Andy Blunden December 2010
Hegel’s psychology is presented in the Subjective Spirit, within the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Although an English translation of the Subjective Spirit was published in 1894 as part of the whole Philosophy of Spirit (i.e., including Objective Spirit, later the Philosophy of Right), this edition did not include the Zusätze, the important notes with explanation and examples, added by Hegel’s students, drawing upon his lecture notes. The Zusätze are crucial to understanding the bare and abstract text, and had been included in the 1873 translation of the Shorter Logic and the 1896 translation of the Philosophy of Right, ensuring the wide distribution and relative popularity of these works in the English speaking world. However, it was only in 1971 that the William Wallace translation of the Philosophy of Spirit was republished with Ludwig Bouman’s Zusätze, thus making Hegel’s psychology accessible to an English speaking readership for the first time.
Instead, Hegel’s views on psychology have been taken to be what is presented in §§178-196 of The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) – the famous “master-servant” narrative. The Phenomenology was Hegel’s first published book. Only 250 copies were printed, and despite the celebrity Hegel achieved, it was never revised or reprinted during his lifetime. He used to give away copies as gifts to his friends. The Phenomenology has an important place in Hegel’s oeuvres, but it suffers from two defects. Firstly, it is an immature work, almost unreadable, written in haste to meet the publisher’s deadlines, at a time when Hegel’s ideas were only just coalescing. Secondly, it is not a positive presentation of Hegel’s views, but rather an immanent critique of foregoing ideas still tied up with problems of ontology and epistemology. Sections §§178-196 concern the master-servant dialectic which appears in every exposition of Hegel’s system, in one form or another from 1802 until 1830, though by 1830 it is much attenuated. In the Phenomenology, Hegel gave it the form of a foundation myth because it is a parody of state-of-nature narratives. It concerns the attainment of self-consciousness on the part of a subject, individual or collective, which lacks any form of mediation to interact with another subject. In 1937, Alexander Kojève used this section as the basis for a representation of the relations between colonial powers and the peoples they dominated. This reading became very popular in France after World War Two. After the Algerian War and the failure of the 1968 rebellions in France, its popularity spread throughout the world. Nowadays it would seem that Hegel had written only these 19 paragraphs in his entire life.
Such is the prominence of the Phenomenology, that even with the publication of the Philosophy of Mind in 1971, only two book length treatments of the Subjective Spirit have been published in 40 years: Willem DeVries’ Hegel’s Theory of Mental Activity: An Introduction to Theoretical Spirit, in 1988, and Richard Dien Winfield’s Hegel and Mind. Rethinking Philosophical Psychology, in 2010. Winfield’s otherwise very useful book is written within the framework of “Philosophy of Mind,” accepting that mind is inside the body, if not the brain cavity, of an individual person. DeVries’ book, on the other hand, is in my opinion a brilliant presentation of Hegel’s idea for the present-day reader.
We can only hope that people will tire of the master-servant narrative at some point, and the profound and complex structure of the Subjective Spirit will capture the attention it deserves. It may surprise readers to see that Hegel presents a view of mind which gives to thinking a plausible material basis while also making it possible for us to reconcile the experience of awareness with its material foundation. Hegel was writing at a time when biology was in its infancy and microscopes were still not powerful enough to reveal any of the microstructure of the body, let alone the nervous system. From the point of view of a natural scientific analysis of thinking, Hegel had nothing to go on, so his psychology is based solely on speculative reasoning, his experience as a teacher and philosopher, and the very limited scientific knowledge of the time. Nonetheless, the complex structure he suggests for the mind is plausible and challenging, and gives modern science cause to take it seriously.
One of the features of Hegel’s approach is that he does not take the individual mind to be a homogeneous process, but a three-layered process. First there is what Hegel calls die Seele or Soul, but I will follow Winfield in using ‘the Psyche’ instead. The Psyche is something entirely natural, found in all animate creatures. The Psyche encompasses the entire organism of an animal, registering the neurophysiological totality of the organism as its own being. Its determinations are feelings, but the Psyche does not register these feelings as intuitions of an object nor take itself as a subject. Its mental life lacks both subject and object – it just feels such-and-such. The Psyche encompasses both the outward behaviour and the inward feelings of the organism, mediating between the two. It is an integral function of the organism. The Psyche develops by means of habits and habituation so that the organism comes to distance itself from the immediacy of its own body and thus to the distinction between itself and objects which belong to an external world from which it has extricated itself.
