In Hegel's hands, psychology, as a philosophical science, becomes ‘a philosophy of mind sui generis’ (xi) with a particular focus on ‘the living activity of spirit’ (xii). This brief description gives a glimpse of the complexity and conceptual stratification of Hegel's treatment of psychology. This complexity is rooted in his notion of Geist and may be one of the reasons why this part of Hegel's system—which concludes the Encyclopaedia section dedicated to the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit—has been largely unexplored until fairly recently. Susanne Herrmann-Sinai and Lucia Ziglioli aim to correct this shortcoming with their collection Hegel's Philosophical Psychology.
The edited volume has two principal goals. 1) It seeks to explain the ways in which Hegel's psychology is used to unfold key aspects of his complex conception of Geist. In this particular respect, psychology is thereby presented as a pivotal part of Hegel's system: it allows us to understand the systematic connection between the Logic and the Realphilosophie. Hegel's psychology also provides ‘the essential link between the self-conscious spirit […] and a manifestation of spirit in social practices and the institutions of a just state’ (xiv), where the underlying theme is the progressive realization of freedom. 2) It seeks to emphasize the continued relevance of Hegel's psychology for contemporary systematic discussions of mind and subjectivity, not least because Hegel's psychology, crucially, contains discursive resources and strategies that can help rearticulate contemporary problems concerning, for instance, the constitution of perceptual experience, the nature of intentional action, free will, epistemological realism and cognitivism, the emergence of mind and the origin of language.
The volume comprises fourteen contributions and is divided into four parts. Part I explores Hegel's psychology within the context of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. It examines both psychology's historical background and its systematic sense in the broader framework of the Philosophy of Spirit. Parts II and III follow thematically through the subsections of Hegel's psychology, respectively analysing theoretical, practical and free spirit. The last part of the volume discusses Hegel's challenges to contemporary debates in epistemology and philosophy of mind.
The book begins with a chapter by Michael J. Inwood. Referring to the Phenomenology of 1807 and to the Encyclopaedia, Inwood reviews Hegel's arguments against physiognomy and phrenology. He argues that Hegel's criticisms do not affect ‘phrenology's remote descendant, neuropsychology’ (17). Inwood further outlines and questions Hegel's alternative, according to which ‘a man's actuality is his deed’ (12) and therefore persons’ intentions are unimportant once we know their actions.
Angelica Nuzzo's contribution investigates the connections between ‘spirit’ as the specific thematic object of psychology and its broader sense as self-produced and self-aware actuality constituting the general content of philosophy. For this purpose, Nuzzo reconstructs psychology's systematic role within the Philosophy of Spirit by recognizing a unique link between Hegel's idea of a dialectical-speculative ‘philosophia prima as a philosophy of spirit’ (21) and the development of a methodologically innovative and tradition-breaking psychology. For Nuzzo, Hegel's psychology differs from competing accounts, because it places the very notion of spirit in the conception of subjectivity as articulated in the Subjective Logic. Against this backdrop, Nuzzo examines how Hegel delineates the general concept of spirit and its narrower psychological sense as the truth of ‘the anthropological soul and the phenomenological consciousness’ (22). She concludes by arguing that Hegel's psychology provides the ‘underlying basis’ for ‘spiritual subjectivity of both Objective and Absolute Spirit’ (22), while, conversely, being rendered more concrete by those further developments.
In the final chapter of Part I, Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer presents Hegel's psychology as a ‘logical geography of our talk and knowledge about the human spirit’ (37). Specifically, Hegel is deemed to investigate the conditions of possibility of intelligent performance ‘as a development in the world and out of nature’ (40). On the one hand, for Stekeler-Weithofer, Hegel describes the attainment of somatic habits as partly enabling the repetition of complex actions at will. On the other, Hegel is said to understand such acts as intersubjectively constituted performances: any performance actualizes itself in a complex system of human relations and social practices and institutions, which serve as the normative backdrop and developmental conditions for the ‘constitution of a real person with real self-consciousness’ (48).
Part II focuses on ‘Theoretical Spirit’. It begins with a chapter by Stephen Houlgate, picking up on a discussion with John McDowell since 2006. Houlgate is interested in the difference between Hegel's account of perceptual experience and McDowell's. Houlgate argues that, for Hegel, conceptual capacities are directly operative in receptivity: ‘no sensory content is received without being received, or rather taken up, into consciousness’ (66). Conceptualization plays an active role in receptivity in the sense that it bestows ‘objectivity on sensory content that otherwise lacks it’ (66). For McDowell, instead, conceptual capacities are passively dragged into the operation of receptivity. Replying to McDowell's previous criticism, Houlgate further argues that his Hegel does not fall into subjective idealism, as McDowell affirms. In this regard, the author exposes why and how by assigning objectivity to sensory content thought ‘understands what we see to be the object it is’ (70).
