Commentary on Subjective Spirit, Chapter 35
And a Warning That Remains
It stands at the beginning and holds for the whole part: in the human being there is “only one reason in feeling, willing, and thinking.”
Whoever turns this into faculties working side by side has missed the matter — and not only in Hegel’s case. It is the same mistake made when one treats cognition and emotion as separate systems that interfere with one another. [KF]
Part II: The Reception
Whoever has read the subjective spirit knows Hegel’s text. What was made of it is a history of its own — and it begins with Hegel himself, in the lecture courses, and leads through the students and their opponents to the commentaries of the present.
The order follows proximity to the author: first his own lectures, then those who heard him, then those who attacked him, and finally those who interpret him.
II.1 Hegel’s Own Lecture Courses
The transcripts are the first reception — by Hegel himself, who delivered the same material multiple times and reworked it each time. They have been fully available since 2016 (GW 25.1–3): the 1822 course in the Hotho transcript, 1825 in Griesheim, 1827/28 in Stolzenberg.
What the lecture courses have already yielded stands in Part I: the division into verbs (is — appears — relates to itself), Hegel’s own explanation of the name “Phenomenology,” the distinction between subjective and objective modes of consideration, the determination of insanity through the presentness of content — and the evidence that free spirit is still absent in 1827/28.