hegel
Hegel occupies a structurally formative position within the depth-psychology corpus, operating less as a subject of direct psychological commentary than as a philosophical matrix from which the discipline’s most characteristic concepts draw their logic. The corpus reveals three distinct axes of engagement. First, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit—with its dialectical narrative of spirit’s alienation and circuitous return to self-recognition—provides Abrams, Ricoeur, and others with the foundational vocabulary of estrangement and reintegration that depth psychology inherits. The Hegelian Aufhebung (annul, preserve, transcend) functions as the structural precursor to both individuation and the Jungian dialectic of conscious and unconscious. Second, Jung himself explicitly names Hegel a ‘psychologist manqué,’ crediting him with proto-psychological insight while claiming that philosophy arrested where psychology should have begun. Third, Derrida and Heidegger subject the Hegelian system to critical interrogation—its privileging of the ‘now,’ its treatment of sign and spirit, its sublation of otherness—moves that resonate with post-Jungian deconstructions of the self-enclosed psyche. Armstrong’s comparison of Hegel to Kabbalah introduces a further theological dimension. Across all registers, Hegel names the problem of mediation: how consciousness travels through negation to self-knowledge, and how the personal and historical are always already intertwined.
It was always my view that Hegel was a psychologist manqué, in much the same way as I am a philosopher manqué.
Jung articulates a structural complementarity between his own psychology and Hegel’s philosophy, positioning both as disciplines arrested at the threshold of the other’s domain.
, Letters Volume 1: 1906-1950, 1973thesis
Hegel has to invent a language to accommodate his special vision of the history of mankind… the key dialectical term, aufheben (to annul, preserve, and transcend), is the most consequential pun since Christ said, ‘Thou art Peter.’
Abrams identifies the Hegelian Aufhebung as the pivotal operative concept through which the Phenomenology accomplishes its vision of spirit’s self-transformative journey.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
human consciousness becomes aware that it has been its own betrayer, and can be its own redeemer… the end product… is the equivalent of the Passion—at once ‘the recollection and the Golgotha of the absolute spirit.’
Abrams argues that Hegel’s Phenomenology recasts Christian salvation narrative as the immanent self-redemption of consciousness through its own dialectical suffering.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
Georg Wilhelm Hegel evolved a philosophy which was in some respects strikingly similar to Kabbalah… the Spirit was willing to suffer limitation and exile in order to achieve true spirituality and self-consciousness.
Armstrong frames Hegel’s concept of Spirit as structurally cognate with Kabbalistic theosophy, where divine self-limitation and exile are preconditions for the attainment of full self-consciousness.
, A History of God, 1993thesis
the final stage now constitutes a recovered unity of spirit with itself that ‘comprehends’ the totality of the differentiations which have evolved during the process of all three circuitous stages.
Abrams maps the triadic structure of Hegel’s system as a great circle of circles, wherein the spirit’s ultimate self-comprehension retroactively encompasses all prior alienation.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
Hegel’s path, on the other hand, is the Romantic way along an inclined plane back toward the point of origin… the figure of the circuitous journey homeward.
Abrams contrasts Enlightenment linear progress with the distinctively Hegelian-Romantic figure of the circuitous return, which structures the Phenomenology as a journey of spiritual homecoming.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
I have expressed this reintegration in terms of a ‘return’ to the right hemisphere… REINTEGRATION AS AUFHEBUNG.
McGilchrist appropriates the Hegelian Aufhebung as the neurological and philosophical model for the reintegration of hemispheric processing, where left-hemisphere analysis is preserved and transcended by right-hemisphere synthesis.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
Hegel’s book, taken as a literary form, is thus one of the earliest, yet at the same time the most intricate and extreme, of modern involuted works of the imagination.
Abrams reads the Phenomenology as a literary artefact structurally parallel to Wordsworth’s Prelude—a representative spiritual autobiography that justifies suffering as a condition of education.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
We have to mobilize the force of denunciation resonating, before the Nietzschean thunderbolt, in Hegel’s warning shot… a virulent critique of the misinterpretation of conscience in the pages that the Phenomenology of Spirit devotes to the ‘moral view of the world.’
Ricoeur enlists Hegel’s Phenomenology as a precursor to Nietzsche’s hermeneutics of suspicion, specifically in its critique of bad-faith moralizing conscience.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
The entire system of concepts organized around Hegel’s fundamental assertion—according to which time is the existence (Dasein) of the concept, absolute spirit in its automanifestation—depends upon a vulgar determination of time.