Elisa Magrì's chapter focuses on Hegel's treatment of habit in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. While Hegel's anthropology is concerned with ‘habituality as the second nature of the embodied self’ (75), his psychology develops a more active form of habituality as memory that, by transforming intuitions into signs, includes learning and enables thinking. A special emphasis is put on the ambiguous character of habit: while allowing subjectivity ‘to set itself free as a thinking subject’ (76), it could also lead to establishing unaware automations that undermine the self and make agency irrelevant. Such an ambiguity requires investigating the role and limits of habituality. What drives Magrì's analysis is the question as to whether there is any special sense in which freedom can develop outside of habit. Her answer is that habit and memory promote the realization of a ‘specific sort of freedom, i.e., the freedom of thought as such’ (76), but are not responsible for conscious agency and choice.
Richard D. Winfield focuses his attention on current trends in philosophy of mind concerning the origin and learning of language. According to Winfield, contemporary approaches rely on three dogmas: ‘mind-body dualism’, the ‘identification of mind with consciousness’, and the ‘discursive character of all consciousness’ (94). This dependence prevents us from seeing how individuals create language and learn to communicate within existing linguistic contexts prior to being self-conscious and competent speakers. Winfield claims that Hegel's account of intelligence, as a trajectory from intuitions, via representations, to concepts and words (signs), offers insightful instruments to explicate language development as an incremental process intertwining (i) thought's freedom, (ii) grammar's generative character, and (iii) linguistic communities sharing intersubjective recognized meanings. In this way, Hegel complements achievements by Chomsky, Davidson and Vygotsky.
In her chapter, Lucia Ziglioli illustrates what she takes to be the novelty of Hegel's perspective on cognition in his psychology: he overcomes naïve realism, scepticism, and subjective idealism via an account of intelligence that sees representation as mediating between the givenness of intuition and active conceptualization. Ziglioli focuses on a tripartite cognitive role of representation, namely ‘the spiritualisation, universalisation, and objectification of the content of knowledge’ (109). She further contends that Hegel succeeds in sidestepping a formalistic notion of thought as he integrates ‘historical, cultural factors of social praxis in the development of cognition’ (113).
Part III is dedicated to ‘Practical and Free Spirit’ and starts with Susanne Herrmann-Sinai's chapter. Herrmann-Sinai questions the divide between causalist and expressivist theories, which shapes contemporary interpretations of Hegel's philosophy of action. She contrasts well-known passages from the Philosophy of Right with Hegel's treatment of intentional action in ‘Practical Spirit’. Herrmann-Sinai argues that Hegel, in ‘Practical Spirit’, is dealing with subjective intentional action from the first-personal perspective. Therefore, law-realizing intentionality is not at stake here: the subject's activity is not yet concerned with morality, and therefore with deeds that could lead to possible unintended consequences. Instead, subjective intentionality is end-pursuing: it corresponds to an agent's ‘practical representation of ends that serve as the causa finalis of its activity’ in a process of ‘teleological self-determination’ (128). On this basis, the social normativity of subjective action is not legal but psychological.
Dirk Stederoth's chapter emphasizes the decisive (but hitherto underexplored) contribution of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit to making sense of Hegel's conception of freedom. He explains that the section on practical mind exposes a stage theory of will, which also allows to differentiate corresponding degrees of freedom in terms of the actualization of the mind's contents. They range from impulses and inclinations to contents that reason generates from within itself, independently of external circumstances (164). Stederoth argues that Hegel's strategy provides meaningful tools for overcoming contemporary dualistic positions about free will, which either admit it en bloc or exclude it. Furthermore, in juridical contexts concerning individual responsibility, Hegel's insights can also help systematize an account of freedom's gradation, while accommodating contemporary talk of degrees of freedom.
The desideratum of Sebastian Stein's chapter is a unifying account of rationality that is able to integrate cognizing reality and practically positing reality. Stein's point is that on Hegel's account neither way is prior to the other: on the contrary, ‘the identity and the difference of subject and object’ which willing and cognition respectively express ‘are logically simultaneous’ (171). Such logical simultaneity is conveyed in the category of the ‘free mind’. By analysing Hegel's notions of ‘cognizing’, ‘willing’ and ‘free mind’, Stein also aims to refute Buterin's thesis that Hegel, like Fichte, priorities praxis over theory. Stein concludes that Hegel's account of finite agency overcomes the theoretical difficulties of his predecessors because it is grounded on Hegel's speculative (as opposed to reflective) method.
