In all his works, Hegel makes very few references to the unconscious. In fact, the account is limited to only a few passages in his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and these do not explicitly develop a formal theory of the unconscious. Yet Hegel does not completely ignore the issue. In the Encyclopaedia, as outlined in Petry’s presentation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, Hegel describes the unconscious processes of intelligence as a ‘nightlike abyss’. It is important to understand what Hegel means by this nocturnal ‘abyss’ and what role it plays in mental functioning. Despite a few noteworthy exceptions, which largely focus on Hegel’s theory of mental illness,1 Hegel’s treatment of the unconscious has been largely overlooked. It will be the overall focus of this chapter to introduce Hegel’s contributions to our understanding of unconscious processes and, through extrapolation, show how he in many remarkable ways anticipates key notions formally investigated by psychoanalysis a century later. As an arch-rationalist, Hegel provides one of the first attempts in the history of Western metaphysics to show how unconscious psychic forces precede reason, and how the abyss is an indispensable aspect of his entire philosophy. Before we examine the structural processes and specific functions the unconscious assumes in Hegel’s system, it may prove useful for readers unfamiliar with Hegelian studies to have an overview of his philosophical project.
Hegel’s dialectical method
Geist is customarily translated as ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’, both of which have entirely different meanings in English. There is no appropriate German equivalent for the word ‘mind’, which, in English, is often associated with brain dependence and its emergent mental processes, the field of cognitive neuroscience, and consciousness studies, while ‘spirit’ often evokes religious sentiments, theology, mysticism, or supernatural ideology. Neither is the case in German; therefore, making any translational meaning of Geist is difficult at best. In general, psychoanalysis would possibly contend that the dialectical modes of Geist are themselves differentiated and modified forms of the mind as psychical agencies, registers, self-states, or projected part-objects maintained by unconscious motivations or through ego manoeuvres of intentionality, dissociation, or defence,2 yet this does not fully capture Hegel’s project.
Geist intimates a complex integration of an individual’s personality as a whole, including one’s intellect, character, ethical or moral sensibilities, and personal maturity, as well as the refinement of one’s more basic desires or passions. Therefore, Geist assumes a developmental ascendance and transcendental quality that embodies an ideal value, human striving, or pursuit. To refer to a person’s Geist is to import a measure of respect for its superiority because it implies a cultivated degree of self-awareness through laborious developmental achievement. Geist is also a term used for God – Der Heilige Geist (the Holy Ghost) – thus, it commands a degree of exaltation. Of course, this process is not the same for all people. While all human beings are primarily equal with regard to their soul (Seele), in German a term devoid of any religious connotations whatsoever, people are vastly different when it comes to their Geist. This is why, when we refer to spirit, we signify the coming into being of a privileged form of subjective transcendent awareness, hence, the coming to presence of pure self-consciousness. Hegel wants to extend this notion of the individual mind to the collective element of humankind realized through our historical cultural practices, which define the process and progress of civilization. Therefore, spirit is the unification of nature within mind, hence, body and soul instantiated throughout history and objective social life as the sophistication and sublimation of human subjectivity. In psychoanalytic language, Geist is the amalgamation of Freud’s tripartite division of the psyche within the process of actualizing its rational, aesthetic and ethical potential, hence, a triumph of the human spirit.3
Although Hegel is one of the most prodigious and influential thinkers in the history of philosophy, his dialectical method remains one of his least well understood philosophical contributions. While philosophers have made scores of commentaries and interpretations of Hegel’s dialectic (Beiser, 1993; Burbidge, 1981; Hibben, 1984; McTaggart, 1964), some interpreters have gone so far as to deny Hegel’s method (see Solomon 1983) or to render it opaque, simplistic and imprecise (Forster 1993). Hegel’s dialectical method governs all three dimensions of his overall philosophical system, namely, the Logic; the Philosophy of Spirit, including the Phenomenology; and the Philosophy of Nature. The dialectic serves as the quintessential method not only for explicating the fundamental operations of mind but also for expounding the nature of reality.
