Hegel's Philosophy of Mind — Georg Hegel — John Shaqi
Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
Georg Hegel · en
The superior faculty is therefore the more thorough organisation of that
which is elsewhere less harmoniously systematised. Opinion is fragmentary
and partial: it begins abruptly and casually from the unknown, and runs
off no less abruptly into the unknown. Knowledge, on the contrary, is
unified: and its unity gives it its strength and superiority. The powers
which thus exist are the subjective counterparts of objectively valuable
products. Thus, reason is the subjective counterpart of a world in which
all the constituents are harmonised and fall into due relationship. It is
a product or result, which is not psychologically, but logically or
morally important. It is a faculty, because it means that actually its
possessor has ordered and systematised his life or his ideas of things.
Psychologically, it, like unreason, is a compound of elements: but in the
case of reason the composition is unendingly and infinitely consistent; it
is knowledge completely unified. The distinction then is not in the
strictest sense psychological: for it has an aesthetic or normative
character; it is logical or ethical: it denotes that the idea or the act
is an approach to truth or goodness. And so, when Butler or Plato
distinguishes reason or reflection from appetites and affections, and even
from self-love or from the heart which loves and hates, this is not
exactly a psychological division in the narrower sense. That is to say:
these are, in Plato’s words, not merely “parts,” but quite as much “kinds”
and “forms” of soul. They denote degrees in that harmonisation of mind and
soul which reproduces the permanent and complete truth of things. For
example, self-love, as Butler describes it, has but a partial and narrowed
view of the worth of acts: it is engrossing and self-involved: it cannot
take in the full dependence of the narrower interest on the larger and
eternal self. So, in Plato, the man of heart is but a nature which by fits
and starts, or with steady but limited vision, realises the larger life.
These parts or kinds are not separate and co-existent faculties: but
grades in the co-ordination and unification of the same one human nature.
(i.) Psychology and Epistemology.