Commentary on Subjective Spirit, Chapter 9
What “Soul” Means Here
The title is the most misleading thing, and Hegel’s first sentence seems to confirm it: the soul is “not only immaterial for itself but the universal immateriality of nature, its simple ideal life” (§ 389).
This sounds like panpsychism — as if everything material harbored something spiritual. Something else is meant, and Hegel says it in the same paragraph: in this still abstract determination, the soul is “only the sleep of spirit — the passive nous of Aristotle, which is potentially all things.”
The passive nous is the capacity to be determined — not a thing that does something. The soul in this first sense is the possibility of forming a spirit, not a spirit already there.
And § 395 gives the rule for the whole section. Hegel writes there that the soul is “individuated into an individual subject,” but “this subjectivity comes into consideration here only as individuation of natural determinateness.”
Stekeler reads this as information about word usage: “Soul” here means nothing other than “I as subject,” restricted to the natural side — animal capacities, reactions, behaviors. What becomes of this, as a freely acting person, is later called spirit or self-consciousness.[1]
So whoever searches for the soul as an object is searching for the wrong thing. The section deals with what a living being brings with it and how a subject arises from it. [KF]
Stekeler-Weithofer, Hegels Realphilosophie, on § 395 (p. 533). ↩︎