From the very outset of the Anthropology we discover soul determined by the fluctuations of its external environment. This excessive ‘rendering by externality’ impinges on the activity of spirit proper and so gives us a precise sense of the ways in which spirit's origins are antithetical to its project of autopoiesis and how its upsurge first appears in terms of that which it is not. This initial ‘rendering by externality’ also indicates soul's emergent disunion [Entzweiung], its self-estrangement, and this is what we will look to track in the current chapter.

Inchoate spirit discovers the fluctuations of the situation into which it is factically thrown by way of its sensible body, an interpenetrating psychosomatic interface. Concerning sensibility, Hegel writes:

In sensibility the soul of nature transforms into the nature of the soul; it expresses the restructuring activity whereby nature is taken up into the inchoate interiority of the finite individual. Playing on the signification of the German verb ‘to find’ [finden], Hegel indicates how the soul literally finds this particular content as transformed by way of the minimally mediated experience of sensibility [Emp-findung]. In the sensation of touch, for instance, we simultaneously experience the presence of the external object that we are touching and our reaction to it. Consequently, sensibility is the minimally mediated identity between ‘subject’ and ‘object’. This is a unity, however, that precedes any subject–object distinction (Hegel states: ‘nor set in distinction as objective to subject’), because at this point in Hegel's analysis he is dealing with a domain that is anterior to any application of the categories of the understanding that would structure the sensory manifold in terms of clear subject–object relations – hence the opacity constitutive of the structure analysed. Consequently, we can speak of the body of sensibility as the individual's obscure ‘preconscious gearing onto the world’ – to use the vocabulary of Merleau-Ponty.