Commentary on Subjective Spirit, Chapter 23
Why “Psychology” Here Means Something Else
The warning is necessary, and Hegel speaks it himself — already in the introduction to the philosophy of spirit (§ 378).
He distinguishes there three approaches, all of which he rejects. Pneumatology, or “so-called rational psychology,” treats spirit as “abstract metaphysics of the understanding” — it asks whether the soul is simple, immortal, immaterial, and makes it into a thing. Empirical psychology observes and describes “the particular faculties of spirit,” but does not achieve “the true unification of the singular and the universal.” And mere observation of “contingent particularity” achieves nothing in any case.
What Hegel does instead is neither the one nor the other: he does not ask what faculties there are and how they interact, but which forms there are in which spirit relates to a content — and how they follow one another.
And from this the warning he explicitly formulates: the difficulty consists “for the understanding, in freeing itself from the separation it has once arbitrarily made among the faculties of the soul, feeling, the thinking spirit, and in arriving at the representation that in the human being there is only one reason in feeling, willing, and thinking.”
That is the sentence on which everything hangs. Whoever regards intuition, representation, thinking, feeling, and will as five faculties working side by side has missed the part before even reading it. It is a single activity in different forms. [KF]