The relevance of anthropology for Hegel's theory of life and mental activity in general can hardly be underestimated. On Hegel's view, the object of philosophical anthropology, namely the soul or psyche, provides the ontological foundation for the individuation of mental activities, thus for the ascription of mental states to a subject. Furthermore, Hegel regards anthropology as a whole as the study that provides fundamental insights into the nature and development of animal and human life. Over the last decades, Hegel's philosophical Anthropology has received consistent attention in the Anglophone scholarship, sparking a fruitful and productive engagement with the method, sources and ethical implications of Hegel's anthropological inquiry (see, for instance, Thomas Lewis, Freedom and Tradition in Hegel: Reconsidering Anthropology, Ethics, and Religion, 2005; Nicholas Mowad, Meaning and Embodiment: Human Corporeity in Hegel's Anthropology, 2019; Terry Pinkard, Hegel's Naturalism. Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life, 2012; and the essays edited by David S. Stern, Essays on ‘Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit’, 2013).

In this context, Allegra De Laurentiis’ latest monograph, Hegel's Anthropology: Life, Psyche, and Second Nature, provides a nuanced and much needed analysis of Hegel's text, taking into account not only Hegel's claims but also the context in which those claims were originally made. As Hegel's Anthropology represents the first part of the doctrine of subjective spirit in the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, it is often tempting to regard Anthropology as a treatise concerned with the contingent aspects of the development of Geist (involving, among others, the relation between subjectivity and the environment, racial differences, dreaming and mental derangement). In contrast to this, De Laurentiis’ work shows that Hegel's Anthropology plays a key role in Hegel's theory of selfhood, including the relation between self, body, and nature. De Laurentiis’ book is divided into seven chapters that explore the main partitions and concepts of Hegel's Anthropology. Such concepts include the roots of Hegel's notions of ‘soul’ and world-soul (Weltseele); the mind-body problem, the concept of race, processes of character formation and sexuality; the distinction between sentience and sensibility, phenomena of dreaming, genius, and inner derangement, and finally the concept of habit.

As De Laurentiis points out in her ‘Introduction’, referring to Hegel's consistent revisions of his own work as well as to the three editions of the Encyclopedia (1817, 1827, 1830), Hegel's Anthropology ‘underwent and survived all three of author's revisions of his system of philosophy’ (7). For this reason, it is even more interesting that Hegel's Anthropology is neither a classification of human faculties nor a collection of general observations about human nature. Instead, Hegel's Anthropology discusses complex theoretical issues, such as the mind-body unity and the inner teleology of living bodies, treating them as essential premises for the investigation of the species and individual life. De Laurentiis shows that these themes have an important metaphysical background, which—on her view—draws on both Aristotelian metaphysics as well as on Hegel's confrontation with the Cartesian view of the human subject. Pointing especially to Hegel's critique of Descartes in Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy, De Laurentiis notes that, for Hegel, Cartesianism is ‘anything but dualistic’ (22). On the basis of Descartes’ philosophy, it is possible to assert the identity of being and thought that Hegel also seeks to demonstrate through his speculative logic. Yet, on Hegel's account, Descartes could only posit such identity without being able to thematize the dialectical relation between thinking and being. What Descartes missed was an account of the ‘self-relation of spirit in thinking alone’ (23), which arguably refers to the fact that, for Hegel, the self does not only have thoughts but also perceives itself in thinking.

In contrast to the Cartesian approach, De Laurentiis maintains that Aristotelian hylomorphism provides, for Hegel, a way to make intelligible the ontological nature of the embodied self. Most notably, according to De Laurentiis, the notion of hylomorphism captures both the intrinsic unity of matter and form that is distinctive of the soul as a ‘microcosm of the Idea’ (17), and the self-differentiation of the living being through thought. This means that Hegel's hylomorphism of the soul can hardly be understood as a foundational and monolithic reality but rather ‘as consisting of the unceasing, lifelong tension between externality and inwardness. If one of these poles goes missing, the living individual simply ceases to exist’ (25). Ultimately, Hegel grounds the notion of psyche or soul on an anti-dualistic framework that is simultaneously a return to Aristotle's view of the soul via the critique of Cartesian metaphysics.

On the basis of these premises, De Laurentiis illustrates how the notion of ‘form’ in Hegel's Anthropology underlies a morphological account of natural life that shares important elements with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's approach to natural science. As De Laurentiis explains, morphology is primarily a ‘doctrine of the change of forms’ (38). Similarly to Goethe, who was interested in uncovering the original phenomenon from whose division natural phenomena derive, Hegel's philosophy of nature results from the original partition (Ur-teilung, from which Urteil, judgement derives) of the Idea. De Laurentiis does not suggest that the Idea represents a monistic principle that manifests itself through nature, but rather that nature is a totality of ‘lawful movements’ (including motions, transitions and metamorphoses) whose semantic content is made explicit by the concepts that articulate the philosophy of nature. In particular, De Laurentiis draws attention to the fact that spirit represents the truth of nature, because ‘it is always already contained in nature—albeit in a potential, in-concept-only condition’ (44). At the level of Anthropology, nature and spirit are ontologically and metaphysically intertwined, to the point that ‘the soul is at once the last shape (morphe) of nature and the first form (eidos) of spirit’ (112). For De Laurentiis, the fact that nature represents the external existence (or self-estrangement) of the Idea does not entail that nature is the only mode in which the Idea exists, or that the Idea discards its physicality by positing itself as the inward possibility of nature. Rather, De Laurentiis regards the ‘inwardization’ or the inward recollecting (47) of the Idea in the concept as the source of the oppositions that would later emerge in organic, sentient life. Indeed, the lack of identity between the Idea and nature can be connected to the ensemble of potentialities that characterize natural life, including the tensions that are intrinsic to the development of the soul.

