Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit (PSS) is certainly the part of his system that has been mostly neglected in the English speaking literature. When Michael J. Petry’s translation of and commentary on this part of the Encyclopaedia appeared in 1977, the main concern of the editor was to show that Hegel was not indifferent to empirical facts. Indeed, Hegel’s investigations on philosophical anthropology and psychology take into account a wide range of empirical disciplines, including chemistry, biology, and psychopathology. As David S. Stern remarks in his Editor’s Introduction, the PSS engages with both philosophical and scientific works of Hegel’s time, on the one hand, and contemporary science, on the other. Accordingly, the major challenges presented by Hegel’s text concern the relation between science and philosophy as well as the assessment of his sources and references. What Hegel develops—according to Stern—is a critique of contemporary science that goes together with a new account of subjectivity. Yet another relevant problem concerns the method employed by Hegel to investigate the different aspects of subjectivity, including the embodied self, consciousness and cognition.

While in Germany scholars such as Hans Friedrich Fulda and Reiner Wiehl have paid attention to Hegel’s account of knowledge and to his discussions of sensation, feeling and memory, the first English monograph entirely devoted to the PSS was published only in 1988 (deVries 1988).Footnote ¹ Recently, the so-called Hegel Renaissance in the United States has given rise to a renewed interest in Hegel’s PSS, most notably with regard to the issue of social naturalism. Not by chance, most of the essays edited by Stern focus on the relation between spirit and nature as well as on the problems of recognition and social norms. Each chapter discusses selected themes of the PSS from both a historical and analytical point of view.

Angelica Nuzzo opens the book with an articulated argument about the role of the Anthropology as the basis of the entire PSS. Challenging Robert R. Williams’s and Michael Wolff’s positions, Nuzzo argues that the anthropological treatment of spirit frames the general problem of subjectivity. To this end, she devotes special attention to Erdmann’s Nachschrift of the lectures, which draws the anthropological characterization of the subject to the centre of the PSS. On the one hand, Nuzzo shows contra Williams that the Anthropology is significant for the whole PSS a parte ante and not only, teleologically, a parte post. On the other hand, Nuzzo shows, against Wolff, that even after 1817 Hegel does not dissolve the traditional soul–body problem, but rather reformulates it dialectically.

Italo Testa argues that the mind–body problem has a ‘glocal’ meaning. By this, he means that Hegel’s understanding of the mind–body relation not only concerns the transition from nature to spirit but also introduces a broader conception of nature. Highlighting several fundamental aspects inherent in Hegel’s treatment of Anthropology, such as habit and embodiment, he argues that Hegel’s account is in agreement with social naturalism, according to which the notion of second nature includes the social body of shared ethical life and institutions.

Jeffrey Reid inquires scrupulously into the variations occurring between the 1827 and 1830 editions of the Encyclopaedia. He argues that the change in the section heading at §430, from the ‘The Dreaming Soul’ to the ‘Feeling Soul’, has Hegel’s 1794 manuscripts on subjective spirit as its source. Importantly, this particular revision is related to Hegel’s criticism of Schleiermacher’s religion of feeling. Along similar historical lines, Glenn Alexander Magee shows the influence of G. H. Shubert’s theory of animal magnetism on Hegel’s Anthropology, something that was neglected by Petry. According to Magee, Hegel’s study of Anthropology was marked not only by philosophical theories but also by scientists who were not well known even at the time when Hegel wrote.

Jason J. Howard reviews some distinctive features of Hegel’s theory of feeling/emotion (Gefühl). In Howard’s view, emotions are not only partly constitutive of rationality, but they are also fundamental in motivating agency. Howard’s analysis convincingly shows that, for Hegel, emotional life requires habit and unfolds through distinct affective experiences that are equivalent to our understanding of emotions. Following Hegel, one can argue that emotions organise our experience in that they anchor motivation and behaviour. Under the label of emotions, Howard includes practical feelings which concern ‘the practical ought’. He regards such emotions as expressing evaluations and self-assessments established by agents in relation to an objective world. However, he ultimately criticises Hegel’s theory of emotions for being mapped onto physiological processes, thereby accounting only for the lower grade of rational organisation.

