The Existence of the Speculative: Hegel's Theory of the Soul

Why should we care about the concept of the soul? Is it not a relic, on the one hand, of retrograde two-substance philosophical ontologies and, on the other, of religious dogmatisms opportunistically purveying belief in life after death? What might we learn from a reconsideration of the soul, today, regarding topics that seem to be of more pressing philosophical and political concern, such as the relation between materialism and idealism, the concept of the human, theories of mental illness, or the relationship of reason to modern colonialism and racism? This compound question is at the core of Allegra de Laurentiis's outstanding study Hegel's Anthropology: Life, Psyche, and Second Nature (2021). Although the term soul does not appear in de Laurentiis's title, her book offers a sustained engagement with the implications of Hegel's title for the first section of his Philosophy of Spirit (volume 3 of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences): Anthropology: The Soul. Hegel's title returns us to a time when the purview of anthropology was “the scientific study of the human organism, conceived of as a union of body and soul, including human anatomy and physiology (and later phrenology) and the study of sensation and perception.”1 What is striking about this latter definition—the second listed in the Oxford English Dictionary—is that the now-obsolete focus of anthropology on the corporeality of the human organism was conceived as hand-in-glove with a focus on the unity of the body and soul, such that anthropology's constitutive attention to the body and the organism seems to have declined even as its study of the soul fell into disfavor. Does a fading anthropological investment in the concept of the soul involve a concomitant decorporealization of the concept of the human?In accordance with the subject matter of the discipline in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Hegel treats the theory of the soul as integral to anthropology, but he aims to overcome the dualism of approaching human nature as a union of two discrepant substances.2 His contribution to such an overcoming is to develop a speculative theory of the soul setting out from the original unity of the material and the immaterial and attempting to show, from an idealist perspective, how “spirit has come into being as the truth of nature” (Hegel 2007: §388).3 Indeed, through this account of the genesis of spirit, Hegel aspires not only to offer a speculative theory of the soul but also, as well shall see, to offer a theory of the soul as the substance of speculative thinking. His Anthropology therefore turns out to be important not only for grasping Hegel's concept of the soul but also for understanding the soul of the concept.Hegel declares that “the soul is the existing concept, the existence of the speculative” (§403 Rem; die Seele ist der existierende Begriff, die Existenz des Spekulativen). This formulation imposes a demanding interpretive task: we have to determine how Hegel understands the sense of “existence,” what he means by “concept,” and how these are related to the specificity of speculative thinking. Understanding the soul accordingly will then require us to reconstruct the conceptual relation between nature and spirit, and thus to take a position on major questions in contemporary Hegel scholarship, including the sense in which Hegel's thinking is metaphysical, how his idealism should be distinguished from philosophical materialism, and how we should situate the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences in relation to key passages in The Phenomenology of Spirit and The Science of Logic.Allegra de Laurentiis's book is a major contribution to making headway on these questions. “While not disputing the dated and scientifically indefensible character of a few of Hegel's empirical claims,” de Laurentiis presents a “qualified defence” of Hegel's treatise (xxi, 6). 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