Hegel's Philosophy of Mind · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Essay IV. Psycho-Genesis.
In France political excitement allowed the mesmeric theory and practice to drop out of notice till the fall of the first Empire. But in Germany there was a considerable amount of investigations and hypotheses into these mystical phenomena, though rarely by the ordinary routine workers in the scientific field. The phenomena where they were discussed were studied and interpreted in two directions. Some theorists, like Jung-Stilling, Eschenmayer, Schubert, and Kerner, took the more metaphysicist and spiritualistic view: they saw in them the witness to a higher truth, to the presence and operation in this lower world of a higher and spiritual matter, a so-called ether. Thus Animal Magnetism supplied a sort of physical theory of the other world and the other life. Jung-Stilling, e.g. in his “Theory of Spirit-lore.” (1808), regarded the spiritualistic phenomena as a justification of—what he believed to be—the Kantian doctrine that in the truly real and persistent world space and time are no more. The other direction of inquiry kept more to the physical field. Ritter (whose researches interested both Schelling and Hegel) supposed he had detected the new force underlying mesmerism and the like, and gave to it the name of Siderism (1808); while Amoretti of Milan named the object of his experiments Animal Electrometry (1816). Kieser(85), again (1826) spoke of Tellurism, and connected animal magnetism with the play of general terrestrial forces in the human being.
At a later date (1857) Schindler, in his “Magical Spirit-life,” expounded a theory of mental polarity. The psychical life has two poles or centres,—its day-pole, around which revolves our ordinary and superficial current of ideas, and its night-pole, round which gathers the sub-conscious and deeper group of beliefs and sentiments. Either life has a memory, a consciousness, a world of its own: and they flourish to a large extent inversely to each other. The day-world has for its organs of receiving information the ordinary senses. But the magical or night-world of the soul has its feelers also, which set men directly in telepathic rapport with influences, however distant, exerted by the whole world: and through this “inner sense” which serves to concentrate in itself all the telluric forces (—a sense which in its various aspects we name instinct, presentiment, conscience) is constructed the fabric of our sub-conscious system. Through it man is a sort of résumé of all the cosmic life, in secret affinity and sympathy with all natural processes; and by the will which stands in response therewith he can exercise a directly creative action on external nature. In normal and healthy conditions the two currents of psychic life run on harmonious but independent. But in the phenomena of somnambulism, clairvoyance, and delirium, the magic region becomes preponderant, and comes into collision with the other. The dark-world emerges into the realm of day as a portentous power: and there is the feeling of a double personality, or of an indwelling genius, familiar spirit, or demon.
To the ordinary physicist the so-called _Actio in distans_ was a hopeless stumbling-block. If he did not comprehend the transmission (as it is called) of force where there was immediate contact, he was at least perfectly familiar with the outer aspect of it as a condition of his limited experience. It needed one beyond the mere hodman of science to say with Laplace: “We are so far from knowing all the agents of nature, that it would be very unphilosophical to deny the existence of phenomena solely because they are inexplicable in the present state of our knowledge.” Accordingly mesmerism and its allied manifestations were generally abandoned to the bohemians of science, and to investigators with dogmatic bias. It was still employed as a treatment for certain ailments: and philosophers, as different as Fichte and Schopenhauer(86), watched its fate with attention. But the herd of professional scientists fought shy of it. The experiments of Braid at Manchester in 1841 gradually helped to give research into the subject a new character. Under the name of Hypnotism (or, rather at first Neuro-hypnotism) he described the phenomena of the magnetic sleep (induced through prolonged staring at a bright object), such as abnormal rigidity of body, perverted sensibility, and the remarkable obedience of the subject to the command or suggestions of the operator. Thirty years afterwards, the matter became an object of considerable experimental and theoretic work in France, at the rival schools of Paris and Nancy; and the question, mainly under the title of hypnotism, though the older name is still occasionally heard, has been for several years brought prominently under public notice.
