Hegel and Mind provides a valuable contribution to one of the English speaking world’s most neglected aspects of Hegel’s philosophy: his theory of mind. Winfield points out how Hegel’s investigation of Subjective Spirit in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences has been ‘ignored almost as much in the vast literature on Hegel as in contemporary philosophy of mind’ (xi). Great attention has instead been given to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, in which Hegel develops a critique of different epistemological approaches but does not yet provide a positive account of mind. By investigating Hegel’s account of mind in his Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, in the section on Psychology in particular, Winfield aims to provide an alternative approach to the most arduous problems of philosophical psychology.

There are two main polemical targets of this book. The first is the modern tendency to treat ‘mind as an epistemological foundation’ (x), so that knowledge is determined by the mental or psychological conditions of mind. Winfield rightly insists on the importance of distinguishing a theory of truth from a theory of mind, for otherwise we would fall into the vicious circle of grounding truth on a theory of mind which also needs to be justified. By separating his logic from his philosophical psychology, Hegel instead has shown how this circle can be avoided. In this way, the onto-logical presentation of truth is provided by the movement of pure logical thought, whereas the philosophy of mind investigates how the finite, embodied subject actually achieves knowledge of something.

The second target of Winfield’s investigation is the conflation of mind and consciousness typical of many contemporary theories of mind. One of the main problems with this approach is the preclusion of any pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic consciousness, which also makes the progressive acquisition of thought and language by the subject inexplicable. These main polemical targets are addressed throughout the work.

The book is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter examines how Hegel’s account of mind, which includes a pre-conscious psyche and a pre-linguistic consciousness, challenges the modern understanding of mind. Winfield remarks how for many contemporary philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, Sellars, Davidson and their followers, ‘self-knowledge, knowledge of objects, and knowledge of others are inseparably connected’ (1). But what, according to Winfield, makes this view problematic is the understanding of the linguistic conditions of meaning as conditions of truth, so that a subject cannot be conscious of its own self or of an object without already disposing of propositions and concepts. This not only makes knowledge dependent on the contingency of linguistic interaction, but also makes it difficult to justify any kind of consciousness or self-consciousness in animals or in children who have not, or not yet, developed linguistic capacities.

Hegel’s approach to the mind is different. He maintains that linguistic, rational intelligence presupposes a pre-conscious psyche and a pre-linguistic consciousness. As Winfield rightly shows, Hegel conceives of psyche, consciousness and intelligence as different stages of the development of mind, which allow for different kinds of mental activities, some of which humans have in common with certain animals. Every stage of mind thus represents a different degree of self-relation and of relation to the other. If we take this progression seriously, as Winfield invites us to do, we are able to explain the possibility of mental activities such as perception, understanding, desire and recognition that involve neither concepts nor discursive intelligence and that are thus available also to dumb animals and children.

Another significant consequence of Hegel’s account of mind according to Winfield is the possibility of overcoming mind–body dualism. The author explains in Chapter 2 how Hegel’s notion of a self-developing embodied mind avoids the problems implied by some other significant attempts to solve the mind–body issue, such as Aristotelianism, Spinozism, materialism and, in recent times, Searle’s proposal. For Hegel, Winfield writes, ‘mind does not act upon the body as cause of effects, but rather acts upon itself as an embodied living subjectivity’ (37). Because mind is embodied, its relation to corporeality is not to be understood as a relation to something external, but rather as a ‘self-development or cultivation’ of mind (39). Hegel thus presents an account of mind that does not oppose itself to the body, but emerges from the body and from its natural determinacy. Among the significant consequences of this notion of a self-developing, embodied mind, Winfield highlights its relevance for Hegel’s theory of action and ethics. Acting is not the result of an immaterial, external causation by mind upon a separated body, but is a process that the embodied mind undergoes by informing a content with its will.

Further related to the mind–body problem is the issue of the distinctive character of mind and its irreducibility to a machine (Chapter 3). Here the discussion goes beyond Hegel’s text, broadening to the problem of the features of mind’s activity and to the limits of artificial intelligence. Through a discussion of Hegel’s investigation of mechanism, chemism, life and teleology in the ‘Doctrine of the Concept’ of the Science of Logic, Winfield seeks to demonstrate that Hegel provides a decisive argument against the reduction of mind to machines. Since every machine, as externally determined in every operation it performs, lacks self-activity, machines cannot have feelings, consciousness and ultimately cannot think.

In Chapter 4 Winfield moves to the complicated issue of self-consciousness and intersubjectivity. At first, he discusses the necessity of the awareness of one’s own body in order to develop self-consciousness. But then the question arises: ‘how is consciousness self-aware, given its concrete being in the world?’ (67). In the recent debate, after Sellars and Davidson, the view that self-consciousness is intrinsically connected to the consciousness of objects and the consciousness of other selves has become very popular. Winfield observes how this view is usually accompanied by a sort of epistemological foundationalism, according to which the linguistic conditions of meaning are conditions of truth, so that there is no consciousness without self-consciousness and linguistic capacity. It is this simultaneity that Winfield rejects: self-consciousness does not necessarily require linguistic intelligence. A confirmation of the possibility of a pre-linguistic self-consciousness is in his opinion provided by Hegel’s theory of desire, which Winfield understands as ‘the minimal form of self-consciousness’ (70). The dynamic of desire allows indeed for an interaction with an object and, also, with another consciousness without requiring one to engage in a conceptual or linguistic relationship with it. In his view, even animals and children in the pre-linguistic phase have desires.