This is Consciousness, das Bewu?tsein. What distinguishes Consciousness is that it takes the objects with which it interacts to be objects with an independent unity of their own. While Consciousness directs the body in its activity in relation to given objects, the Psyche all the while continues its work of regulating the movement and functioning of the body, now responding additionally to the activity of Consciousness. Indeed, Consciousness can only sense objects thanks to the feelings of the Psyche. But Consciousness is not at first self-consciousness. In the earliest stages of Consciousness, even though Consciousness takes the object to have an independent unity, it is not self-aware. It comes to know its own subjectivity mediately through interactions with other, objectively existing self-consciousnesses. Once it comes to see its subjectivity as something objective and objectivity as something which can be subjective, then it has reached the threshold of der Geist, what Hegel actually calls Psychology. Winfield uses the term ‘Intelligence’ here and I will use the terms Intelligence or the Intellect. The crucial stage in the development of the Intellect is language, but there is pre-linguistic Intelligence, which knows its object to be a meaningful thought determination, but has not yet acquired universal self-consciousness. Intelligence is universal self-consciousness, an entire world vested with meaning.
Whereas the Psyche knows nothing of subject and object, and Consciousness takes its object to be objective, the Intellect understands its objects to be both subjective and objective, to be both meanings and objects which exist in the world independently of its own activity. With Intelligence we have not only self-conscious activity, but thinking activity. Intelligence becomes actual when its will becomes objective, in the rule of law and private property. Each individual mind is a concrete whole, but differentiated according to the categorically different relations to the world characterising Psyche, Consciousness and Intelligence.
Let us reflect on the relationship between these three levels of the subjective spirit.
Firstly, on its own, the Psyche constitutes the mental life of a viable and self-contained organism. Consciousness rests on the Psyche but subsumes it as its own substance, also constituting a viable and self-contained organism in its own right. Whereas the Psyche does not ascribe its intuitions to anything, but merely feels, these same intuitions may be taken by consciousness to refer to an object outside of and independent of the subject. The Intelligence may ascribe subjective significance to the objects of its perception. While the Psyche communes with itself, Consciousness rests on the Psyche, and the Intelligence rests on Consciousness.
Secondly, these three processes are not ‘modular’ in the sense of acting externally to one another, executing distinct functions, and interacting causally. Rather they include one another, each being but a special function of the other. But each is a distinct whole, or Gestalt. The Psyche is entirely self-contained and in communion with itself. Consciousness takes its determinations, whether feelings or perceptions of objects in the external world, to be equally objective determinations of consciousness, and in that sense also, Consciousness always refers to itself, absorbed in an objective world. Intelligence moves within a world of universal consciousness, in which language comes to play the central role.
Given the name lion, we need neither the actual vision of the animal, nor its image even: the name alone, if we understand it, is the unimaged simple representation. We think in names (1830/1971 §462).
Thirdly, each sphere of mental life begins from something which arises in the lower sphere, from which in turn, it takes the basic unit of its own sphere. In the Psyche, responses to stimuli are merely feelings, but thanks to the development of habituation and habit, certain feelings stand out in relief, as it were, as that to which the organism is not habituated and these intuitions are taken to be sensations of something else, and sensations become the basic units of consciousness. Intelligence takes what is in sensation as not merely objective but meaningful, and conversely makes its own activity into something objective.
Hegel calls this section of the Encyclopaedia, “Subjective Spirit,” and it is very easy to read the entire work as concerning only nervous activity going on inside the body, albeit responding to objects outside of the mental sphere, whether inside or outside of the body. Hegel was an idealist and so any of his writings can be read in this way. After all, he took a “social formation” to be a “formation of consciousness.” but to take the Subjective Spirit to be about mental activity whilst the Objective Spirit is about social practice, would be a mistake. As Hegel explains:
We called the first form of mind we have to consider subjective mind, because here mind is still in its undeveloped Concept, has not yet made its Concept an object for itself. But in this its subjectivity mind is at the same time objective, has an immediate reality by overcoming which it first becomes for itself, attains a grasp of its Concept, of its subjectivity. We could just as well say that mind is, to begin with, objective and has to become subjective, as conversely that it is first subjective and has to make itself objective. Consequently, we must not regard the difference between subjective and objective as fixed. Even at the beginning, we have to grasp mind not as mere Concept, as something merely subjective, but as Idea, as a unity of subjectivity and objectivity, and any progress from this beginning is a movement away from and beyond the first, simple subjectivity of mind, a progress in the development of its reality or objectivity. This development brings forth a succession of shapes [Gestalten]; these, it is true, must be specified empirically, but in the philosophical treatment cannot remain externally juxtaposed, but must be known as the corresponding expression of a necessary series of specific Concepts, and they are of interest to philosophy only in so far as they express such a series of Concepts. However, at first, we can only assert what the different forms of subjective mind are; their necessity will emerge only from the specific development of subjective mind (1830/1971 §387n).
