Hegel's Philosophy of Mind — Georg Hegel — John Shaqi
Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
Georg Hegel · en
the healthy mind in a healthy body. Ethics is only too apt to suppose that
will and intelligence are assumptions which need no special justification.
But the truth is that they vary from individual to individual in degree
and structure. It is the business of ethical psychology to give to these
vague attributions the definiteness of a normal standard: to show what
proportions are required to justify the proper title of reason and will—to
show what reason and will really are if they do what they are encouraged
or expected to do. It talks of the diseases of will and personality: it
must also set forth their educational ideal. The first problem of Ethics,
it may be said, is the question of the will and its freedom. But to say
this is of course not to say that, unless freedom of will be understood in
some special sense, ethics becomes impossible. If the moral law is the
_ratio cognoscendi_ of freedom, then must our conception of morality and
of freedom hang together. And it will clearly be indispensable to begin by
some attempt to discover in what sense man may be in the most general way
described as a moral agent—as an intelligent will, or (more briefly, yet
synonymously) as a will. “The soil of law and morality,” says Hegel(65),
“is the intelligent life: and its more precise place and starting-point
the will, which is free, in the sense that freedom is its substance and
characteristic, and the system of law the realm of freedom realised, the
world of intelligence produced out of itself as a second nature.” Such a
freedom is a freedom made and acquired, the work of the mind’s
self-realisation, not to be taken as a given fact of consciousness which
must be believed(66). To have a will—in other words, to have freedom, is
the consummation—and let us add, only the formal or ideal consummation—of
a process by which man raises himself out of his absorption in sensation
and impulse, establishes within himself a mental realm, an organism of
ideas, a self-consciousness, and a self.