In this light, De Laurentiis interprets the world-soul in terms of sentience, namely as the totality of self-moving and self-feeling bodies, across which different forms of bodily self-awareness are possible. This means that the human soul, while immersed in the domain of animal sentience, also exhibits differentiations that occur in the natural history of the human species. In this context, De Laurentiis engages Hegel's account of race from a historical point of view. Without underplaying Hegel's quick and dismissive comments about African culture, De Laurentiis reconstructs the original debate on the origins of the human species in which Hegel's approach to race was situated. Most notably, De Laurentiis brings to light the relevance of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's anthropological analysis, which not only affirmed the dignity and perfectibility of all races, but also established racial differences as ‘neither stable nor created, but rather fluid inner-species variations resulting from geographic segregation, historic migrations, and, last but not least, sexual intercourse’ (91). De Laurentiis convincingly shows that Hegel's concern with the notion of race was as much inspired by a similar interest in the development and variation of the human species rather than in the affirmation of the Caucasian race. This aspect is also reflected by Hegel's interest in the variability and contingency of disposition, temperament, and character, which for Hegel are ‘inescapably bound up with social determinants’ (111). Such dialectic between biological difference and cultural variations is fruitfully employed by the author to also illustrate Hegel's view of desire and sexuality.

De Laurentiis’ reconstruction of the stages that mark the ontological and metaphysical progression of the natural soul culminates in the emergence of egoic awareness through self-feeling. In this case, De Laurentiis argues that Hegel's account of the ego is modelled on the metaphysical view of self as the actualization of natural potentialities. On this view, the soul's capacity for self-feeling emerges as a receptacle of the antagonistic forces, impulses and drives that characterize animal sentience. With regard to this, De Laurentiis provides essential clarifications that contextualize Hegel's response to widely debated issues in the medical and anthropological field of his time, including Philippe Pinel's classification and treatment of mental derangement and Franz Anton Mesmer's conception of individual organisms as magnets. According to De Laurentiis, Hegel embraces the most innovative and forward-looking aspects of such theories, including Pinel's model of rational analysis for the humane treatment of madness as well as the implication of bipolarism from Mesmerism, as bipolarism affects the natural dispositions and acquired traits of the individual (what Hegel calls Genius).

De Laurentiis eventually connects habit (as the culminating moment of the Anthropology) to the Hegelian motto of finding oneself at home in the world. On this view, habit provides the middle ground between the natural spontaneity of animal life and the capacity to regard oneself as a person. This entails that, while habit does not yet coincide with practical freedom, it is however ‘a necessary step toward it’ (187). For De Laurentiis, the actual soul is the soul liberated from the necessity of nature in so far as the ‘I’ is capable of taking her own second nature as the object of her will. Such reflexivity of habit is connected by De Laurentiis to the Stoic aspiration to find oneself at home in the world; that is, to learn to shape the natural and seemingly indifferent world in which one finds herself immersed according to one's practical and moral orientation.

At this level, a number of issues appear necessarily tied to Hegel's methodology, particularly to his commitment to infuse anthropological analysis with metaphysical arguments. On the one hand, it can be argued that Hegel's Anthropology, considered in itself, is necessarily limited because it illustrates the phenomenal qualities and activities of animal and human life without thereby providing the logical justification of their essence. If this is the case, then the metaphysical individuation of the psyche that is developed throughout the Anthropology is eminently descriptive rather than normative, for personhood—as De Laurentiis emphasizes—‘is a product of self-reflective thought’ (98) and not of sentience. This indirectly suggests (in a way that seems compatible to De Laurentiis's analysis) that the human psyche is not to be regarded in an anthropocentric sense as the highest point of the development of the world-soul, but rather, in a humbler sense, as the emergence of one particular form of self-awareness among others.

On the other hand, however, Hegel also privileges the emergence of self-conscious thought over sentience in a way that still positions rational awareness in a state of continuous, potential tension with sentience and sensibility. The worry in this case is that derangement and mental illness, as pointed out earlier, cannot be neatly separated from the social environment. By positioning mental illness in the domain of anthropology, Hegel may suggest that the treatment of mental illness is only partial if it takes the individual as the exclusive locus of pathology. One could argue that it is the task of ethical life to ‘educate’ and train the community to adequately tackle the issues connected to mental derangement. Yet it is neither obvious nor guaranteed that education and training would suffice, hence derangement appears less a disorder of the soul than a perpetual possibility of the psyche that stands in potential tension with self-conscious thought.

By constantly inviting the reader to appreciate not only the richness but also the tensions of Hegel's anthropological horizon, De Laurentiis’ book provides an invaluable resource to re-read and understand Hegel's Anthropology, situating it in its historical and theoretical context, and becoming attuned to the ‘primitive, wild, and bewildering’ instantiations of self-moving and self-feeling life.