Thus the objective sphere implicit in the development of subjective mind described is “a succession of shapes [Gestalten], ... the corresponding expression of a necessary series of specific Concepts.” In the Subjective Spirit, Hegel can show the necessity of these Gestalten by tracing the development of the subjective side of the relation. Once Mind has become actual in the form of private property and the state, the development must be traced by showing the necessity of the Gestalten constituting Objective Spirit in their own right.
Each of the forms of life described in the Subjective Spirit is an individual taken together with its environment, engaged in a symbiotic, metabolic relationship. In the beginning, where we are dealing with only the simplest kind of organism, all that is implied is that the environment provides suitable, natural conditions for the individual organism to thrive. But once we reach the stage of intellectual life where the organism regards its determinations as both subjective and objective, then this attitude of the organism to objects is founded on the fact that its environment is on the whole a product of its own activity and that of others of its species. The tools and other artefacts which the Intellect uses are products of the Intellect, but at the same time, they are material things, objective in relation to the individual subject.
It is only possible to attain the level of development of Mind constituted by Intelligence in a situation in which words, tools and other artefacts are already an integral part of the life of the community. So, Subjective Spirit describes the necessary structure and development of forms of life entailing relations between subject and object as described in each case.
Objective Spirit, which is Hegel’s theory of social life and world history, bears this name because its development is marked by forms of Mind which are actualised and made objective, not merely as artefacts, but in the form of institutions. With the right to private property, comes normative principles of right and wrong, a moral code, family property and inheritance, civil society, division of labour, government, a political constitution and the state. Mind is no longer simply something interior, but marches through the world beyond the horizon of activity of the individual, and presenting itself to the individual as “objective spirit.” Prior to Objective Spirit, the organism can only develop within limits imposed by the nature of the organism itself. As Hegel put it:
This world confronting the soul is not something external to it. On the contrary, the totality of relations in which the individual human soul finds itself, constitutes its actual livingness and subjectivity and accordingly has grown together with it just as firmly as ... the leaves grow with the tree (1830/1971 §402n).
Hegel tackles the emergence of mind from Nature as follows. In the simplest organic creature, mind is nothing other than a natural, material process, manifesting the original oneness of mind and matter. But in the development of the Psyche, mind “spontaneously raises itself from a merely implicit being to an explicit existence.” Hegel’s point here being that it is Mind which distinguishes itself from Nature, as its truth, rather than that mind is produced by Nature. The natural process of the self-regulation of an individual organism, the first step towards self-determination, Hegel calls the “Physical Soul,” and he takes this to be as the simplest formation of mind – as much a part of Nature as of Spirit.
There is nothing here of mind acting upon a material body. Mind and body are one and the same process at this point. Mind cannot be said to be a cause in relation to the organism and its behaviour, since the relation of cause and effect presupposes that the cause is external to the effect, which is not the case here. Mind exists only as the activity of an animal organism, inseparably from animal physiology. What constitutes Mind is the process of mediation between the physiology of the animal and its behaviour. Nonetheless, “the separation of the material and immaterial can be explained only on the basis of the original unity of both” (1830/1971 §389n). On the other hand, “the opposition between itself and its Other, so does its Other appear to it as a reality, as external to mind and to itself, as something material” (1830/1971 §389n). Thus the opposition between mind and matter begins at this same point of origin: that which is outside the unity of the self-regulating organism is matter.
Nonetheless, “the soul is still in immediate, undifferentiated unity with its objectivity” (1830/1971 §402n) and in fact the soul has no reference to another, no subject/object distinction in its make-up. It functions so as to regulate the finite organism, but it does so naturally, without distinguishing itself from its environment. It just feels. The mental life of the Psyche is the registration of the neurophysiological system as a single whole. This amounts to the mediation between sentience and behaviour, and its feeling is the totality of these processes of mediation. The Psyche is not confined to the central nervous system, but embraces the entire organism.
