36 Hegel Philosophy of Spirit: The Soul

If you wish to understand which logical concept underlies sensation and why sensation, as the source and origin of spiritual consciousness, is still entirely without consciousness and understanding, you are in the right place.

The Determination of Spirit

In the philosophical consideration of Spirit, Spirit is regarded as determining itself in accordance with its concept. Its distinct expressions are only moments of its unification with itself, through which it first becomes actual Spirit.

In its three chief forms, Spirit is distinguished as subjective, objective, and absolute Spirit.

Subjective Spirit, in its natural existence, is still in immediate connection with the organic body. Subjective Spirit differentiates into soul, consciousness, and Spirit — thus as immediate, as mediated, and as self-determining.

As soul, Spirit is the subject matter of Anthropology; as consciousness, the subject matter of Phenomenology; and as Spirit, the subject matter of Psychology.

The Soul

In what follows we will be concerned with the soul. The chapter on the soul is articulated into the natural soul, the feeling soul, and the actual soul.

The soul is the universal immateriality of nature, its simple ideal life. By immateriality is meant the sublated externality and juxtaposition of nature. The soul is the substance in which Spirit particularizes and singularizes itself. The soul is the sleep of Spirit; it is the world-soul, or, as sublated nature and as immediate Spirit, the body

The Natural Soul

The organism, as natural soul, stands in immediate natural determinacy, as mere being. In this first spiritual life no difference has yet been posited. It simply is; every determinate being is still enclosed within the soul.

The natural soul awakens from its self-enclosed natural life and finds within itself the determinations of content of its sleeping nature. Thus it comes into opposition against its inner universality.

Sensation is the external, given determination of content that is at the same time sunk into the universality of the soul and thereby, in its singularity, sublated. Hence in this its other the sensing soul returns to itself and, in the immediate existent which it senses, is with itself.

Sensation is thus that by which something, in its determinacy, maintains itself as universal. What is sensed already undergoes a sublation of its seemingly independent and given determinacy, though this sublation is still entirely superficial.

Sensation is therefore already an activity of Spirit, albeit only in its unconscious and understanding-less individuality. Spirit as such first comes to the fore later in comprehending thinking.

In contrast to sensation, which counts for the soul as its own concrete actuality, thinking consciousness enjoys greater freedom, for it can free itself from a determinate sensation, abstract from it, and is thus no longer determined to be dependent upon sensation.

Consciousness achieves this by raising the content of sensation out of the form of singularity into the form of universality, leaving aside the contingent and holding fast to the essential. In this way what is sensed becomes, in general, a representation.

The content contained in sensation is not yet adequate to Spirit. The contradiction between the two consists in this: Spirit, in and for itself, is universal, truly objective, whereas sensation is something singular, contingent.

The Feeling Soul

As feeling soul it proceeds to scission and appears in a state of illness. Here there prevails the contradiction between the naturalness of the soul, to which it is bound, and the stage at which it is already loosening itself from naturalness.

The Actual Soul

As actual soul, the mutually external universal differences of the soul are taken back into the unity of the single human soul.

Concept Script

Now follows the translation from Reinhold Oberlercher’s book Hegel’s System in Formulas.

An import of sociological foreign symbols from the ideography of the “System of the Social Sciences” consists of the running indices

p communities q individuals r things, deeds, matters

which were employed, according to the following schema, to enrich the expressions for the moments of the concept.

The

body

is, as

natural soul

in immediate natural determinacy, as mere being; as

feeling soul

the individual relation to its being, in which it is abstractly for itself; and as

actual soul

the same incorporated bodily into it.

The Life of Spirit

Spirit lives, in its substance, the natural soul, the

universal planetary life

with the differences of climates, seasons, times of day, and so forth — a natural life which within it partly comes only to somber moods.

The natural soul is thus the sublated universal life of nature, as it were the ideality of the entire array of natural appearances, hence also the world-soul.

The universal planetary life of the natural spirit particularizes itself into the concrete differences of the earth and breaks up into the particular nature-spirits of the geographical parts of the world and into racial differences, which further particularize into the local spirits, into the intelligent and ethical character of peoples.

Furthermore, the soul is individualized into the individual subject. In the soul as

individual

the differences appear as changes and moments of development within it:

The Course of Life

These are the natural course of the stages of life: from the child, Spirit wrapped up within itself; to the youth, whose ideals and imaginings stand in tension with the unideal world at hand; to the man, who acknowledges the objective necessity and rationality of the world already existing; and to the elder, who really executes the transition into the inactivity of blunting habit and, ideally, gains freedom from the limited interests and entanglements of the external present.

Besides the course of the stages of life, there appears for individuals the

sexual relation

as a moment of the real opposition of the individual to itself, which seeks and finds itself in the other and, in the family, attains its spiritual and ethical significance and determination.

Waking and Sleep

The distinguishing of individuality as being-for-itself over against itself as mere being, as an immediate judgment, is

waking and sleep

Waking is the judgment of the individual soul, the distinguishing of itself from its as yet undistinguished universality. All self-conscious and rational activity belongs to wakefulness.

Sleep is the strengthening of this activity, not merely its negative rest, but a return out of the world of determinacies, distractions, and singularities into their universal substance.

The natural immediacy of the soul, as sensation, is interiorized to the body and embodied. Through sensing the soul has reached the point that the universality constitutive of its nature becomes for it in an immediate determinacy.

Waking and sleep are alternating states. In the being-for-itself of the waking soul, being is contained as an ideal moment; thus it finds within itself the determinate contents of its sleeping nature.

Sensation

Sensation is the identity of the waking soul’s being-for-itself within the differentiation and inclusion of the soul as being. The sensing soul interiorizes its outer corporeality and embodies its inwardness.

In sensation, then, through something that stands between it and the other in the sensed content, the soul unites with itself; it reflects itself out of the other back into itself, separates itself from the other, and thereby confirms its identity with itself.

The Feeling and the Actual Soul

The sensing of total substantiality within itself is the

feeling soul

It is individual, excluding natural determinacy, and posits difference within itself; and outside itself it has, as its object, its substance, which is its predicate. It relates itself to substance and has this as feelings, and at the same time as its particular feelings within itself:

self-feeling

Persistence in a particularity of self-feeling is an illness of the feeling soul and thus derangement.

The identity of the inner q or (,) with the outer r or ),( subjected to it is the

actual soul

This externality does not present itself but rather the soul and is its sign. The soul that sets its being in opposition to itself has lost the significance of the soul as the immediacy of Spirit and awakens to the I, to thinking, and to the subject that, in its judgment, excludes from itself the natural totality of its determinations as a world external to it, as an object, and relates itself to it such that in this external world it is immediately reflected into itself.

Thus the subject becomes consciousness.

With this brief summary, let the chapter on the soul conclude. Many thanks for reading, and until next time.