Meaning and Embodiment: Human Corporeity in Hegel's Anthropology

Examines Hegel's insights regarding the complexity and significance of embodiment in human life, identity, and experience. Meaning and Embodiment provides a detailed study of Hegel's anthropology to examine the place of corporeity or embodiment in human life, identity, and experience. In Hegel's view, to be human means in part to produce one's own spiritual embodiment in culture and habits. Whereas for animals nature only has meaning relative to biological drives, humans experience meaning in a way that transcends these limits, and which allows for aesthetic appreciation of beauty and sublimity, nihilistic feelings of meaninglessness, and the complex and different systems of symbolic speech and action characterizing language and culture. By elucidating the different forms of embodiment, Nicholas Mowad shows how for Hegel we are embodied in several different ways at once: as extended, subject to physical-chemical forces, living, and human. Many difficult problems in philosophy and everyday experience come down to using the right concept of embodiment. Mowad traces Hegel's account through the growth and development of the body, gender and racial difference, cycles of sleep and waking, and sensibility and mental illness.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction Abbreviations 1. That the Term "Body" Is Equivocal The Essence of Embodiment Dimensions of Embodiment The Materiality of the Soul Multidimensional Embodiment 2. The Concept of Spirit The "Idea" and Hegel’s "Idealism" The Idea in Nature: Life and Death The Concept of Spirit as the Idea Knowing Itself in Its Other: A Close Reading of §381 Revelation The Soul as Natural Spirit Whether the Anthropology Is Normative 3. Immersion in Nature What Hegel Means by "Soul [Seele]" The Soul of the World; or, That Meaning in Nature Is Not Fabricated Arbitrarily Reconciling Different Explanations of the Same Phenomenon Anthropological Description Is Interpretation, Not Classification Examples of Finding Meaning in Nature What "Race" Is Not, and What It Means for Hegel What Can Be Salvaged in Hegel’s Philosophy of Race? The Extent to Which Race Can Be Transcended The Individual Soul 4. The Inner World of the Soul The Ages of Life Life and Death What Lies on the Surface of Hegel’s Theory of Gender The Law of the Netherworld and Radical Guilt Waking from Sleep and the Masculine Pathos Sleep as a Transcendental Condition of Waking Experience 5. Sensation and the Oblivion of the Body Seeking a Middle Term The Five Senses Setting the Stones in Motion The Soul as "Mixed" with Its Body The Embodiment of the Emotions 6. Perverse Self-Knowledge From Sensation to Feeling The Displacement of the Self Examples and Analysis 7. Mental Illness and Therapy What It Means to Say That Mental Illness Is Pathological Mental Illness as "Self-Feeling" and Sickness of the Soul Mental Illness as Excessive Attachment Habit as Therapy Hegel and Foucault 8. The Social Dimension of Human Embodiment Habit as a Social "Sense" with Unlimited Scope Internalization, Imagination, and Ethical Life The Enduring Ambiguity of Nature Assigning Meaning to the Human Body "Double Consciousness": Feeling in Its Immediacy as Ideology "The nation is sick, trouble is in the land, confusion is all around" Habit and the Unmooring of a Reified Culture Racial Politics and Democracy Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Nicholas Mowad is Professor of Philosophy at Chandler-Gilbert Community College.

Review :
"…Mowad's study is a compelling and worthwhile investigation that makes a significant contribution to both the fields of Hegel studies and contemporary philosophy of race and gender for its original and thought-provoking insights on Hegel's Anthropology." — Journal of the History of Philosophy "This book offers a lucid explanation of very difficult Hegelian concepts in clear language, along with a passionate, searing, provocative, and intelligent foray into questions of race and gender." — Lydia Moland, Colby College