The first step towards independence of the Psyche from immediate concern with its feelings is Habit. The acquisition of Habits applies to all grades of mental action. The sense in which Hegel uses the word roughly corresponds to the meaning of ‘operations’ in Activity Theory – actions which by repetition become automatic, freeing the mind from having to pay attention to the execution of simple actions. Thanks to Habit, we can “chew gum and walk at the same time.” Habit can be refined so as to be regarded as an aptitude or skill, being able to do something without thinking.
Habit is further developed by Habituation: One who gets inured against external sensations and who hardens the heart against misfortune or becomes indifferent to the satisfaction of its desires, acquires a strength which consists in a growing independence from its conditions of life, acquiring a distance from the immediacy of its feelings. This indifference pervades a greater and greater portion of increasingly complex activity. It is only the unusual and exceptional which attracts attention, while the normal course of life proceeds more or less automatically by Habit and Habituation. It is not clear whether Hegel understands Habit to be acquired ontogenetically or whether he is demonstrating the logical necessity of Habit. Hegel did not accept the theory of the evolution of species, so although the idea of Habit evoked here rings true as a theory of action, it is not coherent as a theory of the origin of species.
In this way, the organism becomes inured to feelings encountered in the normal course of life, with only those coming from ‘outside’ gaining attention. These feelings take on the significance of a signal of something uncontrolled, something coming from the material world outside the Psyche. This feeling becomes Sensation and constitutes the basic unit of consciousness.
Consciousness is the psychic structure whose smallest unit is a sensation. “Everything is in sensation (feeling): if you will, everything that emerges in conscious intelligence and in reason has its source and origin in sensation” (1830/1971 §400). But whereas the Psyche relates only to its own mental content without drawing any subject/object distinction, Consciousness takes its content as something exclusively objective, with its own independent unity. Consciousness is thus ‘reflected’ being, and rests upon and unfolds from this opposition to its object. Consciousness acts upon its own embodied self while engaged with the objectivity which it distinguishes from its own awareness.
But this does not as such amount to Self-consciousness, because Consciousness cannot stand outside itself and sensuously observe itself as an object. Its sensations come via the depths of the Psyche or from an outer world, but either way, it is something other. Consciousness treats the content of its sensations initially as something immediate and singular, manifested as a stream of qualities. This is the material out of which Consciousness of something is made, and its development is given in detail in the section of the Logic dealing with Being.
From this stream of qualities arises the sensuous perception of things and in general, awareness of the existence of a variety of things which have a unity and a continuity of their own. The highest point attained by the sense perception of Consciousness is the realisation that its objects are an Appearance (whose development is given in detail in the first part of section of the Logic on Reflection). The representational theory of mind makes some sense within the domain of Consciousness. This is what the activity of Consciousness consists in: the working up of sensations into representations of independently existing objects.
It is the discovery that something looks different according to one’s point of view (for example, something looks bigger when viewed from closer up) which opens the way for self-consciousness. But in the beginning, Consciousness is not Self-consciousness. Small children and animals may for example recognise objects and other creatures as having a unity, independence and dynamic of their own, without being aware of their awareness of that objectivity.
There are many grades of Self-consciousness, each corresponding to a wider perception of the subject’s own position, corresponding to successively deeper understandings of the world itself. In this primitive stage of development of Self-consciousness, the subject’s position is defined by the objects of their desire.
Desire is the crucial relation. When consciousness is not only aware of an object, independent of itself, but desires it and wants to consume it, then the decisive step of ascribing subjective meaning to the object has been taken, and the most elementary form of self-consciousness attained. With desire, the organism is not only aware of the object as independent of it, but acts to annul that independence, rendering it a means of satisfying its own desires. Thus the subject apprehends its own subjectivity – its needs – in the form of an object, but cancels its objectivity by consuming it.
Self-consciousness develops through three grades: Appetitive Desire, Self-consciousness Recognitive and Universal Self-consciousness. Appetitive Desire is the first and most elementary form of self-consciousness in which a subject sees an image of themselves in the objects of their desire. The problem that the subject finds with appetitive desire is that the destruction of the object of desire (or simply their acquisition) means that the subject has to begin all over again. The desire is continuously regenerated and satisfaction eludes the subject. However, if a subject can subordinate another subject so as to have that other labour to satisfy their needs then its desire may be satisfied in an enduring way.