It cannot be said that the net results of these observations and hypotheses are of a very definitive character. While a large amount of controversy has been waged on the comparative importance of the several methods and instruments by which the hypnotic or mesmeric trance may be induced, and a scarcely less wide range of divergence prevails with regard to the physiological and pathological conditions in connexion with which it has been most conspicuously manifested, there has been less anxiety shown to determine its precise psychical nature, or its significance in mental development. And yet the better understanding of these aspects may throw light on several points connected with primitive religion and the history of early civilisation, indeed over the whole range of what is called _Völkerpsychologie_. Indeed this is one of the points which may be said to emerge out of the confusion of dispute. Phenomena at least analogous to those styled hypnotic have a wide range in the anthropological sphere(87): and the proper characters which belong to them will only be caught by an observer who examines them in the widest variety of examples. Another feature which has been put in prominence is what has been called “psychological automatism.” And in this name two points seem to deserve note. The first is the spontaneous and as it were mechanical consecution of mental states in the soul whence the interfering effect of voluntary consciousness has been removed. And the second is the unfailing or accurate regularity, so contrary to the hesitating and uncertain procedure of our conscious and reasoned action, which so often is seen in the unreflecting and unreasoned movements. To this invariable sequence of psychical movement the superior control and direction by the intelligent self has to adapt itself, just as it respects the order of physical laws.
But, perhaps, the chief conclusion to be derived from hypnotic experience is the value of suggestion or suggestibility. Even cool thinkers like Kant have recognised how much mere mental control has to do with bodily state,—how each of us, in this way, is often for good or for ill his own physician. An idea is a force, and is only inactive in so far as it is held in check by other ideas. “There is no such thing as hypnotism,” says one: “there are only different degrees of suggestibility.” This may be to exaggerate: yet it serves to impress the comparatively secondary character of many of the circumstances on which the specially mesmeric or hypnotic experimentalist is apt to lay exclusive stress. The methods may probably vary according to circumstances. But the essence of them all is to get the patient out of the general frame and system of ideas and perceptions in which his ordinary individuality is encased. Considering how for all of us the reality of concrete life is bound up with our visual perceptions, how largely our sanity depends upon the spatial idea, and how that depends on free ocular range, we can understand that darkness and temporary loss of vision are powerful auxiliaries in the hypnotic process, as in magical and superstitious rites. But a great deal short of this may serve to establish influence. The mind of the majority of human beings, but especially of the young, may be compared to a vacant seat waiting for some one to fill it.
In Hegel’s view hypnotic phenomena produce a kind of temporary and artificial atavism. Mechanical or chemical means, or morbid conditions of body, may cause even for the intelligent adult a relapse into states of mind closely resembling those exhibited by the primitive or the infantile sensibility. The intelligent personality, where powers are bound up with limitations and operate through a chain of means and ends, is reduced to its primitively undifferentiated condition. Not that it is restored to its infantile simplicity; but that all subsequent acquirements operate only as a concentrated individuality, or mass of will and character, released from the control of the self-possessed mind, and invested (by the latter’s withdrawal) with a new quasi-personality of their own. With the loss of the world of outward things, there may go, it is supposed, a clearer perception of the inward and particularly of the organic life. The Soul contains the form of unity which other experiences had impressed upon it: but this form avails in its subterranean existence where it creates a sort of inner self. And this inner self is no longer, like the embodied self of ordinary consciousness, an intelligence served by organs, and proceeding by induction and inference.
Its knowledge is not mediated or carried along specific channels: it does not build up, piecemeal, by successive steps of synthesis and analysis, by gradual idealisation, the organised totality of its intellectual world. The somnambulist and the clairvoyant see without eyes, and carry their vision directly into regions where the waking consciousness of orderly intelligence cannot enter. But that region is not the world of our higher ideas,—of art, religion, and philosophy. It is still the sensitivity—that realm of sensitivity which is ordinarily covered by unconsciousness. Such sensitive clairvoyants may, as it were, hear themselves growing; they may discern the hidden quivers and pulses of blood and tissue, the seats of secret pain and all the unrevealed workings in the dark chambers of the flesh. But always their vision seems confined to that region, and will fall short of the world of light and ideal truth. It is towards the nature-bond of sensitive solidarity with earth, and flowers, and trees, the life that “rolls through all things,” not towards the spiritual unity which broods over the world and “impels all thinking things,” that these immersions in the selfless universe lead us.
