Commentary on Subjective Spirit, Chapter 13
The First Failure: Passivity (§ 405)
The feeling individuality is at first “indeed a monadic individual, but as immediate not yet as itself, not a subject reflected into itself, and therefore passive.”
Stekeler warns against a genetic reading: the “not yet” is to be read conceptually, not as a developmental phase everyone passes through.[1] What is meant is a constitution in which whatever happens simply happens — without the individual relating to it.
The Grading of Feeling (§§ 404–407)
Between task and failure stands a differentiation lost in the standard translation: where we generically say “feeling,” Hegel distinguishes three stages.
The sensing totality (§ 404). The soul distinguishes within itself, but “what is distinguished by it is not yet an external object as in consciousness, but rather the determinations of its sensing totality.”
Stekeler’s image for this is exact: the feeling soul is an ideal center without a fixed place in the body — like the spider in its web, always present wherever something moves. Hence “the real spread-out-ness of corporeality” has no truth for it; the pain is where it hurts, not at a coordinate.[2]
The life of feeling as a condition (§ 406). Here Hegel treats magnetic somnambulism — the animal magnetism heatedly debated in his time. What remains of this is not the theory but the determination: the life of feeling becomes an illness when it appears as a form “in which the individual relates unmediated to the concrete content of itself and has its sober consciousness of itself and of the rational context of the world as a condition distinct from that.”
Sick, then, is not feeling itself but the falling-apart: someone who feels and at the same time knows that they know — but has both side by side, without connection.
The lecture course makes the transition visible and names the condition under which it is not yet illness:
“Waking, sober consciousness, and presentiment, dreaming, can exist alongside each other and alternate with one another. This posits two personalities: the objective, rational personality and the subjective consciousness.”
And then the distinction that matters: “The free, objective sensing, knowing, willing does not yet appear in direct opposition to this subjective dull consciousness, but they are only different in general […] Spirit does not yet exist as a contradiction within itself.”[3]
As long as the two merely stand side by side, it is sleep, dream, presentiment. Only where they come into opposition does it become illness — and that is § 408.
And the lecture courses name the three conditions in which this occurs — a division the printed text lacks: “a. Natural dreaming. b. The life of the child in the womb. c. The relation of particular consciousness to inner spiritual life, which has also been called the genius of the human being.”[4]
The third point is the interesting one, and it has little to do with the Romantic concept of genius. What is meant is something everyone has:
“This particular individuality, which decides how I conduct myself in circumstances, what becomes of me; it determines my particular fate. There is a duality in me: on the one hand, how I know myself according to my external life, my relations as they hold according to the general representation as such. The second is my determinate inner being.”
Genius is the difference between how someone understands themselves and how they actually react. And Hegel determines it as what decides the outcome — “my particular fate.”
With this, the place of this passage is clear: it belongs to the feeling soul, because something operates there that is not raised into consciousness and yet determines behavior. Hegel does not call it illness — it only becomes illness when the two sides come into contradiction.
What still holds today is the distinction itself: that someone has a self-image and a disposition according to which they act, and that the two need not coincide. [KF]
The “Second Genius” — and the Limit of Anticipation
In the Griesheim transcript there is a second, narrower determination Dirk Stederoth has worked out: impulse can be determined by kind and manner, and “this does not depend on instinct, however, but belongs to another sphere; it falls, so to speak, into this second subjectivity, this second genius.”[5]
Not what someone wants, but how — that is the sphere in question. And it depends on the fact that the satisfaction of other impulses has been excluded: what someone has become habituated to determines the form of their willing, without their knowing it.
Illness attaches to this, and Hegel determines it as fixation: in hardening, “immoderation can occur; self-activity can fixate itself in a single manner of satisfaction and hold fast to this partial side.”
Stederoth examines the proximity to Freud — and draws the boundary himself. The affinity to primal repression is there: a drive-representation that becomes fixed and thereafter remains unchangeable. What is missing is the second stage — “actual repression,” the subsequent repression of associated representations.
And his conclusion matters as much for reading this volume as the finding itself:
The discovery of this dynamic “remains the achievement of Freud and his collaborators and cannot honestly be diminished by the construction of supposed anticipations.”
