Commentary on Subjective Spirit, Chapter 46
Stederoth: The Comparative Commentary
Dirk Stederoth’s Hegels Philosophie des subjektiven Geistes. Ein komparatorischer Kommentar (2001) was written before the Gesammelte Werke. What was accessible in transcripts he checked in the manuscripts themselves and built out of it a comparison of the versions, with a table in the appendix that shows, for every section, how it looked between 1817 and 1830.
The procedure is the counterpart to Drüe and Stekeler. Both comment on the printed text; Stederoth sets the versions side by side and asks what changes between them. This makes visible what a commentary on the final text cannot see — for instance that from 1825 on Hegel reverses the order of the natural soul and says nothing about it. The passage stands in Chapter 11 of this volume; it is one of several at which Stederoth’s finding that “regarding his change he once again wraps himself in silence” is the most precise information about the text that was to be had.
His second yield is the proximity to later psychology — together with its limit. The excursus on the impulses and the “second genius” works out how far Hegel’s determination of impulse comes to Freud, and then draws for itself the line that is not to be crossed (Chapter 13). The same procedure on a smaller object: Hegel notes that “in Swabia one does not distinguish smelling and tasting,” and Stederoth draws from it the point that in that case what he says about the animals would hold for his own countrymen (Chapter 12).
What stays sober in him is the reception. In the controversies of the neurosciences and the philosophy of mind, he notes, “one will look for the name Hegel almost in vain” — and even Michael Wolff’s Das Körper-Seele-Problem (1992), expressly addressed to both sides, had “unfortunately failed insofar as it found attention only within Hegel scholarship.” That is the finding against which Chapter 42 writes. [KF]