What Hegel chiefly sees in these phenomena is their indication, even on the natural side of man, of that ideality of the material, which it is the work of intelligence to produce in the more spiritual life, in the fully-developed mind. The latter is the supreme over-soul, that Absolute Mind which in our highest moods, aesthetic and religious, we approximate to. But mind, as it tends towards the higher end to “merge itself in light,” to identify itself yet not wholly lost, but retained, in the fullness of undivided intellectual being, so at the lower end it springs from a natural and underlying unity, the immense solidarity of nether-soul, the great Soul of Nature—the “Substance” which is to be raised into the “Subject” which is true divinity. Between these two unities, the nature-given nether-soul and the spirit-won over-soul, lies the conscious life of man: a process of differentiation which narrows and of redintegration which enlarges,—which alternately builds up an isolated personality and dissolves it in a common intelligence and sympathy.
It is because mental or tacit “suggestion”(88) (i.e. will-influence exercised without word or sign, or other sensible mode of connexion), thought-transference, or thought-reading (which is more than dexterous apprehension of delicate muscular signs), exteriorisation or transposition of sensibility into objects primarily non-sensitive, clairvoyance (i.e. the power of describing, as if from direct perception, objects or events removed in space beyond the recognised limits of sensation), and somnambulism, so far as it implies lucid vision with sealed eyes,—it is because these things seem to show the essential ideality of matter, that Hegel is interested in them. The ordinary conditions of consciousness and even of practical life in society are a derivative and secondary state; a product of processes of individualism, which however are never completed, and leave a large margin for idealising intelligence to fulfil. From a state which is not yet personality to a state which is more than can be described as personality—lies the mental movement. So Fichte, too, had regarded the power of the somnambulist as laying open a world underlying the development of egoity and self-consciousness(89): “the merely sensuous man is still in somnambulism,” only a somnambulism of waking hours: “the true waking is the life in God, to be free in him, all else is sleep and dream.” “Egoity,” he adds, “is a merely _formal_ principle, utterly, and never qualitative (i.e. the essence and universal force).” For Schopenhauer, too, the experiences of animal magnetism had seemed to prove the absolute supernatural power of the radical will in its superiority to the intellectual categories of space, time, and causal sequence: to prove the reality of the metaphysical which is at the basis of all conscious divisions.
Self-consciousness appears at first in the selfish or narrowly egoistic form of appetite and impulse. The intelligence which claims to mould and construe the world of objects—which, in Kant’s phrase, professes to give us nature—is implicitly the lord of that world. And that supremacy it carries out as appetite—as destruction. The self is but a bundle of wants—its supremacy over things is really subjection to them: the satisfaction of appetite is baffled by a new desire which leaves it as it was before. The development of self-consciousness to a more adequate shape is represented by Hegel as taking place through the social struggle for existence. Human beings, too, are in the first instance to the uninstructed appetite or the primitive self-consciousness (which is simply a succession of individual desires for satisfaction of natural want) only things,—adjectival to that self’s individual existence. To them, too, his primary relation is to appropriate and master them. Might precedes right. But the social struggle for existence forces him to recognise something other which is kindred to himself,—a limiting principle, another self which has to form an element in his calculations, not to be neglected. And gradually, we may suppose, the result is the division of humanity into two levels, a ruling lordly class, and a class of slaves,—a state of inequality in which each knows that his appetite is in some measure checked by a more or less permanent other. Lastly, perhaps soonest in the inferior order, there is fashioned the perception that its self-seeking in its isolated appetites is subject to an abiding authority, a continuing consciousness. There grows up a social self—a sense of general humanity and solidarity with other beings—a larger self with which each identifies himself, a common ground. Understanding was selfish intelligence: practical in the egoistic sense. In the altruistic or universal sense practical, a principle social and unifying character, intelligence is Reason.
