The Other Hegel: The Anthropology and Spirit’s Birth from within the Bio‑Material World

This chapter functions as a preparatory overview of Part II as a whole. First, it historically contextualizes Hegel’s speculative anthropology in terms of developments in empirical psychology and anthropology from the period; second, it emphasizes the ways in which Hegel was fascinated throughout the course of his philosophical activity by the perplexing question of how anything resembling the free self-referential activity of spirit might emerge from within the coordinates of blind material nature. Simultaneously, it emphasizes not only the significant role Hegel assigned to the results of empirical inquiry but, more importantly, the thorough-going materialism operative in his analysis of the genesis of finite subjectivity. In this sense, the chapter develops a portrait of the other Hegel: one concerned with materialism, science, embodiment, and various forms of pathology which permeate the life of subjectivity.