Natural and Unnatural Activities of the Psyche according to German Idealism.

What is it about?

The focus is on the nineteenth-century philosopher Hegel’s explanations of two principal activities of the human soul or psyche: sentience and feeling. In his Anthropology Hegel shows how these capacities are at once movements of the body and of the soul—what we would today call “psychosomatic” activities. The precursors of these capacities of the animal and human psyche are discussed in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: they are vibrational patterns characteristic of both inorganic and organic bodies—an extraordinarily foresighted explanation vis-à-vis contemporary attempts to explain the psyche in biological terms.

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Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash

Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The topic is important, among other things, because the conceptual presuppositions of today's psychological theory are rather murky, torn between purely physiological and emphatically "spiritualistic" explanations of mental activities. Neither approach seems adequate to account for the extraordinary capacities of animals and humans, including the widely acknowledged psychosomatic nature of disease. Classical philosophy may come to the rescue.