Thus, Man, beginning as a percipient consciousness, apprehending single objects in space and time, and as an appetitive self bent upon single gratifications, has ended as a rational being,—a consciousness purged of its selfishness and isolation, looking forward openly and impartially on the universe of things and beings. He has ceased to be a mere animal, swallowed up in the moment and the individual, using his intelligence only in selfish satisfactions. He is no longer bound down by the struggle for existence, looking on everything as a mere thing, a mere means. He has erected himself above himself and above his environment, but that because he occupies a point of view at which he and his environment are no longer purely antithetical and exclusive(91). He has reached what is really the moral standpoint: the point i.e. at which he is inspired by a universal self-consciousness, and lives in that peaceful world where the antitheses of individualities and of outward and inward have ceased to trouble. “The natural man,” says Hegel(92), “sees in the woman flesh of his flesh: the moral and spiritual man sees spirit of his spirit in the moral and spiritual being and by its means.” Hitherto we have been dealing with something falling below the full truth of mind: the region of immediate sensibility with its thorough immersion of mind in body, first of all, and secondly its gradual progress to a general standpoint. It is only in the third part of Subjective mind that we are dealing with the psychology of a being who in the human sense knows and wills, i.e. apprehends general truth, and carries out ideal purposes.
Thus, for the third time, but now on a higher plane, that of intelligence and rationality, is traced the process of development or realisation by which reason becomes reasoned knowledge and rational will, a free or autonomous intelligence. And, as before, the starting-point, alike in theoretical and practical mind, is feeling—or immediate knowledge and immediate sense of Ought. The basis of thought is an immediate perception—a sensuous affection or given something, and the basis of the idea of a general satisfaction is the natural claim to determine the outward existence conformably to individual feeling. In intelligent perception or intuition the important factor is attention, which raises it above mere passive acceptance and awareness of a given fact. Attention thus involves on one hand the externality of its object, and on the other affirms its dependence on the act of the subject: it sets the objects before and out of itself, in space and time, but yet in so doing it shows itself master of the objects. If perception presuppose attention, in short, they cease to be wholly outward: we make them ours, and the space and time they fill are projected by us.
So attended to, they are appropriated, inwardised and recollected: they take their place in a mental place and mental time: they receive a general or de-individualised character in the memory-image. These are retained as mental property, but retained actually only in so far they are revivable and revived. Such revival is the work of imagination working by the so-called laws of association. But the possession of its ideas thus inwardised and recollected by the mind is largely a matter of chance. The mind is not really fully master of them until it has been able to give them a certain objectivity, by replacing the mental image by a vocal, i.e. a sensible sign. By means of words, intelligence turns its ideas or representations into quasi-realities: it creates a sort of superior sense-world, the world of language, where ideas live a potential, which is also an actual, life. Words are sensibles, but they are sensibles which completely lose themselves in their meaning. As sensibles, they render possible that verbal memory which is the handmaid of thought: but which also as merely mechanical can leave thought altogether out of account. It is through words that thought is made possible: for it alone permits the movement through ideas without being distracted through a multitude of associations. In them thought has an instrument completely at its own level, but still only a machine, and in memory the working of that machine. We think in names, not in general images, but in terms which only serve as vehicles for mental synthesis and analysis.
It is as such a thinking being—a being who can use language, and manipulate general concepts or take comprehensive views, that man is a rational will. A concept of something to be done—a feeling even of some end more or less comprehensive in its quality, is the implication of what can be called will. At first indeed its material may be found as immediately given and all its volitionality may lie in the circumstance that the intelligent being sets this forward as a governing and controlling Ought. Its vehicle, in short, may be mere impulse, or inclination, and even passion: but it is the choice and the purposive adoption of means to the given end. Gradually it attains to the idea of a general satisfaction, or of happiness. And this end seems positive and definite. It soon turns out however to be little but a prudent and self-denying superiority to particular passions and inclinations in the interest of a comprehensive ideal. The free will or intelligence has so far only a negative and formal value: it is the perfection of an autonomous and freely self-developing mind. Such a mind, which in language has acquired the means of realising an intellectual system of things superior to the restrictions of sense, and which has emancipated reason from the position of slave to inclination, is endued with the formal conditions of moral conduct. Such a mind will transform its own primarily physical dependence into an image of the law of reason and create the ethical life: and in the strength of that establishment will go forth to conquer the world into a more and more adequate realisation of the eternal Idea.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.