Embodiment: Spirit, Material– Maternal Dependence, and the Problem of the in utero

Abstract

Chapter six, in turn, begins to critically read Hegel against Hegel. It reads his notion of spirit (beginning with finite subjectivity) in terms of the concept of nature established in Part I. The chapter argues that the problem nature poses for subjective spirit presents itself in two ‘symptomatic’ moments of Hegel’s anthropology. First, in his analysis of subjectivity’s embodiment, its “primordial grasp on the world.” Second, in his analysis of the fetus-mother dynamic. Reconstructing both analyses, the chapter argues that they reveal spirit as over-immersed in exterior determinations and unable to assert itself as an autarkic center, as subject. Over-immersion in its environmental milieu, the chapter argues, is the problem of spirit’s origins, i.e. the problem of nature. It must move beyond this displacement in externality. However, there are no facile guarantees that this will transpire in the concrete actuality of life. Therefore, the origin of spirit is a developmental confrontation with nature and a protracted attempt to break with it.