or the lower soul inheres only in
the higher, as a predicate in a subject: and this mere ideal is not
to be ranked very high, as is indeed the case in formal thought; that
which is for itself is, on the contrary, the never-ceasing return into
itself, to which actuality belongs. We can determine these expressions
even more particularly. For if we speak of soul and body, we term the
corporeal the objective and the soul the subjective; and the misfortune
of nature is just this, that it is objective, that is, it is the
Notion only implicitly, and not explicitly. In the natural there is,