Hegel's Philosophy of Mind — Georg Hegel — John Shaqi
Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
Georg Hegel · en
The somnambulist and the clairvoyant see without
eyes, and carry their vision directly into regions where the waking
consciousness of orderly intelligence cannot enter. But that region is not
the world of our higher ideas,—of art, religion, and philosophy. It is
still the sensitivity—that realm of sensitivity which is ordinarily
covered by unconsciousness. Such sensitive clairvoyants may, as it were,
hear themselves growing; they may discern the hidden quivers and pulses of
blood and tissue, the seats of secret pain and all the unrevealed workings
in the dark chambers of the flesh. But always their vision seems confined
to that region, and will fall short of the world of light and ideal truth.
It is towards the nature-bond of sensitive solidarity with earth, and
flowers, and trees, the life that “rolls through all things,” not towards
the spiritual unity which broods over the world and “impels all thinking
things,” that these immersions in the selfless universe lead us.
What Hegel chiefly sees in these phenomena is their indication, even on
the natural side of man, of that ideality of the material, which it is the
work of intelligence to produce in the more spiritual life, in the
fully-developed mind. The latter is the supreme over-soul, that Absolute
Mind which in our highest moods, aesthetic and religious, we approximate
to. But mind, as it tends towards the higher end to “merge itself in
light,” to identify itself yet not wholly lost, but retained, in the
fullness of undivided intellectual being, so at the lower end it springs
from a natural and underlying unity, the immense solidarity of
nether-soul, the great Soul of Nature—the “Substance” which is to be
raised into the “Subject” which is true divinity. Between these two
unities, the nature-given nether-soul and the spirit-won over-soul, lies
the conscious life of man: a process of differentiation which narrows and
of redintegration which enlarges,—which alternately builds up an isolated
personality and dissolves it in a common intelligence and sympathy. It is
because mental or tacit “suggestion”(88) (i.e. will-influence exercised
without word or sign, or other sensible mode of connexion),
thought-transference, or thought-reading (which is more than dexterous
apprehension of delicate muscular signs), exteriorisation or transposition
of sensibility into objects primarily non-sensitive, clairvoyance (i.e.
the power of describing, as if from direct perception, objects or events
removed in space beyond the recognised limits of sensation), and
somnambulism, so far as it implies lucid vision with sealed eyes,—it is
because these things seem to show the essential ideality of matter, that
Hegel is interested in them. The ordinary conditions of consciousness and
even of practical life in society are a derivative and secondary state; a
product of processes of individualism, which however are never completed,
and leave a large margin for idealising intelligence to fulfil. From a