The Soul’s Intensity and Individuality in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit

Abstract

In this paper, I explore a peculiar triad found in Hegel’s later anthropological thought: individuality, intensity, and daimon (or fate), the latter identified with what Hegel calls one’s “intensive form of individuality.” In his notion of the soul’s intensity, Hegel is reconceptualizing Kant’s idea of intensity of the soul towards an anthropological theory of individuality and the individual unconscious. Within this individual intensive “nucleus,” Kern, one’s “fate,” Schicksal, is enclosed, directing a human individual towards his “sphere” within Gemeinwesen, the free community of spirit.