The Soul and the Body in Hegel's Anthropology

Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2010 The Soul and the Body in Hegel's Anthropology Nicholas Mowad Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Mowad, Nicholas, "The Soul and the Body in Hegel's Anthropology" (2010). Dissertations. 208. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/208 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2010 Nicholas Mowad LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO THE SOUL AND THE BODY IN HEGEL’S ANTHROPOLOGY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN PHILOSOPHY BY NICHOLAS MOWAD CHICAGO, IL AUGUST 2010 Copyright by Nicholas Mowad, 2010 All rights reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my professors, who have greatly contributed to my understanding of Hegel and of philosophy generally. Above all, I would like to thank Adriaan Peperzak, whose patient direction and insightful commentary have allowed me to improve my work to a large extent and whose own research on Hegel has provided me with a model of depth and clarity. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to Ardis Collins, in whose courses I first encountered Hegel, and whose interpretive rigor and lucid presentation inspired me to try my own hand at Hegel scholarship. I would like to express my appreciation as well for the Arthur J. Schmitt Foundation, whose generosity and commitment to research and humanity have given me the means to complete this dissertation. I would like to thank my parents and my siblings for their encouragement and support. Most of all, I would like to thank my wife, who has contributed more than anyone (including Hegel) to my understanding of what it is to be human, and how human feelings cannot be reduced to biology. iii To my wife. Insofern der Geist natürliches, sinnliches Dasein hat, ist die menschliche Gestalt die einige Weise, in der es angeschaut werden kann. Das heiβt aber nicht, daβ der Geist ein Sinnliches, Materielles ist, sondern die Weise seiner Unmittelbarkeit, Realität, sein Sein für anderes, sein Angeschautwerden ist in menschlicher Gestalt. Deshalb haben die Griechen die Götter als Menschen vorgestellt. Dies hat man den Griechen wie auch [anderen] Völkern übergenommen; es muβ nicht gesagt werden, daβ die Menschen es tun, weil es ihre Gestalt sei, als ob damit die Sache erschöpft wäre, sondern sie tun recht daran, weil dies die einzige Gestalt ist, in der der Geist existiert; in Löwengestalt z. B. kann doch wohl das Geistige nicht hervortreten. Die Organisation des Menschen aber ist nur die Gestalt des Geistigen; die Notwendigkeit dieses Zusammenhangs gehört dem Gebiet der Physiologie, der Naturphilosophie an und ist ein schwieriger, in der Tat noch zu wenig erörterter Punkt. – G.W.F. Hegel PREFACE Philosophy is widely regarded as the most difficult of all disciplines: this is no doubt in part because philosophers rarely write with the intention or hope of being read by a wide audience. With the emergence in the 17th and 18th centuries of figures like Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, and the Enlightenment philosophes , it must have seemed for a brief time that this tendency was changing, that philosophers were writing for an audience not of academic experts, but simply of an educated, middle-class public. Yet any hopes that philosophy would become a discipline readily accessible to the common person must have been dashed when the popular philosophy of the Enlightenment gave way to the exceedingly abstruse reflections of the movement we call “German Idealism,” which culminated in the nearly opaque work of G.W.F. Hegel. It has been fashionable for nearly two centuries to bash Hegel as not only excessively difficult, but criminally obscure, perhaps even utterly nonsensical. Many philosophers—even some philosophical movements—have made a name for themselves by ridiculing Hegel for his supposed incomprehensibility and celebrating his demise from the world of letters and culture. Yet every time some zealous thinker takes it upon him or herself to bury Hegel, Hegel emerges again to prove that he is far from dead. It must be granted, even by committed Hegelians, that Hegel is difficult to read. Yet the reason for this difficulty, the divergence of Hegel’s writing from the plain spoken style of the man on the street, is not the result of any deficiency in Hegel’s thought, but rather the poverty vi of the ‘common-sense’ way of speaking. Hegel writes the way he does because that is the only way his insights can be expressed. Hegel does not take for granted the apparatus of sophisms and half-truths that is ‘the