Description
Book SynopsisThis book provides a critical analysis of Hegel's Anthropology, a long-neglected treatise dedicated to the psyche, or soul, that bridges Hegel's philosophy of organic nature with his philosophy of subjective spirit. Allegra de Laurentiis recuperates this overlooked text, guiding readers through its essential arguments and ideas. She shows how Hegel conceives of the sublation of natural motion, first into animal sentience and then into the felt presentiment of selfhood, all the way to the threshold of self-reflexive thinking. She discusses the Anthropology in the context of Hegel's mature system of philosophy (the Encyclopaedia) while also exposing some of the scientific and philosophical sources of his conceptions of unconscious states, psychosomatism, mental pathologies, skill formation, memorization, bodily habituation, and the self-conditioning capacities of our species. This treatise on the becoming of anthropos, she argues, displays the power and limitations of Hegel's idealisti
Table of Contents
- Abbreviations
- Preface
- Introduction: Spirit’s Humble Beginnings
- 1. On the character of Hegel’s text
- 2. Text and Context
- Chapter 1. Aristotelian Roots
- 1. On unraveling the sense of psuche
- 2. Hylomorphism
- 3. The real unity of the Cartesian man
- 4. Return to the roots: being-soul
- Chapter 2. Life, or die Weltseele
- 1. Nature exceeds itself
- 2. Goethe’s UrphÄnomen
- 3. Hegel’s Urteil
- 4. Natural spirit
- Chapter 3. False Enigmas and Real Beginnings
- 1. Mind-body conundrums and the meaning of Idealism
- 2. The soul begins as world-soul (kosmos zoon empsuchon)
- Chapter 4. Animal Life, or das tierische Subjekt
- 1. The strange case of the human soul
- 2. One genealogy, many races
- 3. From Enlightenment to Reaction: Johann Blumenbach to James Hunt
- Chapter 5. No Longer Just Animal Life
- 1. The soul of peoples
- 2. Kinship and the individual: disposition, temperament, character
- 3. Kinship and the individual: age, sexuality and the patterns of life
- Chapter 6. Premonitions of Selfhood, or die ahnende Seele
- 1. Organic sensibility and psyche’s sentience
- 2. From sentience to self-feeling: a matrix for the ego
- 3. The monadic soul: on dreaming, fetal life and hypnosis
- Chapter 7. Disorders
- 1. Healthy and diseased schisms of the soul
- 2. Leading a twofold life: on double genii and bipolar magnets
- 3. Out-of-joint times and inner derangement
- Conclusion. Inhabiting the World, or die Gewohnheit
- 1. Spirit builds itself a home
- 2. On divine sparks, unnatural freedom, and other human matters
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