Nicholas Mowad’s essay revolves around the relation between sleeping and waking in Hegel’s Anthropology in a way that includes madness. Mowad argues that insanity is a form of awakening in that the universality of the soul is individualised. In this light, madness entails a form of negative appropriation, since the soul identifies itself with the present feelings. In Mowad’s view, the cure for madness must be found in the death of the singular feeling, i.e., in the habituation to corporeity and the consequent ‘mortality’ of contingent feelings. Mario Wenning also focuses on the problem of madness but from a different angle. Like Testa, Wenning defends the claim that a broader conception of nature remains a constitutive background of the dimension of subjectivity in the PSS. In this light, Wenning argues that madness should be understood not as a simple loss of rationality, but rather as a constant possibility, i.e., a possibility of ‘sinking into nature’. Such a claim entails that spirit and nature cannot be opposed to each other. On the contrary, by conceiving of madness as a dimension of the soul, Hegel intended to learn more about sanity. Yet—according to Wenning—Hegel’s view of madness differs from Foucault’s in that for Hegel madness remains a form of pathology.

Simon Lumsden offers an interesting argument to distinguish Hegel’s naturalism from other contemporary versions, such as that of McDowell. Lumsden argues that Hegel’s view of habit challenges the exclusivity of the traditional spirit–nature divide in ways that mostly deal with unconscious processes of self-positing and self-identity. In Lumsden’s view, the mind–world divide outlined by Hegel’s Anthropology is in line with theories of sense-making practices defended by, among others, Merleau-Ponty and Dewey, rather than with the normative accounts defended by Brandom and Korsgaard. For Hegel, the norms of communal life are authorised and legitimated by a shared horizon of traditions and customs. Thus, their rationality is not self-consciously ascribed, as is held by contemporary accounts of naturalism.

Turning to the often-neglected Phenomenology, Marina F. Bykova argues that Hegel’s treatment of self-consciousness in the PSS provides an account of intersubjectivity in terms of the ‘struggle for recognition’. According to Bykova, Hegel defends a normative account of mutual recognition that moves from the theoretical–epistemological account of the 1807 Phenomenology to a ‘life-world’ sense of recognition. Robert R. Williams also focuses on the problem of recognition in the Phenomenology. He challenges Pippin’s interpretation of the relationship between self and other based on the interiorisation of pre-established community practices. According to Williams, Hegel offers a theory of mediated autonomy that grounds practices and institutions instead of presupposing them. In this sense, autonomous freedom is not given but achieved through progressive layers of reciprocal, correlative relationships.

Jere O’Neill Surber examines the relationship between language and thought in the Psychology section of the PSS. According to Surber, Hegel departs from Kant’s dismissive view of language, but his account does not rest on Herder’s presuppositions either. Surber highlights what he calls a ‘dynamic parallel discourse’ in Hegel’s Psychology. This pattern is characterised by the correlation between faculties (intuition, recollection, imagination, memory and thought) and their ‘significational counterparts’ (images, representations, signs, names, concepts). In this scheme, each counterpart prepares the transition to a higher faculty, as the former becomes the content that is internalised by the latter. Although Hegel’s Psychology is a reply not only to Kant and Fichte but also to Herder’s Metacritique, Surber argues that Hegel raises significant unresolved issues when it comes to the relation between logic and language.

Richard Dien Winfield defends the unity of theoretical and practical intelligence in light of his account of the self-determining activity of spirit. The author focuses on the section of the PSS on ‘Practical Intelligence’, exploring the layers that engender free spirit, i.e., practical feelings, impulses and happiness. Just as theoretical intelligence is self-determining, likewise practical intelligence aims at realising its own concept and to achieve an objectivity of its own.

Philip T. Grier concludes the survey of the PSS with an argument for the relation between mind and nature. According to Grier, Hegel’s paradigm is a comprehensive one in that it offers two interrelated and reciprocally determining accounts: (1) an account of the constitution of mind from the standpoint of nature, and (2) an account of the constitution of nature from the standpoint of mind. Accordingly, Grier argues that Hegel’s theory of mind rules out the possibility of a dualism between mind and body.