This is the same test-sentence that holds throughout this work. A similarity is not an anticipation, and whoever turns one into the other robs the later thinker of what he accomplished. What remains is more precise and more modest: Hegel identified an instance that shapes willing without being known. What became of it, he did not see. [KF]
With this, the grading is grounded from within: it is not duality itself that produces insanity, but its becoming contradiction. [KF]
The self-feeling (§ 407). The third step, and the decisive one: the feeling totality distinguishes itself within itself “and awakens to judgment within itself, according to which it has particular feelings and is as subject in relation to these its determinations.”
Only here does someone exist who has feelings — in such a way that they are simultaneously immersed in them and, through them, joined together with themselves.
What distinguishes the three stages is the degree of separation: in § 404 nothing is divided, in § 406 it falls apart, in § 407 it is distinguished and connected at once. This is the same figure as in the natural soul — and it explains why insanity follows immediately afterward. [KF]
The Second Failure: Persistence (§ 408)
Here lies the payoff, and it is detachable from the examples. Hegel’s determination of insanity:
The subject, “although formed to rational consciousness,” remains “still capable of the illness of persisting in a particularity of its self-feeling, which it is not able to work up and overcome into ideality.”
Three things stand in this sentence.
First: this is not about unreason. The subject is “formed to rational consciousness” — insanity presupposes the understanding and stands alongside it, rather than replacing it.
Second: what constitutes it is a persistence in a particularity. Not a false content, but a particularity that cannot be integrated — that is not “worked up into ideality.”
Third: the reason lies in the corporeal — in the immediacy “in which self-feeling is still determined,” because there corporeality is “still undivided from spirituality.”
The lecture courses sharpen the determination, and specifically through a distinction the printed text lacks: what separates insanity from mere folly is the presentness of the content.
“People have many notions, and as long as these remain mere wishes, insanity is not yet present. Wandering about among wishes can be folly, but the notion remains merely subjective; realization is still to occur only in the future.”
And against this: “Actual insanity is not merely a foolish notion but consists in the fulfillment of the doubled personality appearing as something present, and the individual being present within it as existing.”[6]
Whoever wishes to become emperor is a fool. Whoever believes himself to be emperor is mad. The difference lies not in the content but in its mode of being — and precisely for this reason insanity belongs in the Anthropology, where the relation to one’s own being is at stake.
And Hegel draws the consequence for the relation of body and soul: “Insanity is also consciousness, but the being within it is divided, a duality of being that consists in the fact that being is not idealized; hence corporeality is set into insanity. Thus soul and body are both sick, not one side alone.”
This is no psychosomatic thesis in today’s sense, but follows from the determination: where corporeality is not appropriated, both are affected — because at that point they are not yet two separate things. [KF]
And Here the Logic of Development Takes Hold
Failure and success have the same structure, and this is no accident but the reason both stand at this point.
In insanity, a particularity fixes itself that the subject cannot work through; it remains as particularity and dominates the subject. In habit (§§ 409f.), a particularity likewise fixes itself — but in such a way that it “for it is no longer limiting.”
The same operation, two outcomes: in one case the particularity retains its intractability, in the other it loses it. Hegel treats both immediately one after the other, and he himself establishes the connection.
What follows from this is the actual lesson of this section: what one does not make one’s own makes one its own. The task of § 403 — becoming the power over oneself — has no neutral failure. Whoever does not resolve it is dominated by what they have not worked through.
This is no psychology in today’s sense and does not compete with it. It is a determination of the form in which someone stands toward what they find — and it holds independently of what psychiatry has discovered about somnambulism. [KF]
Stekeler-Weithofer, Hegels Realphilosophie, on § 405. ↩︎
Stekeler-Weithofer, Hegels Realphilosophie, on § 404 (pp. 570 f.). ↩︎
Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des subjektiven Geistes, on § 320 of the first edition (= § 406): GW 25.1. ↩︎
Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des subjektiven Geistes, transcript by Hotho, on the feeling soul: GW 25.1. ↩︎
Dirk Stederoth, Hegels Philosophie des subjektiven Geistes. Ein komparatorischer Kommentar, Berlin 2001, excursus “Die Triebe und der zweite Genius,” pp. 250–276. The Hegel quotation follows the transcript by Griesheim (Gr 213 f., 217). ↩︎
Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des subjektiven Geistes, transcript by Hotho, lecture course 1822: GW 25.1. ↩︎