Appetitive Desire is transcended by Self-consciousness Recognitive, in which a person sees themself reflected in the eyes of another subject. Thus, the subject’s self-consciousness is based on consciousness of their social status, how they are seen through the eyes of other people. So the subject sees its own needs and their satisfaction manifested in the activity of another subject subordinated to it, as something objective and belonging to perception. This produces a more enduring and secure satisfaction of needs.
But this also proves to be a defective means of the enduring satisfaction of the subject’s needs, and a poor reflection of the subject’s consciousness, since it reflects only the subject’s desire in the form of a subordinate consciousness which lacks self-consciousness, since it cannot recognise itself in the objects of its labour or by recognition of the subject itself. The subordinated consciousness acts to meet the needs of the dominant subject, but at the expense of satisfying its own desire. What the dominant subject requires is recognition by their peers (or betters), something which they cannot gain by exploitation of those below them in social status.
Mutual recognition thus becomes a shared need. Reciprocated recognition is achieved through the emancipation of the subordinate consciousness. The subject’s needs are then satisfied in the most secure and objective way possible, by the action of another free subject. It is this objectivity of subjectivity, or universal self-consciousness, which lays the basis for the next stage of development of Subjective Spirit, Intelligence.
Hegel remarks, after presenting an attenuated version of the ‘master-servant’ dialectic:
To prevent any possible misunderstandings with regard to the standpoint just outlined, we must here remark that the fight for recognition pushed to the extreme here indicated can only occur in the natural state, where men exist only as single, separate individuals; but it is absent in civil society and the State because here the recognition for which the combatants fight already exists. For although the State may originate in violence, it does not rest on it (1830/1971 §432n).
Hegel was not in a position to know that at no point in history had human beings existed as “single, separate individuals,” having evolved from the animal kingdom as social animals. It does apply in the extreme form to relations between cultural groups, between nations for example, or new social movements. The conditions for the emergence of a master-servant dialectic are (1) there is no means of mediation of interactions between subjects, and (2) one subject can meet the desire of the other but has no means of exacting recognition.
It should be noted however that recognitive self-consciousness is attained without any call for language or signs, in fact without any call for intelligence, that is, thinking as such. The relationships between subjects involved in recognitive self-consciousness hinge around subjectivity splitting in two with the activity of one satisfying the desire of the other, rather than the subject satisfying its needs immediately through its own actions.
Nothing up to this point entails language or conceptual thinking. The kind of knowledge which the subject has up to this point is a ‘knowing how’ or skill. This knowing-how underpins intelligence.
The final phase of the Subjective Logic is called alternately “Free Mind,” “Psychology,” or “Spirit” (Geist) or following Winfield, “Intelligence.”
The principle of free mind is to make the merely given element in consciousness into something mental, and conversely to make what is mental into an objectivity (1830/1971 §440n).
The first thing to grasp about Hegel’s concept of Intelligence is that although this grade of mind is the grade in which language develops, there is pre-linguistic Intelligence. Indeed, people have to make do with an Intelligence which is able to create tools, signs and symbols which become part of a universal culture before they can invent the enormously complex apparatus of a spoken language. We now know that evolutionary time would have been required for hominids to acquire the vocal apparatus presupposed by language before a culture of spoken language could be created and understood. Doubtless, during that time, human intelligence developed without the benefit of language ... but Hegel knew nothing of that, relying solely on speculative reasoning to develop his theory of the mind.
Hegel sees three stages in the development of intelligence: Intelligent perception, Representation and Thought.
In Intelligent Perception, the object is taken as a separate entity, and in this grade, it is objectivity which predominates. But at the same time, it is also my perception – I give it my attention, single it out and detach it from its surroundings. Intelligent perception is distinguished from Consciousness by the fact that Intelligent perception does not take the object as so many attributes, but as a totality, a unified whole. It is this capacity to form intuitions into wholes, recognised as having a unity of their own, which creates the conditions for the further development of Intelligence.
In Representation, the second grade of the Intellect, the subject not only perceives the object, but creates a representation of the object which persists even when the object is no longer in the field of perception. The development of Representation hinges around the development of forms of what Hegel calls recollection, imagination and memory, through which the means of forming concepts are created. For Hegel, Representation includes both the mental process of memorising, and the practical creation of artefacts. In general, Hegel uses all these terms quite idiosyncratically, and at the time, the words did not exist for the concepts he was producing.
