Hegel's Philosophy of Mind

Hegel's Philosophy of Mind by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The work describes the pattern of the Idea as manifesting itself in dialectical reasoning. While some believe that the philosophy of nature and mind are applications of the logic, this is a misunderstanding. The purpose of the Encyclopedia is descriptive: to describe how Geist (Spirit or Mind) develops itself and not to apply the dialectical method to all areas of human knowledge, but Spirit is in process of growing, like a seed growing into a mature tree: it passes through stages. The first stage of Spirit's development is described in the Logic. Thus the Logic presents the categories of thought as they are in themselves; they are the minimal conditions for thinking anything at all, the conceptions that run in the background of all our thinking. These logical categories turn out to be none other than Geist itself. In order to get at what a thing is, we must think about it. No amount of observing will bring us to the essence of things. Thinking and being are equivalent, and so logic and metaphysics are equivalent as well. The underlying element of it all is Geist; thus the activity of thinking is no less than Geist articulating itself. (This is how Hegel could say that logic is the thought of the mind of God before creation.) As Geist works itself out more fully, it reaches the point where it simply cannot remain as it is; it is incomplete, and therefore it "others" itself; this is where the philosophy of nature emerges. When this stage of its development is completed, Geist "returns" to itself, which is the emergence of the philosophy of mind. Hegel coined the term "diamond net" in the book. He said, “the entire range of the universal determinations of thought… into which everything is brought and thereby first made intelligible.”In other words, the diamond net of which Hegel speaks are the logical categories according to which we understand our experience, thus making our empirical observations intelligible.