David S. Stern - Essays on Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit

Essays on Hegel's
Philosophy of Subjective Spirit

Edited by

David S. Stern

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

2013 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Essays on Hegel's philosophy of subjective spirit / edited by David S. Stern.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4384-4445-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 17701831. 2. SpiritHistory19th century. 3. SubjectivityHistory19th century. I. Stern, David S., 1956

B2949.S75E87 2012
193dc23

2011052054

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

References and Abbreviations

Through this volume references to Hegel's works use the following abbreviations:

Editor's Introduction

The present volume of essays is the first English-language collection devoted to Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. The Philosophy of Subjective Spirit is the first section of the third part of Hegel's Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. First published in 1817, Hegel published two additional editions of the Encyclopedia in his lifetime, one in 1827 and the third in 1830, just a year before his untimely death. That he saw fit to devote his efforts to revising, expanding, and republishing the Encyclopedia provides a clear indication of the importance Hegel attached to the Encyclopedia, something not lost on Hegel scholars. But this recognition notwithstanding, the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit has remained until very recently what one scholar has justifiably called a less-well-known, less well-understood area in Hegel's thought. For a variety of reasons, including the editorial work associated with the publication of the new edition of Hegel's Gesammelte Werke, recent textual discoveries, and the saliency of issues in the philosophy of mind in contemporary philosophy generally, we have recently witnessed renewed interest in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. The essays in the present volume, all prepared for publication here, contribute to a growing body of new scholarship on the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and Hegel's thought on some issues of central concern in contemporary philosophy of mind.

Prior to the 1970s there were virtually no studies of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit in English. In 1975, John Findlay brought out a new edition of the 19th-century translation of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit into English,

It is generally agreed that these supplementary materials enhance the intelligibility of the materials published by Hegel in the Encyclopedia, which was intended by him to serve as an outline for his lecture courses, and these English-language scholarly works may have been stimulated by the translation of the materials in English. Nonetheless, the editorial methods Boumann used in compiling the materials have confounded scholars. In creating the Zustze he combined varying sources from different hands that were drawn from different years, based on as many as five different lecture courses offered by Hegel between 1816 and 1830 and that in some cases were based on the first edition of the Encyclopedia but were published together as Additions to the text of the third edition.

Many of the materials available to Boumann have, alas, been lost or destroyed. Though Hegel lectured on the philosophy of spirit five times between 1820 and 1830, we have available five transcripts based on three of the lecture courses. Three of the transcriptsby Hotho from 1822 and Griesheim and Kehler from 1825have been known to scholars for quite some time and were reissued and translated into English by M. J. Petry in his invaluable three-volume edition noted just above. More recently, they have been definitively edited and published as a volume in Hegel's Gesammelete Werke.

The editorial and philological stage has thus been set for a fresh philosophical encounter in English with Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. The present volume of new essays, by scholars from the United States, Canada, Australia, Macau, and Italy constitutes a significant contribution to that encounter. As these essays reveal, there are far more than philological and historical reasons why such a new encounter is warranted. The Philosophy of Subjective Spirit is a rich work in which Hegel deals with a wide range of topics that have been central to the philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of action, including discussions of feeling, consciousness, mind and body, emotions, memory, habit, free will, and rationality, among many others. But a reader new to this work may also be surprised to find that Hegel deals with a variety of other phenomena that one might not expect, including the paranormal, madness, dreams, and ganglia, to mention only a few. Moreover, Hegel does so by considering both historical and contemporaneous philosophical works on the one hand and contemporary science on the other. And finally, it should be noted that the