In Recollection, the first stage of Representation, there is an involuntary calling up of content which is already ours, the same content as is in intuition. In this way the intuition receives its confirmation in my representation and my representation is verified by intuition. Thus the content is not only intuitively perceived, but is posited as mine in the form of an image. The second stage of Representation is Imagination, in which what is universal in the image is brought out by thinking and the active creation of the object. The unity of subject and object then is not immediate, but is rather a restored unity, in which “the intuitively perceived external content is subjugated to the mentally represented content which has been raised to universality” (1830/1971 §451n). Thus the mentally represented content is made a sign of the object and thereby represented as an ideal. The third stage of Representation Hegel calls Memory, in which the sign is taken to be the object, not something inward but rather an ideal which exists as object, and “in this way a unity of subjectivity and objectivity is produced which forms the transition to thought as such” (1830/1971 §451n).
Since this section is so crucial to our subject matter, it is worthwhile sketching in a little more detail how Hegel analyses these two processes of Imagination and Memory, which bring us to conceptual thought as such.
Imagination is based on the capacity to recall images voluntarily. Associative Imagination then recalls images in response to other images – something which happened in the same place, or the same person is involved, or something evoking a similar emotion, etc. – thus voluntarily connecting up images in a myriad of ways depending on personal experience, and constructing an elaborate network of associations around the reproduced images. The association of images is not, according to Hegel, based on similarity, but on all kinds of practical associations. In this way the image is raised to a general idea or representation of a host of associated events or circumstances. The third stage of Imagination, then, is Creative Imagination, which entails the positing of a general idea by singling out a particular aspect of an image which acts as a pictorial sign or symbol for the network of associated ideas, and lays the basis for transition to Memory.
Hegel sees this phase of Creative Imagination as the phase in the development of mind where all kinds of general ideas are formed around images which play the role of pictorial symbols. Imagination, in transition to Memory, transforms these symbols into (non-pictorial) signs of various kinds, including the creation of monuments, works of art and poetry.
The functions of Memory, then, include the creation of signs in the material life of the community, including spoken language. Words signify forms of practical activity, the genus of something, abstractions like number, and the greatest variety of ideas which creative intelligence can form.
Hegel sees memory as developing from Retentive Memory, through Reproductive Memory to Mechanical Memory. The material with which Retentive Memory has to work is the signs produced by Creative Imagination, and words in particular, making a synthesis of the word as an intuition itself together with the connotations of the sign or word, welding them into a universal.
Reproductive Memory involves the reproduction not of the images associated with the word, but the words themselves. We think in words, as the signs for concepts, and the material existence of the words is essential for our thoughts, but is not the content of our thought. The final stage of Memory Hegel calls “Mechanical Memory.” Mechanical Memory involves severing the roots of the meaning of words in intuitive images, so that “the distinction between meaning and word is abolished” (1830/1971 §463). Thus is created a universe of words which “does not need to go outside of itself for existence” (1830/1971 §464). This universe of words which refer only to other words is the world in which Thinking operates.
A number of points need to be made about thinking. Firstly, all thoughts are generalisations. The relation of thinking to lived experience and perception is mediated by the psyche and consciousness, in which forms of representation of individual entities may be said to be formed. But in thinking we think only universals; universals come to the individual through particularisation. So the ancient problem of how it is possible to think universals is misplaced. We think in universals, so the challenge is rather how we come to think of individuals.
Secondly, although it is signs which are the bearers of the universal in our thinking – “We think in words,” he says – and whenever we think, the thought is embodied in a sign or symbol, nonetheless, the thought is not the sign or symbol, but rather it is at work through the sign or symbol. Thinking expresses itself in the use of a sign, and can only be discussed in terms of those signs. So this means that in thinking and talking we do not call upon sensuous images of the things we are thinking about. The things we represent exist for us in the names themselves. We have no need to call up the images we have of things, and indeed, it would be impossible to think or talk if we had to continuously call up the images of things. The signs themselves, the representations before the mind, are inconsequential. What really counts is what we do with the symbols. The activity actually operating on the symbols – for which the symbols are but “pieces in a game” – is thinking. An experienced chess player can play on paper or with pieces, but some familiar representation of the concepts is required.
Thirdly, although we think in universals and thinking has no way of directly representing an individual entity, Consciousness does make representations of the sensory field and these representations are constantly at work ‘underneath’ our thought, so to speak.
