1001Philosophers

Friedrich Nietzsche vs Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel on Mind

Hegel treats mind (Geist) as the developing self-consciousness of Spirit, working itself out through history toward absolute self-knowledge. Nietzsche treats the same notion as a metaphysical inflation of the European philosophical psyche, and analyzes the actual mind as a battleground of drives whose surface unity conceals competing wills and ranks of power. The Hegelian mind ascends toward self-realization; the Nietzschean mind is to be analyzed genealogically.

About this topic

Philosophy of mind asks what mental states are, how they relate to bodies and brains, and how thought, perception, and feeling are possible at all. Classical sources from Plato through Descartes treated the mind as a distinct substance, while later philosophers proposed varieties of materialism, functionalism, and emergentism in its place. Phenomenologists in the twentieth century turned attention to consciousness as it is lived from the inside. Contemporary philosophy of mind works in close dialogue with cognitive science.

For a side-by-side overview of the two philosophers more broadly, see the full Friedrich Nietzsche vs Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel comparison. To browse philosophy more widely on this theme, see the the Mind quotes hub.

Representative quotes on mind

Friedrich Nietzsche on mind

  • Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:

    “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

  • Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:

    “There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”

  • Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:

    “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”

  • Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:

    “The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel on mind

  • “An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking.”

    Jede Vorstellung ist eine Verallgemeinerung, und diese gehört dem Denken an. Etwas allgemein machen, heißt, es denken. ("Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse", Berlin, 1833, p. 35)

  • “To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them.”

    As quoted in Inwardness and Existence (1989) by Walter A. Davis, p. 18

  • “Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself.”

    Difference of the Fichtean and Schellingean System of Philosophy , cited in W. Kaufmann, Hegel (1966), p. 49

  • “Hegel , Philosophy of Mind (quoted by W. Wallace & A. V. Miller in Philosophy of Mind, Oxford 2010; also quoted in other words by Slavoj Žižek in A Glance into the Archives of Islam , Lacan dot com, 1997).”

    In Mohammedanism the narrow principle of the Jews is expanded into universality and thereby overcome. Here, God is no longer, as in the Far East, regarded as existent in an immediately sensory way but is conceived as the one infinite power elevated above all the multiplicity of the world. Mohammedanism is, therefore, in the strictest sense of the word, the religion of sublimity.

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