LU 6 | Additional Resources

Additional Resources 1

G. W.F Hegel. (2001). Philosophy of Mind retrieved from https://www.hegel.net/en/pdf/Hegel-Enc3.pdf

The knowledge of mind is the highest and hardest, just because it is the most 'concrete' of sciences. The significance of that 'absolute' commandment, know thyself that is whether we look at it in itself or under the historical circumstances of its first utterance and is not to promote mere self which is knowledge in respect of the particular capacities, character, propensities, and foibles of the single self. The knowledge it commands means that of man's genuine reality and of what is essentially and ultimately true and real just like of mind as the true and essential being. Equally little is it the purport of mental philosophy to teach what is called knowledge of men which is the knowledge whose aim is to detect the peculiarities, passions, and foibles of other men, and lay bare what are called the recesses of the human heart. Information of this kind is, for one thing, meaningless, unless on the assumption that we know the universal just like man as man, and, that always must be, as mind. Another one is for another, being only engaged with casual, insignificant, and untrue aspects of mental life, it fails to reach the underlying essence of them all which is come from the mind itself.

Pneumatology, or, as it was also called, Rational Psychology, has been already alluded to in the Introduction to the Logic as an abstract and generalizing metaphysic of the subject. Empirical (or inductive) psychology, on the other hand, deals with the 'concrete' mind: and, after the revival of the sciences, when observation and experience had been made the distinctive methods for the study of concrete reality, such psychology was worked on the same lines as other sciences. In this way it came about that the metaphysical theory was kept outside the inductive science, and so prevented from getting any concrete embodiment or detail: whilst at the same time the inductive science clung to the conventional common sense which is metaphysics with its analysis into forces, various activities, and rejected any attempt at a 'speculative' treatment.

In philosophy of mind, it is divided into three section which is mind subjective, mind objective and absolute mind.

1) The subjective mind is:

(A) Immediate or implicit: a soul − the Spirit in Nature − the object treated by Anthropology.

(B) Mediate or explicit: still as identical reflection into itself and into other things: mind in correlation or particularization: consciousness − the object treated by the Phenomenology of Mind.

(C) Mind defining itself in itself, as an independent subject − the object treated by Psychology.

2) The objective mind is:

The absolute Idea, but only existing in posse and as it is thus on the territory of finitude, its actual rationality retains the aspect of external apparency. The free will finds itself immediately confronted by differences which arise from the circumstance that freedom is its inward function and aim, and is in relation to an external and already subsisting objectivity, which splits up into different heads: viz. anthropological data (i.e. private and personal needs), external things of nature which exist for consciousness, and the ties of relation between individual wills which are conscious of their own diversity and particularity. These aspects constitute the external material for the embodiment of the will.

3) The absolute mind is:

while it is self was centred identity, is always also identity returning and ever returned into itself which if it is the one and universal substance it is so as a spirit, discerning itself into a self and a consciousness, for which it is as substance. Religion, as this supreme sphere may be in general designated, if it has on one hand to be studied as issuing from the subject and having its home in the subject, must no less be regarded as objectively issuing from the absolute spirit which as spirit is in its community.