Part IV delves into the challenge of Hegel's philosophical psychology. Kenneth R. Westphal, in his contribution, claims that meaningful links between the Science of Logic, the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and the Philosophy of Nature make Hegel's epistemological realism explicit: ‘cognitive activity on our part is consistent with realism about the objects of human knowledge’ (193). By also taking the Berlin lectures on Logic and on Philosophy of Spirit into account, Westphal investigates how Hegel critically develops Kant's cognitive psychology and articulates a conception of Intelligenz based on four central aspects: 1) human cognition is active and genuinely relates to actually existing objects; 2) Denkbestimmungen, namely structuring objects and events can only be captured by intelligence (consciousness by itself is not enough); 3) intelligence achieves objective knowledge by correctly recognizing objects’ features; and 4) natural sciences are essential to grasping the Denkbestimmungen. On Westphal's account, these explications make sense of Hegel's talk of a concept's realization: ‘to ‘realize’ a concept is to demonstrate that an extant object corresponding to it can be located and identified by us’ (191).
Willem A. deVries discusses Hegel's conception of space and time. While taking up the Kantian view that they are subjective forms of intuition, Hegel dismisses transcendental idealism by understanding them as forms of material objects as well. deVries notes that what makes Hegel's position interesting is his complex account of how space and time are present in subjective experience: Hegel distinguishes various levels of sensibility, that are informed by space and time in different modalities. Accordingly, deVries analyses Hegel's treatment of space and time in intuition, sensation and feeling, while also contrasting his view with those of Newton, Leibniz and Kant. deVries argues that Hegel's account, crucially, involves his Philosophy of Nature and makes ‘significant strides towards an understanding of the mind over the work of his predecessors’ because it takes ‘our continuity with other biological entities seriously’ (225). This is one of the ways in which ‘Hegel's naturalistic “moment”’ (226) enriches his explanation of spirit.
Luca Corti contrasts contemporary conceptualist and non-conceptualist approaches to perceptual experience. With reference to Wilfrid Sellars and McDowell, he lays out how Hegel has been presented as championing conceptualism. Corti further claims that interpreting Hegel as either conceptualist or non-conceptualist in regard to perceptual experience significantly depends on how his method in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit is construed. Hence, Corti distinguishes between what he calls ‘descriptive’ and ‘reconstructive’ approaches. The descriptive view sees Hegel's account of our cognitive capacities as based on their separability, additivity and self-standing instantiability, understood as the possibility to operate in isolation from other faculties. Such a position leads to the non-conceptualist thesis that there is ‘a component of experience prior to any linguistically articulated conceptualisation of it’ (237). By contrast, the reconstructive, conceptualist view sees Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit as ‘a global retrospective reconstruction of the conditions for a cognitively contentful experience’ (239) that progressively articulates more and more appropriate cognitive structures in which geistig activities cannot be separated.
The volume ends with Louise E. Braddock's chapter. Braddock diagnoses two problems: (a) the Hegelian thesis that mind is self-making; and (b) the Hegelian identification of ‘the mind of the infant and the mind in its infancy’ (256). Both have been misinterpreted and incorporated into psychoanalytic developmental theory (PDT)—first by Freud, and most notably in more recent years by Richard Wollheim. PDT conceives the mind as developing ‘its subjecthood along a trajectory from an origin that is infantile, primitive and archaic’ (252). PDT also understands adults’ pathologies as a regression to that archaic phase. After providing a critique of PDT, Braddock argues that the underlying goal of psychoanalysis—namely, the liberation of the subject and the realization of its freedom to create—can be best illuminated by retrieving the proper sense of the archaic within the Hegelian dialectical progression of the mind exposed in his philosophical psychology. Here we find the mind's ‘concept of itself as archaic in containing the end, and the means, of its development towards freedom’ (264).
Overall, this collection makes an excellent contribution not only to the interpretation of Hegel's Encyclopaedia section on psychology, but also to the construal of Hegel's philosophy as a whole. The volume's first principal goal is successfully met: the chapters shed light on decisive and intersecting questions, such as Hegel's overall conception of freedom, the formation and self-affirmation of subjectivity, his account of action, the relation between representations and concepts, and the complex articulation of Hegel's notion of Geist.
As for the volume's second principal goal, the choice of contemporary issues taken into consideration in Part IV might have been better motivated by emphasizing why Hegel's philosophical psychology is especially useful to tackle those questions. The reader might have the impression that this last section partially lacks the unity and coherence that were present in the three preceding parts, and that there may be need for some concluding remarks integrating the chapters’ individual achievements into a wider, more structured picture.
The book, however, remains a praiseworthy—and successful—attempt to bring Hegel into a lively dialogue with contemporary philosophy on several fronts.