After this discussion of pre-linguistic consciousness, Winfield’s inquiry more closely approaches Hegel’s notion of intelligence in his philosophical Psychology (Chapters 5 and 6). The first concern of the author is to clarify what the actual object of Hegel’s psychology is. While Hegel’s investigation is not about the truth conditions of thought, a philosophical psychology can nevertheless add to the logical investigation of thought ‘an account of how real rational agents can think’ (79). According to Winfield, Hegel does not conflate consciousness with conceptual and linguistic thought, as is often done: ‘in stark departure from other modern theorists, Hegel locates the psychological reality of thought and language in intelligence, thereby breaking the mental hegemony of consciousness that has so hobbled the philosophy of mind’ (81).

The investigation then turns to Hegel’s division of intelligence into intuition, representation and thought. Of particular relevance is Hegel’s account of thought as irreducible to representation, to which Winfield dedicates great attention. The limitation of representation lies in the fact that it operates with images, namely, the content given in intuition that intelligence copies and reproduces. Despite the generality that it produces through the association and subsumption of images, representation cannot elaborate concepts. However, representation is able to link its internal content to exterior signs, a process that—the author rightly underlines—is of great importance for the development of language and thought proper. In the unity of sign and meaning preserved by memory, intelligence for the first time finds a content that is both subjective and objective. This identity is essential for the development of thinking, for ‘thought proper no longer has any meaning in the sense of something subjective, something different from its objectivity’ (97). The content of thought is now the object conceptually determined, and concept and objectivity are finally known in their identity. By reconstructing the development of theoretical intelligence from intuition and representation to thinking, Winfield is thus able to show how for Hegel the different stages of intelligence correspond to the progressive liberation of intelligence from the externality of an objectivity initially perceived by mind as given and other from itself.

In the following chapter (Chapter 6) Winfield addresses what is probably the most neglected part of Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit: the second section of Hegel’s Psychology on will as practical intelligence. Why this is the case is difficult to understand, since Hegel’s account of will in the Psychology provides the essential prerequisite to Hegel’s theory of free will, action and the normative lifeworld described in Philosophy of Objective Spirit. Winfield’s inquiry aims to show why, and to which degree, intelligence is necessary for the development of will in general and examines the different dimensions of volition in particular. Winfield demonstrates that if intuition and representation always seem to be necessary for the willing subject to understand how to act in order to satisfy an urge, thought and language are not always required by will. Whereas pre-linguistic intelligence is sufficient for choosing to fulfil an urge, proper rational acting requires linguistic and conceptual intelligence. Hegel’s psychological consideration of will thus provides ‘the volitional prerequisites of rational agency’ (110). Winfield can now address the different stages that Hegel associates with practical intelligence: practical feeling, impulse, choice and happiness. The passage from one stage of will to another might be read as the movement through which the will progressively determines itself. At this point, intelligence is no longer theoretical or practical, but it is free; it is the thinking, free will that finds itself in the object of its willing. By determining itself, subjective spirit achieves its own objectivity, involves the relation to other agents and to universal norms and develops into objective spirit.

The conclusive chapter is devoted to a problem that concerns the representational model of knowing: the problem of foundationalism. The author discusses the strengths and weaknesses of possible ways to escape this problem, including Davidson’s appeal to the sociality of reason, and compares them with Hegel’s approach. Hegel and Davidson, according to Winfield, share the awareness of ‘the basic absurdity of the representational model of knowing, which, by construing cognition as an instrument for accessing independently given objects, creates a gap that can never be coherently bridged’ (130). However, Winfield argues that the alternatives to the representational model of cognition presented by the two philosophers are very different. Davidson, by deriving the objectivity of belief from linguistic communication, makes the conditions of meaning the conditions of truth. Hegel, by contrast, acknowledges the role of language in the development of thinking, but argues that language cannot provide the criteria for discriminating between true and false thoughts, since it enables both. According to Winfield, Hegel’s alternative is based on his non-foundational account of thought. In the Science of Logic, Hegel shows how pure logical thought begins by excluding any given condition and thereby provides justification through its self-development. In this way, Hegel can understand objectivity not as a subject-independent reality, but as ‘a totality determined in and through itself’ (142). According to Winfield, Hegel is thus able ‘to escape the gap that confronts any conditioned knowing when addressing what is putatively objective. … Instead of effecting the correspondence of concept and objectivity by illicitly enlisting some external agency, Hegel purports to show how objectivity’s self-standing totality comes to progressively distinguish within itself a congruent conceptual determination’ (143).

Winfield’s Hegel and Mind—only the second book in English entirely dedicated to Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit after DeVries (Reference DeVries1988)—is part of a series of works devoted to Hegel’s theory of mind (see also Winfield Reference Winfield2011, Reference Winfield2015). The author does not engage in a critical discussion of the state of the psychological investigation and of the philosophical debate about mind at Hegel’s time, something which could have helped us to fully appreciate the originality of Hegel’s account of a ‘philosophical psychology’. On the other hand, the relevance of Winfield’s project is hardly to be underestimated. It provides an invaluable introduction to an important and yet neglected part of Hegel’s philosophy, showing the rich philosophical potential of Hegel’s approach. Winfield is right in stressing the importance of Hegel’s separation of the psychological conditions of thought from the conceptual determinations of truth—an aspect the relevance of which has not always been detected in the scholarly literature. By separating psychology from logic, and meaning from truth, Hegel is indeed able to explain how the embodied mind actually develops thought, without making the objectivity of thought hostage to language or to any other psychological determinations of mind. By showing how this move allows us to rethink some of the most arduous problems in our understanding of mind, Winfield’s book thus provides one of the first systematic attempts to take Hegel’s position seriously as a possible alternative to many common paradigms and assumptions on the human mind.