G.W.F. Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was the German idealist philosopher whose dialectical logic — the movement by which each determinate concept calls up its own opposite and is sublated into a higher unity — became, for the line of post-Jungian thought elaborated by Wolfgang Giegerich, the indispensable philosophical instrument for carrying the depth-psychological project through to its logical conclusion. His major works — The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), the Science of Logic (1812–1816), the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817), and the posthumous lectures on religion, art, aesthetics, and history — constitute the most ambitious single philosophical system of the nineteenth century.

For the depth tradition, Hegel’s importance runs through two channels. The first is the direct debt of Jung to the German idealist vocabulary of Geist, the Absolute, and the dialectical unfolding of self-consciousness — a debt Jung was intermittently willing to acknowledge. The second, more consequential for the Seba lineage, is Giegerich’s insistence that the honest continuation of Jung’s project requires Hegel: that what Jung called the reality of the psyche must be thought through as the self-augmenting logos of Heraclitus as taken up and formalized by Hegel’s Logic, and that the sentimental-imagistic register of much archetypal work must give way to genuine conceptual labor. See wolfgang-giegerich and dialectical-psychology.

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• wolfgang-giegerich
• dialectical-psychology
• logos-self-augmenting