Meaning and Embodiment

Nicholas Mowad

Description

Meaning and Embodiment provides a detailed study of Hegel's anthropology to examine the place of corporeity or embodiment in human life, identity, and experience. In Hegel's view, to be human means in part to produce one's own spiritual embodiment in culture and habits. Whereas for animals nature only has meaning relative to biological drives, humans experience meaning in a way that transcends these limits, and which allows for aesthetic appreciation of beauty and sublimity, nihilistic feelings of meaninglessness, and the complex and different systems of symbolic speech and action characterizing language and culture. By elucidating the different forms of embodiment, Nicholas Mowad shows how for Hegel we are embodied in several different ways at once: as extended, subject to physical-chemical forces, living, and human. Many difficult problems in philosophy and everyday experience come down to using the right concept of embodiment. Mowad traces Hegel's account through the growth and development of the body, gender and racial difference, cycles of sleep and waking, and sensibility and mental illness.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Abbreviations

1. That the Term “Body” Is Equivocal
The Essence of Embodiment
Dimensions of Embodiment
The Materiality of the Soul
Multidimensional Embodiment

2. The Concept of Spirit
The “Idea” and Hegel’s “Idealism”
The Idea in Nature: Life and Death
The Concept of Spirit as the Idea Knowing Itself in Its Other: A Close Reading of §381
Revelation
The Soul as Natural Spirit
Whether the Anthropology Is Normative

3. Immersion in Nature
What Hegel Means by “Soul [Seele]”
The Soul of the World; or, That Meaning in Nature Is Not Fabricated Arbitrarily
Reconciling Different Explanations of the Same Phenomenon
Anthropological Description Is Interpretation, Not Classification
Examples of Finding Meaning in Nature
What “Race” Is Not, and What It Means for Hegel
What Can Be Salvaged in Hegel’s Philosophy of Race?
The Extent to Which Race Can Be Transcended
The Individual Soul

4. The Inner World of the Soul
The Ages of Life
Life and Death
What Lies on the Surface of Hegel’s Theory of Gender
The Law of the Netherworld and Radical Guilt
Waking from Sleep and the Masculine Pathos
Sleep as a Transcendental Condition of Waking Experience

5. Sensation and the Oblivion of the Body
Seeking a Middle Term
The Five Senses
Setting the Stones in Motion
The Soul as “Mixed” with Its Body
The Embodiment of the Emotions

6. Perverse Self-Knowledge
From Sensation to Feeling
The Displacement of the Self
Examples and Analysis

7. Mental Illness and Therapy
What It Means to Say That Mental Illness Is Pathological
Mental Illness as “Self-Feeling” and Sickness of the Soul
Mental Illness as Excessive Attachment
Habit as Therapy
Hegel and Foucault

8. The Social Dimension of Human Embodiment
Habit as a Social “Sense” with Unlimited Scope
Internalization, Imagination, and Ethical Life
The Enduring Ambiguity of Nature
Assigning Meaning to the Human Body
“Double Consciousness”: Feeling in Its Immediacy as Ideology
“The nation is sick, trouble is in the land, confusion is all around”
Habit and the Unmooring of a Reified Culture
Racial Politics and Democracy

Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• The
• Psychology
• Philosophy of mind
• Philosophy
• English articles

