The Nightmare of Reason and Regression into the Night of the World

This chapter critically reads finite subjectivity in terms of its natural, instinctual dimension. The chapter’s objective is to further substantiate the significant problem Hegel’s conception of nature poses to his project of radical freedom. Developing a sense of subjectivity’s potential for “regression”, the chapter seeks to outline how, as in the case of acute psychopathology, subjectivity’s ordering of its instinctual dimension might be undermined. Hegelian regression, therefore, is a haywire inversion where the logical superiority of spirit’s freedom is subordinated to the ontologically prior register of instinct. Extrapolating from this analysis, the chapter contends that the unconscious-instinctual depth of the subject is never entirely abandoned; this abyss (Schacht) of indeterminacy lingers within the matrices of finite spirit and has the perpetual possibility of breaking-loose to the detriment of subjectivity’s free self-actualizing activity. Consequently, a reconstruction of Hegel’s account of mental illness forcefully demonstrates how nature remains a perpetual source of trauma for finite subjectivity and, therefore, the life of spirit.

Assimilation and the Problems of Sex, Violence, and Sickness unto Death

This chapter intensifies the problem of the animal organism’s over-determination by external variables. The chapter concentrates on Hegel’s analyses of eating, sex, violence, sickness and, ultimately, death. These phenomena exemplify how the animal organism is perpetually given over to external circumstances that threaten its self-perpetuating activity. Taken together they indicate, for Hegel, the truth of organic life: it must die. Organic life must prove a necessary yet insufficient condition for the life of conceptuality proper. In other words, the life of spirit requires embodiment and more. Conceptuality can only come into a robust self-relation in something that is, simultaneously, anticipatorily grounded in nature and yet, irreducible to those grounds. The space in which such self-mediation occurs is what Hegel refers to as the life of spirit (Geist). The self-grounding system of thought proper does not find sufficient existence in the natural world because the radical exteriority of the latter is hostile to the auto-dictates of conceptuality, its self-grounding basis. The chapter concludes with a question: what must this ‘monstrous’ conception of nature mean for human culture, specifically finite subjectivity and socio-political freedom?

Treatment as (re-)Habituation: From Psychopathology to (re-)Actualised Subjectivity

Chapter eight outlines how Hegel’s analysis seeks to overcome the problem of nature entailed by his conception of mental illness. It offers, therefore, a reconstruction of Hegel’s analysis of the category of habit. The chapter outlines the duplicitous signification of habit. First, habit expresses spirit’s liberating activity. It binds, unifies, the body’s manifold of instincts and drives as a singular whole. Second, spirit’s reconstructive activity takes the shape of a natural effect. The chapter argues that Hegel’s concept of habit shows itself as crucial to the problem of psychopathology and therefore nature: it combines the multitude of natural drives etc. within the unified simplicity of a subjective totality. Habit, therefore, is the grounding process that allows for the stabilized (re-)emergence of the subject out of its over-immersion in natural determinations. A close reading of habit, however, reveals that there is nothing that guarantees the problem of nature has been permanently ‘sublated.’ To the contrary, the chapter contends that what Hegel’s analysis shows is how closely bound the problem of nature is to his conception of finite subjectivity and freedom. Taking this to be the case allows for this question: how does nature factor in objective spirit, i.e. the political register?

The Problem of Nature in Hegel's Final System

This book challenges the unanimous rejection that has followed Hegel’s Naturphilosohie (1830). Systematically reconstructing Hegel’s conception of nature, the book explores the ways in which it functions as a ground that, nevertheless, perpetually poses problems for human freedom. The book starts by taking seriously Hegel’s characterization of nature as monstrous, a register at odds with the comprehensive order demanded by conceptual thought. The book then critically reads Hegel against Hegel: it analyzes what such a conception of nature must mean in terms of his notions of finite subjectivity and socio-political freedom. The book reveals that Hegelian nature holds a paradoxical status in his late philosophy. As an anterior precondition, it is crucial to the emergence of free self-relating subjectivity. Yet, it also threatens freedom’s subjective structure with destruction: biological disease, psychopathology, and symptomatic tensions within the body politic. The book demonstrates the importance of the ambivalent significations of Hegel’s Naturphilosophie for the entirety of his final system. Indeed, the problem of nature resides at the core of his project of freedom. Hegel, therefore, presents our contemporary world with a strikingly relevant position, one that forces us to rethink not only our received understanding of his philosophy, but our situation within the world. His system can be used to think the timely philosophical problems revolving around the nature-culture distinction to great effects that are still to be exhaustively explored. This potential constitutes the intrinsic merit of the book.

Embodiment: Spirit, Material– Maternal Dependence, and the Problem of the in utero

Chapter six, in turn, begins to critically read Hegel against Hegel. It reads his notion of spirit (beginning with finite subjectivity) in terms of the concept of nature established in Part I. The chapter argues that the problem nature poses for subjective spirit presents itself in two ‘symptomatic’ moments of Hegel’s anthropology. First, in his analysis of subjectivity’s embodiment, its “primordial grasp on the world.” Second, in his analysis of the fetus-mother dynamic. Reconstructing both analyses, the chapter argues that they reveal spirit as over-immersed in exterior determinations and unable to assert itself as an autarkic center, as subject. Over-immersion in its environmental milieu, the chapter argues, is the problem of spirit’s origins, i.e. the problem of nature. It must move beyond this displacement in externality. However, there are no facile guarantees that this will transpire in the concrete actuality of life. Therefore, the origin of spirit is a developmental confrontation with nature and a protracted attempt to break with it.

The Other Hegel: The Anthropology and Spirit’s Birth from within the Bio‑Material World

This chapter functions as a preparatory overview of Part II as a whole. First, it historically contextualizes Hegel’s speculative anthropology in terms of developments in empirical psychology and anthropology from the period; second, it emphasizes the ways in which Hegel was fascinated throughout the course of his philosophical activity by the perplexing question of how anything resembling the free self-referential activity of spirit might emerge from within the coordinates of blind material nature. Simultaneously, it emphasizes not only the significant role Hegel assigned to the results of empirical inquiry but, more importantly, the thorough-going materialism operative in his analysis of the genesis of finite subjectivity. In this sense, the chapter develops a portrait of the other Hegel: one concerned with materialism, science, embodiment, and various forms of pathology which permeate the life of subjectivity.

Numerus as the Metaphysical Principle in St. Augustine’s Doctrine of Rhythm

In St. Augustine’s doctrine of rhythm numerus manifests the metaphysical ascent from sensuousness to rationality and is the ontological root of finite beauty. Moreover, numerus is differentiated into the objective and subjective spheres, proving to be a totality, the “idea.” Meanwhile, as a formation of antique culture, this concept is not known as a real contradiction, and thereby eternal numeri are not posited as a process in which finite subjectivity, I would be a necessity for the infinite substance. So, in St. Augustine’s doctrine the essence of the science of music has not the value of man’s self-conscious activity.