To be sure, historical investigations into Hegel’s sources and Hegel’s idea of madness are extremely helpful to understand Hegel’s strategy in relation to the scientific inquiries of his time. In this sense, Stern’s collection completes and extends Petry’s original investigation. Still, Hegel’s method and the structure of the arguments that he offers in the PSS are the most difficult to explore. With regard to this, a definite outcome of the collection concerns the distinction between nature and spirit. As the essays of Nuzzo, Testa, Howard, Mowad, Lumsden and Grier emphasise, Hegel’s PSS rejects the opposition between nature and spirit. From the very beginning, the PSS demonstrates that Hegel’s account of subjectivity integrates not only the sphere of biological life and embodiment, but also a theory of emotions, madness, and habit. While the thesis regarding the non-opposition between spirit and nature does not strike the reader as completely new, the book puts remarkable emphasis on topics such as habit, embodiment and emotions. Indeed, numerous authors stress the role of habit as the hinge of the transition from sheer natural immediacy to the higher level of ‘second nature’.

In the following, I wish to concentrate on two of the most prominent issues that distinguish Stern’s collection, i.e., habit and embodiment. The former is related to the interpretation of Hegel’s strategy in terms of broad naturalism. Such a theory is not restricted to a single section of the PSS, i.e., the Anthropology. On the contrary, it also calls into question the relation between second nature and freedom with regard to sociality and recognition. However, the theory of broad naturalism does not come without problems. For instance, Testa favours a ‘liberal naturalism’ capable of including phenomena of social organisation, as Hegel does in the Philosophy of Right. According to Testa, the ‘social body’ has a ‘self-moving character’ that is not reducible to the activity of individuals. Not only does this interpretation tend to diminish the relevance of the subjective perspective for agency, but also it contrasts with Hegel’s notion of habit. As Testa rightly puts it, habit implies ‘the experience of a body proper’, which does not consciously self-ascribe any authoritative commitment. As such, habit cannot be applied tout court to the sphere of objective spirit, for moral choice is required when it comes to culture and institutions.

In this sense, Testa’s account differs greatly from Lumsden’s view. Unlike Testa, Lumsden questions the extent and limits of habit. Although habit provides individuals with self-reference, it also induces relapses into sheer mechanical practices. He also warns against the reduction of social practices to habituality, for habituated norms can come into conflict with rational reflection and argument. As Lumsden remarks, habit as such can hardly ground the sphere of ethical life. In line with Williams’s objection to Pippin, an important question that involves the PSS as a whole—and that remains partly unanswered by Stern’s collection—is in what sense the norms of social life are grounded in the self-determining activity of subjective spirit.

Another important theme in Stern’s edited book concerns the embodied self. The concept of embodiment offers an interesting perspective on the mind–body problem, for it highlights the expressivity of the body and the significance of ‘lived experience’. Howard’s analysis of emotions is one of the most innovative and challenging contributions in this regard. For Howard, Hegel’s account of emotions is in line with contemporary and influential theories of emotions, such as that defended by Ronald de Sousa. As Howard puts it, ‘emotions organise experience by providing a range of intentional distinctions under specific affective patterns’. However, it is less convincing why, in Howard’s view, Hegel is committed to locating emotions ‘at the lower level of rational organisation’ in virtue of the alleged priority assigned to physiological processes. While it is true that Hegel encourages a physiological study of emotions, showing interest in the embodiment of sensations, physiology is not the determinant factor of emotional life. As a matter of fact, Hegel admits that it is possible to identify the physiological basis not only of anger, grief and shame, but also of thinking. What really matters to Hegel is the connection between the physiological phenomena and the activity of the soul, i.e., the significance of emotions and other bodily states for the unity of the self and its development. In this sense, Hegel’s appraisal of the physiological basis of emotions paves the way for the understanding of the self as multi-layered and essentially embodied.

Surprisingly, however, Stern’s collection leaves little room for a discussion of other crucial themes of the PSS that are related to the embodied self, such as desire, consciousness and cognition. Yet the book certainly offers detailed inquiries and in-depth analyses regarding the main themes and sources of the PSS. In addition, the richness of the investigations involving habit and embodiment should motivate further discussions and research in the field of Hegelian studies. As such, the book is a precious resource and engaging reading for those interested in Hegel’s theory of mind as well as in contemporary debates on embodiment.