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438475592
• Langue: English

Extrait

Meaning and Embodiment
Meaning and Embodiment
HUMAN CORPOREITY IN HEGEL’S ANTHROPOLOGY
nicholas mowad
Cover art: Carl Randall, Tokyo Portrait No. 4
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mowad, Nicholas, 1979– author.
Title: Meaning and embodiment : human corporeity in Hegel’s anthropology / Nicholas Mowad.
Description: Albany : State University of New York, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018043674 | ISBN 9781438475578 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438475592 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831. | Human body (Philosophy)
Classification: LCC B2948 .M69 2019 | DDC 128.092—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043674
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Dylan, Felix, and Leo
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Abbreviations
Chapter 1. That the Term “Body” Is Equivocal
The Essence of Embodiment
Dimensions of Embodiment
The Materiality of the Soul
Multidimensional Embodiment
Chapter 2. The Concept of Spirit
The “Idea” and Hegel’s “Idealism”
The Idea in Nature: Life and Death
The Concept of Spirit as the Idea Knowing Itself in Its Other: A Close Reading of §381
Revelation
The Soul as Natural Spirit
Whether the Anthropology Is Normative
Chapter 3. Immersion in Nature
What Hegel Means by “Soul [ Seele ]”
The Soul of the World; or, That Meaning in Nature Is Not Fabricated Arbitrarily
Reconciling Different Explanations of the Same Phenomenon
Anthropological Description Is Interpretation, Not Classification
Examples of Finding Meaning in Nature
What “Race” Is Not, and What It Means for Hegel
What Can Be Salvaged in Hegel’s Philosophy of Race?
The Extent to Which Race Can Be Transcended
The Individual Soul
Chapter 4. The Inner World of the Soul
The Ages of Life
Life and Death
What Lies on the Surface of Hegel’s Theory of Gender
The Law of the Netherworld and Radical Guilt
Waking from Sleep and the Masculine Pathos
Sleep as a Transcendental Condition of Waking Experience
Chapter 5. Sensation and the Oblivion of the Body
Seeking a Middle Term
The Five Senses
Setting the Stones in Motion
The Soul as “Mixed” with Its Body
The Embodiment of the Emotions
Chapter 6. Perverse Self-Knowledge
From Sensation to Feeling
The Displacement of the Self
Examples and Analysis
Chapter 7. Mental Illness and Therapy
What It Means to Say That Mental Illness Is Pathological
Mental Illness as “Self-Feeling” and Sickness of the Soul
Mental Illness as Excessive Attachment
Habit as Therapy
Hegel and Foucault
Chapter 8. The Social Dimension of Human Embodiment
Habit as a Social “Sense” with Unlimited Scope
Internalization, Imagination, and Ethical Life
The Enduring Ambiguity of Nature
Assigning Meaning to the Human Body
“Double Consciousness”: Feeling in Its Immediacy as Ideology
“The nation is sick, trouble is in the land, confusion is all around”
Habit and the Unmooring of a Reified Culture
Racial Politics and Democracy
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the Arthur J. Schmitt Foundation for the support I received while working on this project as a Schmitt fellow. My greatest debt is to my professor, Adriaan Peperzak, who illuminated Hegel’s philosophy for me and first encouraged me to write about the anthropology. Though I have in some cases departed from his interpretation, my understanding of Hegel has been guided by him more than anyone else. I remain deeply grateful for the unwavering support. I also thank the other faculty at Loyola University Chicago with whom I studied, especially Ardis Collins, who first introduced me to Hegel and showed me how to follow the path he takes in his arguments, and Hugh Miller whose helpful comments have improved my understanding. I thank Karin De Boer, Allegra De Laurentiis, Alfredo Ferrarin, Angelica Nuzzo, Adriaan Peperzak, and Richard Dien Winfield for reading parts of this book and offering helpful comments. I further extend my thanks to the anonymous reviewers whose comments have helped me improve this book considerably.
In many cases I took the advice offered by those generously giving the time and effort to read my work; what merit this book has was augmented as a result. I would not be surprised if the audience for this book will find places here where I have been too verbose, made a point inadequately, or veered off in the wrong direction. Hegel scholars will know the difficulty in writing a book on Hegel that gives enough background explanation while remaining on point and still making some worthwhile contribution, so I humbly ask for the reader’s charity. In any case, it should go without saying that what weaknesses this book has, it has despite the advice of those who have offered their comments, which have only improved it.
Finally, I thank my wife, Erin Mowad, for her limitless patience with me as I brought this book to completion.
Introduction
This is a book about human embodiment. My thesis is that although the corporeal dimension of the human being can be accurately described in biological (and physical and chemical) terms, to understand it adequately requires transcending the categories used in analyzing animal and other merely natural forms of life. Only then can we see that what is most properly called “the human body” is not a body given by nature, but one produced by spirit (or human subjectivity 1 ) for itself.
The body is one of the rare topics in philosophy that is both of perennial interest and of heightened contemporary concern. However, the attention paid to the body is both a blessing and a curse: while the contemporary reader can be grateful for the breadth of work on this topic, she may also be daunted by the sheer mass of arguments and doctrines concerning the body that have accumulated over the centuries. Gaining familiarity with the contributions of past philosophers on this topic is made especially difficult in the case of systematic philosophers like Hegel, whose writings on the body are hard or impossible to separate from the rest of his theory. Yet the accounts of human embodiment offered by other prominent philosophers of the past century as well as the general trend toward understanding human life and experience holistically suggest that many today would be interested in and sympathetic to Hegel’s theory if they were familiar with it.
Hegel’s theory of human embodiment is mostly contained in a section of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline that he calls “the anthropology.” 2 Because few, even of those with doctorates in philosophy, are familiar with Hegel’s anthropology, some might suppose it resembles Kant’s better-known “pragmatic anthropology.” The two are similar in that both attempt to explain the peculiar corporeal existence of humanity, which is often characterized by its transcendence of embodiment. Yet different methodological commitments make Hegel’s deduction and organic development of humanity out of nature different from Kant’s curious descriptions of the natural variety in which humanity finds itself. A better analogy (and one that Hegel himself makes) would liken the anthropology to Aristotle’s De Anima . Like the latter, Hegel’s anthropology is investigation of “the soul,” which, as he understands it, is what makes the human body different from other bodies. 3 Hegel’s anthropology is thus a study of the intersection or overlapping of what is distinctly human and what is corporeal, or of the specifically human form of embodiment.
Some prefer to leave this topic to natural scientists, who know best how a human brain differs from that of an ape, or how the genome of the human species is unique. But while the natural scientist is the one to consult if one wants to know how the biological system of the human species differs from those of other species, the question of whether the corporeal dimension of the human being is best understood as a biological system at all is not one natural science is prepared to ask much less answer, unless we classify anthropology as a natural science. Yet within the field of anthropology itself there is vigorous debate about whether it should associate itself more with the sciences or the humanities, and how one answers this determines whether anthropology really is capable of answering whether humanity should be defined strictly as a biological species. It is telling that the one discipline (other than philosophy) that aims to understand humanity in all of its complexity has ended up divided into subdisciplines whose partisans often see little in common with each other: those studying “physical” (or “biological”) anthropology present humanity as simply an anatomical system developing under evolutionary pressure in the same way other species do, while “cultural” (or “social”) anthropologists—while acknowledging the biological side—present humanity as above all an agent for recognizing and establishing meaning in the natural world and its own institutions.
Given these apparently separate and independent methods, it is not clear how we are to understand what Marcel Mauss called “techniques of the body” 4 like walking or swimming. These actions do not come from instinct (and so are not purely “natural”) but rat