common-sense attitude’: he pulverizes it and reworks the residue into a proper philosophical system. Such a system can only strike the uninitiated as bizarre and nonsensical, but this impression demonstrates not a flaw in Hegel’s philosophy; rather, it demonstrates only the vast extent to which ‘common sense thinking’ falls short of properly rational, philosophical cognition. Insofar as Hegel’s philosophy is worthy of study yet not immediately accessible, there is a need for commentators to undertake exegetical work on the various parts of Hegel’s corpus, particularly those parts that are the most obscure. I intend this dissertation to be an exegetical study of a short, twenty-five paragraph section of Hegel’s Encyclopedia that he calls “the anthropology,” and which has as its object “the soul.” The soul as Hegel understands it is what makes the human body different from other bodies. Hegel’s anthropology is thus a study of the intersection of what is distinctly human and what is corporeal, i.e. it is a study of the specifically human kind of corporeity: this study culminates in an analysis of habit. Habit is in some sense immediately familiar to everyone: every human being has developed innumerable habits, through which his or her experience of the world is mediated. Yet, as Hegel says, sometimes what is most familiar is least understood: this is certainly the case with habit. Habit is, after all, the ability not to experience a certain feeling that results from the experience of that feeling; it is a mental vii phenomenon, yet one which is actually characterized by the absence of thinking, or mental activity. Clearly then, only a bit of reflection on habit is necessary to reveal the startling obscurity enshrouding this ostensibly clear and familiar phenomenon. Habit is however, in the end, a rational and comprehensible phenomenon, as I believe this dissertation will show. In the course of this demonstration, Hegel’s anthropology, his understanding of the ensouled body of the human being, will likewise become clear. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii PREFACE vi LIST OF TABLES xii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS xiii CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION TO THE BODY AND SOUL 1 Introduction: a note on the text 1 Preliminary examination of some preconceptions concerning the body and soul 4 The human being as soul imprisoned in a body; and the human being as body only 5 The Platonic thesis: the human being as a soul imprisoned in a body 7 The materialist thesis: the human being as a body only 12 Atlas: an image of the human being (that Hegel would reject) 14 Demonstration that extension and mechanism do not adequately or exhaustively define all bodies, especially not the human body 18 The Cartesian understanding of the body as extension, determined by mechanism 18 Other kinds of bodies; or, ways a body can be determined besides mechanism 21 Example of a body transcending mechanism: the animal desiring and consuming food 24 The human body: ensouled, yet still organic, chemical, and mechanical 33 The selfhood of a body 35 Discerning the ‘self’ of a body 35 The self of the mechanical body 36 The self of the chemical body 38 The self of the animal body 40 The human condition: endurance of the loss of self 42 The human condition: knowledge of death 45 Socrates as an image of the human condition that transcends tragedy 48 CHAPTER TWO: THE CONCEPT OF SPIRIT 54 Introduction 54 A brief recapitulation of chapter one: that non-human bodies are not in possession of their own selves, i.e. the principles of their identities 56 A preview of the first part of chapter two 59 A phenomenological description of the way the human soul relates to its body 62 A preliminary definition of human nature: knowing oneself in externality, as illustrated in the example of property 62 Rousseau and natural pity: an example of knowing oneself in externality that does not involve awareness of one’s distinction from externality 65 The stages of life: infancy/childhood and adolescence 70 ix Spirit and subjectivity 75 The body as the reality of the soul; or, the soul’s realization of itself in a body 79 An example of absolute self-determination: national self-determination 82 Examples of absolute self-determination: Athena and Achilles 87 The stages of life: adulthood as subjectivity and self-determination 92 A final example of absolute self-determination: the Karok , or Araar 95 The concept of spirit 99 Hegel’s logic: neither a transcendental logic, nor a formal logic of the understanding 100 Hegel and

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