With Thinking, this phase of development of mind is complete. But Intelligence is the unity of Theory and Practice, so to outline the final phases of Subjective Spirit, I will indicate the development of Will and the relation of Will and Intelligence.
It is only with the development of thought that it is possible to speak of free will. Hegel says:
Intelligence ... recognizes its inwardness as objectivity. Conversely, will at the start of its self-objectification is still burdened with the form of subjectivity. But here, in the sphere of subjective mind, we have only to pursue this externalization to the point where volitional intelligence becomes objective mind, that is, to the point where the product of will ceases to be merely enjoyment and starts to become deed and action (1830/1971 §469).
That is, up to this stage in the development of subjective mind, the activity of the organism is directed solely at the satisfaction of immediate needs. But with an intelligent will, people collectively create ideals in the form of institutions and means of production which alter the whole dynamic of development. But the free will is still burdened with the form of individuality.
Free will is in the first place immediate, still subject to affections which act upon the mind. In the first place, these are what the individual finds agreeable or disagreeable. In the second place, the will is subject to more complex feelings such as hope, anguish, fear, etc., derived from intuition or representation. But thirdly, these feelings are joined by those derived from notions of right, ethics, morality, religion, and so on which originate in thought. The net result of these affections is Practical Feeling.
The Will then finds itself driven in a number of possibly conflicting directions, which is resolved by making a Choice to act on this or that feeling, possibly at the expense of other feelings and the Impulse to act.
But the act must be judged according to the universal inasmuch as the choice made has to be assessed in the light of the totality of outcomes, overall. Hegel says, “it is the subjective feeling and good pleasure which must have the casting vote as to where happiness is to be placed” (1830/1971 §479). In this way people may choose to do what is not agreeable and act not in accord with any feeling they have as an individual, being determined intelligently and freely.
With the unity of Theoretical and Practical Mind, we have completed the achievement of Free Mind, or Mind which is actual. Further development is determined by the logic of Objective Spirit, that is, of the free will of many individuals in a community in which people have rights.
In Hegel’s view, the self is a Concept, a Concept of itself. The genesis of the Self culminates in the emergence of universal self-consciousness associated with the use of concepts by Intelligent individuals. The Self as a concrete concept is the same form of activity as the concrete universal concepts which, as I have already said, constitute the units of a formation of consciousness. A concept is therefore not something which we perceive but the activity which we are. Objective concepts are not so much perceived or understood, but realised by the Self. The Self is Pure Activity. Our internal system of signs is governed by the same rule system as the world around us. Our thinking is an instantiation of this system. Our ability to think true thoughts about the world is based on the fact that we instantiate the same rule system that governs the world. Concrete universal concepts are part of a system of self-realising concepts, of which each one of us is a part.
Like Freud in his day, and the cognitivists in ours, Hegel has given us a speculative structure of the individual human mind which we should have no reason to believe is replicated in neurophysiology. But Hegel’s structure offers a fresh insight into the relation between the emotions and cognitive functions, and an ingenious resolution of the problem of the relation between physiological nature and conscious awareness, sensation and thinking. Of particular importance for the psychology of concepts is Hegel’s claim that thought as such is independent of the sensory images in consciousness: we think in words. Hegel’s tripartite structure of Psyche, Consciousness and Intelligence offers a rich field for investigation of concept formation.
By the time he died in 1831, Hegel had resolved all the methodological problems in the science of concepts. He had developed a system of concepts which spanned the objective and subjective realms and a critical logic which allowed us to think in terms of processes rather than tick-boxes. Hegel was one of the last great encyclopaedic thinkers whose system of philosophy spanned all the sciences of the time, integrating them into a single whole. But this magnificent achievement became untenable as the special sciences began to mobilise the efforts of countless researchers, generating discoveries and problems which massively overstretched efforts to integrate the sciences into a single, logically coherent system.
This created a real problem, a problem which could not be solved by philosophy alone. The further development of science necessitated departure from the holistic conceptions of the philosophers in order to pursue the special problems arising in every aspect of human life. How could positive, experimental science be pursued without abandoning the gains of encyclopaedic philosophy? This problem took almost a century after the death of Hegel to resolve, and in fact, remains today the major barrier to the development of human culture. Before we can return to the problem of the nature of concepts, we must follow the real struggle to resolve the mutual alienation between analytical science and holistic philosophy. Only at the end of this process can we return to the problem of concepts on a sound basis.