Hegel’s philosophy of mind or spirit rests on a proper understanding of the ontology of the dialectic. Hegel refers to the unrest of Aufhebung – customarily translated as ‘sublation’ – a continuous dialectical process entering into opposition within its own determinations and thus raising this opposition to a higher unity, which remains at once annulled, preserved and transmuted. Hegel’s use of Aufhebung, a term he borrowed from Schiller but also an ordinary German word, is to be distinguished from its purely negative function, whereby there is a complete cancelling or drowning of the lower relation in the higher, to also encompass a preservative aspect. Therefore, the term aufheben has a threefold meaning: (1) to suspend or cancel, (2) to surpass or transcend, and (3) to preserve. In the Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel makes this clear: ‘On the one hand, we understand it to mean “clear away” or “cancel”, and in that sense we say that a law or regulation is canceled (aufgehoben). But the word also means “to preserve”’ (EL § 96, Zusatz).
Hegel’s dialectical logic has been grossly misunderstood by the humanities and social sciences largely due to historical misinterpretations dating back to Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, an earlier Hegel expositor, and unfortunately perpetuated by current mythology surrounding Hegel’s system. As a result, Hegel’s dialectic is inaccurately conceived of as a three-step movement involving the generation of a proposition, or ‘thesis’, followed by an ‘antithesis’, then resulting in a ‘synthesis’ of the prior movements, thus giving rise to the popularized and bastardized phrase: thesis – antithesis – synthesis. This is not Hegel’s dialectic; rather, it is Fichte’s (1794) depiction of the transcendental acts of consciousness, which he describes as the fundamental principles (Grundsätzen) of thought and judgment.4 Yet this phrase is a crude and mechanical rendition of Fichte’s logic and does not properly convey even his project. Unlike the meaning that Fichte assigns to the verb aufheben, which he defines as to eliminate, annihilate, abolish, or destroy, Hegel’s meaning signifies a threefold activity by which mental operations at once cancel or annul opposition, preserve or retain it, and surpass or elevate its previous shape to a higher structure.
Fichte’s dialectic is a response to Kant’s (1781) Critique of Pure Reason, in which Kant outlines the nature of consciousness and addresses irreconcilable contradictions that are generated in the mind due to inconsistencies in reasoning.5 For both Kant and Fichte, their respective dialectics have firm boundaries that may not be bridged. Hegel, on the other hand, shows how contradiction and opposition are annulled but preserved, unified and elevated within a progressive evolutionary process. This process of the dialectic underlies all operations of mind and is seen as the thrust behind world history and culture. It may be said that the dialectic is the essence of psychic life for, if it were to be removed, consciousness and unconscious structure would evaporate.
The process by which mediation collapses into a new immediate provides us with the logical model for understanding the dynamics of the mind. An architectonic process, Geist invigorates itself and breathes its own life as a self-determining generative activity that builds upon its successive phases and layers, which form its appearances. Mind educates itself as it passes through its various dialectical configurations, ascending towards higher shapes of self-conscious awareness. What spirit takes to be truth in its earlier forms is realized to be merely a moment. It is not until the stage of pure self-consciousness, what Hegel calls Absolute Knowing as lucid conceiving or conceptual understanding,6 that spirit finally integrates its previous movements into a synthetic unity as a dynamic self-articulated complex whole.
In common language, spirit is a developmental process of self-actualization realized individually and collectively through reflective, contemplative thought and action. The notion of spirit encompasses a principle of complex holism whereby higher stages of development are attained through dynamic, laborious dialectical mediation. At its apex, subject and object, mind and matter, the particular and the universal, the finite and the infinite, are mutually implicative yet subsumed within the Absolute or Whole process under consideration. This is what Hegel refers to as the ‘Concept’ (Begriff), or what we may more appropriately translate as ‘comprehension’. Begriff is the noun to the verb begreifen, literally, ‘to grasp with one’s hands’. Begreifen implies a depth of understanding, an ability to comprehend fully all aspects of a subject matter or thing under question. Therefore, Begriff is a concise one-word description that captures the essence of something, namely Spirit, what we aim to comprehend.
