About the Book
This book provides a critical analysis of Hegel’s Anthropology, a long-neglected treatise dedicated to the psyche, or “soul,” that bridges Hegel’s philosophy of organic nature with his philosophy of subjective spirit. Allegra de Laurentiis recuperates this overlooked text, guiding readers through its essential arguments and ideas. She shows how Hegel conceives of the “sublation” of natural motion, first into animal sentience and then into the felt presentiment of selfhood, all the way to the threshold of self-reflexive thinking. She discusses the Anthropology in the context of Hegel’s mature system of philosophy (the Encyclopaedia) while also exposing some of the scientific and philosophical sources of his conceptions of unconscious states, psychosomatism, mental pathologies, skill formation, memorization, bodily habituation, and the self-conditioning capacities of our species. This treatise on the becoming of anthropos, she argues, displays the power and limitations of Hegel’s idealistic “philosophy of the real” in connecting such phenomena as erect posture, a discriminating hand, and the forward gaze to the emergence of the human ego, or the structural disintegration of the social world to the derangement of the individual mind.
Table of Contents:
Abbreviations
Preface
Introduction: Spirit’s Humble Beginnings
1. On the character of Hegel’s text
2. Text and Context
Chapter 1. Aristotelian Roots
1. On unraveling the sense of psuche
2. Hylomorphism
3. The real unity of the Cartesian man
4. Return to the roots: being-soul
Chapter 2. Life, or die Weltseele
1. Nature exceeds itself
2. Goethe’s UrphÄnomen
3. Hegel’s Urteil
4. Natural spirit
Chapter 3. False Enigmas and Real Beginnings
1. Mind-body conundrums and the meaning of Idealism
2. The soul begins as world-soul (kosmos zoon empsuchon)
Chapter 4. Animal Life, or das tierische Subjekt
1. The strange case of the human soul
2. One genealogy, many races
3. From Enlightenment to Reaction: Johann Blumenbach to James Hunt
Chapter 5. No Longer Just Animal Life
1. The soul of peoples
2. Kinship and the individual: disposition, temperament, character
3. Kinship and the individual: age, sexuality and the patterns of life
Chapter 6. Premonitions of Selfhood, or die ahnende Seele
1. Organic sensibility and psyche’s sentience
2. From sentience to self-feeling: a matrix for the ego
3. The monadic soul: on dreaming, fetal life and hypnosis
Chapter 7. Disorders
1. Healthy and diseased schisms of the soul
2. Leading a twofold life: on double genii and bipolar magnets
3. Out-of-joint times and inner derangement
Conclusion. Inhabiting the World, or die Gewohnheit
1. Spirit builds itself a home
2. On divine sparks, unnatural freedom, and other human matters
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
ALLEGRA DE LAURENTIIS is a professor of philosophy at Stony Brook University. She is the author of Subjects in the Ancient and Modern World: On Hegel's Theory of Subjectivity, the editor of Hegel and Metaphysics: On Logic and Ontology in the System, and the coeditor of The Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel.
Review :
"De Laurentiis' masterful book will change our ways of understanding Hegel's concept of spirit in its entirety. By leading us back to spirit's humble animal-human beginnings, this historically and exegetically rigorous work brings to the foreground a discipline central to Hegel's philosophy yet heretofore neglected. This book shows that there is in Hegel's Anthropology a variety of issues resonating with our contemporary sensibility that knocks you dizzy." --Angelica Nuzzo, author of Approaching Hegel's Logic, Obliquely: Melville, Molière, Beckett
"This excellent book is a wide-ranging and very welcome study of Hegel's unjustly neglected Anthropology. De Laurentiis examines Hegel's rich analyses of the mind-body relation, dreams, and psychiatric illness, and relates them, with subtle attention to detail, both to his metaphysical logic and to the historical context on which he draws--a context extending from Aristotle to eighteenth and nineteenth-century scientists, such as Blumenbach and Bichat. De Laurentiis also highlights the enduring relevance of Hegel's ideas for the modern understanding of psychosomatic states and mental illness. Her book will be essential reading for all those interested in Hegel's philosophy of mind and spirit." --Stephen Houlgate, author of Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit' A Reader's Guide "For all the stress upon 'embodiment' in contemporary philosophy and especially in Hegel scholarship, these discussions remain stymied by various versions or specters of mind/body dualism. Hegel's subtle and penetrating re-examination of Aristotle's De Anima and of a wealth of historical and contemporaneous medical literature shows that there is no problem of how mind and body interact or relate, because within the anthropological soul, they are identical, insofar as animation is the form of the soul's embodiment, whilst the soul's embodiment is its embodiment, not its vehicle, nor its mere functional(ist) 'realization.' Hegel develops a cogent, illuminating non-reductive identity theory, by addressing the question, 'How must an organic being be structured such that it affords mentality?' (Hegel's philosophy of nature has, inter alia, addressed the question, 'How must nature be structured, such that some of it affords organic life?') Many historical theories which Hegel critically examines are shown by de Laurentiis to remain germane insofar as they have direct contemporary counterparts. This is a very lucid, incisive, insightful, well-matured work of philosophical, critical, historical and textual scholarship; a major achievement equally useful to students, to philosophers, to Hegel experts and to scholars in allied disciplines. Rich in insights and revelations, judicious in interpretation and assessment, it is a philosophical pleasure and benefit at every turn." --Kenneth R. Westphal, coauthor of The Palgrave Hegel Handbook
"Many scholars would like to ignore Hegel's Anthropology because it does not accord with their view of what he ought to have said. But not Allegra de Laurentiis, who reveals that the Anthropology is far from being an embarrassment; it contains profound reflections that illuminate many aspects of Hegel's philosophy. This important book makes clear that the Anthropology is not just a Hegelian cabinet of curios, but an integral part of Hegel's system that has been unduly neglected. In particular, de Laurentiis's discussion of Hegel's fascinating treatment of madness is the clearest, and the most interesting, that I have read." --Glenn Alexander Magee, author of Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition
