ARISTOTELIAN SOUL AND HEGELIAN SPIRIT

The Systematic Place of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit in the Encyclopædia

In the Philosophy of Right, after defining spirit as intelligence and saying that the moments of its development from feeling to representation to thought are the path along which spirit “produces itself as will,” Hegel announces his intention to carry out a “science of spirit, usually called ‘psychology’” (PhR §4 A, my transl.). Hegel never had a chance to fulfill this wish, however, save in the revision of the 1817 Encyclopædia in its second and third editions and in the notes for a Philosophy of Spirit, which he wrote between 1822 and 1825 (Fragment, BS 517–50). This is so much greater a pity if we recall that Hegel's interest in psychology spans his entire lifetime as one of his fundamental and constant concerns. In a letter to Niethammer, after lamenting Fries's shallow deduction of logic from anthropological presuppositions based on experience, Hegel announces the publication of his Logic and adds: “My psychology will follow later” (Briefe 196, Letters 257–8). The combined reformation of logic and psychology, which do not show any traces of the accelerated time of the “new spirit” (WL 1: 15, SL 26), appears to be one of Hegel's primary goals, especially in the Nürnberg years.