Hegel’s account of the concrete actuality of the Concept (or Notion) as individual personality may be said to present a theory of human psychology with unconscious elements always prefiguring intrapsychic and logical operations of thought. In fact, the unconscious makes thought possible. Yet, for Hegel, individuality is ultimately explained within the larger context of a collective historical anthropology that informs human relations and the coming to presence of pure self-consciousness. In this sense, we may say that the unconscious is not only non-self-consciousness, which is much of world history until spirit returns to itself and comes to understand its process, but is furthermore the competing and antithetical organizations of ‘impulses’ (Triebe) that are ‘instinctively active’, whose ‘basis is the soul [Seele] itself’ (SL, p. 37), which informs spirit’s burgeoning process. In articulating both the subjective (i.e. personal individuality, particularity) and objective (universal, generalizable) elements of spirit, Hegel illuminates both a personal and collective unconscious as a precursor to Freud and Jung.
Philosophy of mind
Hegel’s theory of mind is comprehensively outlined in the Philosophy of Spirit (Philosophie des Geistes), which is the third part of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Unbeknownst to psychoanalysis, Hegel provides one of the first theories of the unconscious. He gives most of his attention to the unconscious within the stage of presentation (Vorstellung) in the context of his psychology, thus belonging to the development of theoretical spirit or intelligence, what we today refer to as cognition. Here Hegel refers to a ‘nocturnal mine (Schact) within which a world of infinitely numerous images and presentations is preserved without being in consciousness’ (EG § 453). Hegel explains that the night-like pit – what I have translated as the abyss – is a necessary presupposition for imagination and for higher forms of intelligence (cf. Hegel, 1830, 3:405nn). While these more complex forms of the psychological would not be possible without the preservation of images within the unconscious mind, the unconscious is given developmental priority in his anthropological treatment of the soul (Seele).
For Hegel, the unconscious soul is the birth of spirit that developmentally proceeds from its archaic structure to the higher-order activities of consciousness and self-conscious rational life. Like Freud, who tells us that the ego is a differentiated portion of the It (Es), the conscious ego is the modification and expression of unconscious activity. For Hegel, the soul is not an immaterial entity (EG § 389) but, rather, the embodiment of its original corporeality, the locus of natural desire (Begierde) or drive (Trieb).7 As the general object of anthropology, Hegel traces the dialectical emergence of the feeling soul from the abyss of its indeterminations. At first unseparated from its immediate universal simplicity, it then divides and rouses itself from its mere inward implicitness to explicit determinate being-for-self. Through a series of internal divisions, external projections, and reinternalizations, the soul gradually emerges from its immediate physical sentience (EG § 391) to the life of feeling (EG § 403) to the actual ego of consciousness (EG § 411), which becomes further refined and sophisticated through perceptual cognition, conceptual understanding, ethical self-consciousness and rational judgment, the proper subject matter of the Phenomenology.
It is beyond the scope of this immediate synopsis to give a comprehensive overview of Hegel’s philosophy of mind, a subject I have already attended to with precision (see Mills, 2002a); rather, I provide a terse introduction that is germane to the discussion at hand. Hegel’s philosophy of Geist is presented in the third division of the Encyclopaedia, which is further subdivided into three sections: namely, ‘Anthropology’, ‘Phenomenology’, and ‘Psychology’. Each subdivision is concerned with explicating a specific feature and function of the mind. Because Hegel’s dialectical method is suffused throughout every aspect of his philosophy – the dialectic being the force and substance of spirit – each domain of psychic life may only be properly understood in relation to the whole. For our purposes, however, it becomes important to see how the epigenesis of the mind proceeds from its most primordial unconscious configurations to the higher-order functions of rational self-conscious understanding. In many remarkable ways, Hegel’s treatise on mind parallels the psychoanalytic account of psychic development, a topic that will preoccupy us shortly.
Anthropology
As the general object of anthropology, that is, what is common to us all regardless of culture, race or gender, Hegel is first concerned with the universal significance of the soul (Seele). Here the role of the unconscious in Hegel’s conceptualization of the mind is an integral aspect of his philosophy. In fact, the higher forms of mental life emanate from an unconscious ontology and are the phenomenological development of an original unconscious ground. For Hegel, as too for psychoanalysis, the unconscious is the found...
