Abstract

In this article I want to show how Hegel in his anthropology, being the first section of his philosophy of subjective spirit, solves the mind-body problem. Rejecting the tendency, present in almost all classical psychology, to consider the soul as well as the body as different 'things', which in some mysterious way have to be united, Hegel emphasises the immediate unity of the soul and its corporeity. All psychic processes (e.g. sensation and feeling) are to be considered as being fundamentally psychosomatic. Corporeity is not exterior to the soul; it is rather an essential characteristic of the soul itself. Even the world is not to be considered as being exterior to the soul. In the first instance our world is a subjective world being the very substance of the soul itself. Only for consciousness our body appears to belong to an objective, exterior world. The objectivity and exteriority of the world and our body, however, is not to be considered as a simple datum. It is the result of the act of consciousness itself. Hegel's approach of the mind-body problem is dialectical, since it accounts for the unity as well as for the duality of the soul and its corporeity. It presupposes a dynamic conception of the mind, which by no means can be reduced to a simple substance provided with a number of fixed faculties