Granted Hegelian nature's fundamental extrinsicality, which we systematically charted in Part I, our next objective poses a constellation of questions that might be framed as this: what must such a reading of Hegelian nature mean for the rest of the system? More precisely, what would a monstrous natural register mean in terms of spirit's autogenetic upsurge, its construction of a what Hegel calls a second nature [zweite Natur]? In this sense, we begin the difficult yet illuminating task of critically reading Hegel against Hegel in order to develop a precise sense of the ways in which his speculative analysis of nature must have symptomatic effects that permeate what he has to say about spirit, its autogenesis of a second nature in terms of its own reconstructive activity. It is these questions and critical stance that we will now seek to systematically establish. Therefore, we move to a consideration of the first appearance of spirit in the final system's philosophy of the real, his writings on subjective spirit in the Anthropology. This is a much maligned aspect of Hegel's system, one that has, for various reasons, remained relatively unexplored in the scholarly literature, until only recently receiving a modest resurgence of interest. We believe that the insights that we discover in this section of the system are striking, unique, and provocative and, in some key sense, at odds with the more generally accepted portraits of Hegel's thought as strictly rationalist, theologically reactionary, a pathologically systematic expression of logos. We would like to destabilise these generally accepted views throughout the remainder of our analysis of the Anthropology and begin to do so by tracing the historical genesis of this dimension of the system, as we believe it will contribute to such a destabilising effort. Such a move reveals a Hegel very much immersed in concerns of materialism, empiricism, pathology, even irrationality – features that are often underemphasised when repeated emphasis is placed on the theological dimension of his thought.

A Hegel that one encounters in the scholarly literature is perhaps best exemplified in Alan M. Olsen's Hegel and the Spirit: Philosophy as Pneumatology (1992).