Abstract

This work considers two Hegelian texts, The Phenomenology of Mind and the Philosophy of Right. Their dialectics of want and desire are explicated as a phenomenological psychology of motivation, when this psychology of motivation is taken as the ground of an Hegelian psychology of learning, and a philosophy of education. ;The work does not limit itself to relating Hegelian and Freudian theory. Rather, a general approach to the field of traditional psychology is taken, and this approach is informed by nearly all major theories of motivation since Freud's. Further, a distinction is made between traditional natural scientific psychology and a phenomenological psychology. The Hegelian analysis makes use of natural scientific psychology, but is ultimately articulated in terms of a phenomenological existential psychology. ;A phenomenological existential psychology holds that the world is first of all lived, and that as an existential fact this world already has a meaning prior to any which may be neurotically derived . Thus for a phenomenological existential or human scientific psychology the quality of reality with which an object is invested may be reducible to one scientific presupposition, but this presupposition is in fact the lived world, which understands its own constitution to be an act, the nature of which, as act, is itself under constant scrutiny, and by no means to be regarded as something already and inevitably given. This attitude is not a naturally occurring one. Rather, it is rational, and differs from a fully developed Hegelian and philosophical approach only in that the latter has already determined the life world to be constituted as an act of Mind