Derrida, following Heidegger, critiques Hegel’s identification of time with the self-manifestation of Absolute Spirit as resting on an unreflective, ‘levelled’ conception of temporality as a sequence of ‘nows.’
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
Following the classical framework of the Hegelian critique, Chinese culture and writing are reproached simultaneously for their empiricism (naturalism, historicism) and their formalism (mathematizing abstraction). A typical movement of the Hegelian text.
Derrida exposes the internal contradiction in Hegel’s critique of Chinese thought, wherein the dialectical system simultaneously employs the empiricist and formalist procedures it censures in others.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
Hegel has shown that the absolute and infinite… This method of opposites has supplied new instruments of thought for the solution of metaphysical problems, and has thrown down many of the walls within which the human mind was confined.
The Platonic commentary credits Hegel’s dialectical method of opposites with liberating metaphysical inquiry from the impasse of the infinite, a move structurally anticipating depth psychology’s treatment of opposites.
, Sophist, -360supporting
Hegel is right in preferring the concrete to the abstract, in setting actuality before possibility, in excluding from the philosopher’s vocabulary the word ‘inconceivable.’ But he is too well satisfied with his own system.
The commentary grants Hegel’s epistemological preference for the concrete while indicting the systemic closure of Hegelianism as a philosophically self-confirming totality impervious to the unknown.
, Sophist, -360supporting
in Hegel he finds glimpses of the genius of the poet and of the common sense of the man of the world. His system is not cast in a poetic form, but neither has all this load of logic extinguished in him the feeling of poetry.
The commentary discovers in Hegel an irreducible poetic sensibility surviving beneath the logical apparatus, connecting him temperamentally to Goethe and Schiller and to the German mystical tradition.
, Sophist, -360supporting
the historical order of thought has been adapted to the logical, so we have reason for suspecting that the Hegelian logic has been in some degree adapted to the order of thought in history.
The commentary raises a methodological critique of the Hegelian system’s circular relationship between historical and logical ordering, anticipating later accusations of ideological self-confirmation.
, Sophist, -360supporting
‘Necessary bifurcation [Entzweiung] is a factor of life which forms itself through eternal opposing, and totality is possible in the highest liveliness only through restoration out of the highest separation.’
Abrams cites Hegel’s doctrine of necessary Entzweiung—essential division as the precondition of living totality—as the philosophical ground for the Romantic dialectic of fragmentation and reintegration.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
Hegel’s deflationary critique shaped the modern German philosophical reception of the Hellenistic schools… the Hellenistic schools’ ideal of sovereign, rational self-mastery offers nothing more than an illusory substitute for civic freedom.
Sharpe and Ure trace the downstream influence of Hegel’s dismissal of Stoic and Epicurean withdrawal from the world, establishing his critique as the dominant framework through which German and subsequent thinkers read Hellenistic philosophy.
, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting
Hegel’s deflationary critique shaped the modern German philosophical reception of the Hellenistic schools… the Hellenistic schools’ ideal of sovereign, rational self-mastery offers nothing more than an illusory substitute for civic freedom.
Sharpe and Ure trace the downstream influence of Hegel’s dismissal of Stoic and Epicurean withdrawal from the world, establishing his critique as the dominant framework through which German and subsequent thinkers read Hellenistic philosophy.
, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting
In many ways, Hegel and the young Hegelians established the parameters… their polemic against the nineteenth-century institutionalization and professionalization of philosophy.
Sharpe and Ure situate Hegel’s institutionalized philosophy as the foil against which Schopenhauer and Nietzsche mounted their recovery of philosophy as a transformative way of life.
, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021aside
In many ways, Hegel and the young Hegelians established the parameters… their polemic against the nineteenth-century institutionalization and professionalization of philosophy.
Sharpe and Ure situate Hegel’s institutionalized philosophy as the foil against which Schopenhauer and Nietzsche mounted their recovery of philosophy as a transformative way of life.
, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021aside
the realm of Aesthetic Semblance, we find that ideal of equality fulfilled which the Enthusiast would fain see realized in substance. Hege[l]
Abrams marks Hegel’s reception of Schiller’s aesthetic state as a transitional reference point in the broader Romantic argument for art as the prefiguration of social and spiritual freedom.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971aside
soul rises to become Consciousness… the soul in the habit of sensing and of its concrete self felt is in itself the being-for-itself… its free being-for-itself of free universality is the higher awakening of the soul to the ‘I.’
Derrida cites Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind on the soul’s transition to consciousness, providing the structural account of subjectification that underlies his own analysis of the sign and presence.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982aside