1001Philosophers

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel vs Soren Kierkegaard on Mind

Hegel treats mind (Geist) as the developing self-consciousness of Spirit, with the existing individual as one moment in the larger logic of self-realization. Kierkegaard insists that the existing individual cannot be subsumed in any such logic: the deepest movements of the mind are the inwardness of anxiety, dread, and the leap of faith, and these resist the dialectical mediation Hegel made central.

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 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel vs Soren Kierkegaard comparison. To browse philosophy more widely on this theme, see the the Mind quotes hub.

Representative quotes on mind

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.

Soren Kierkegaard on mind

  • “Purity of heart is to will one thing.”

    The two guides call out to a man early and late. And yet, no, for when remorse calls to a man it is always late. The call to find the way again by seeking out God in the confession of sins is always at the eleventh hour. Whether you are young or old, whether you have sinned much or little, whether you have offended much or neglected much, the guilt makes this call come at the eleventh hour. The in

  • “The reason I cannot really say that I positively enjoy nature is that I do not quite realize what it is that I enjoy. A work of art, on the other hand, I can grasp. I can — if I may put it this way — find that Archimedian point, and as soon as I have found it, everything is readily clear for me. Then I am able to pursue this one main idea and see how all the details serve to illuminate it.”

    Journals of Søren Kierkegaard 1A 8, 1834

  • “Journal entry, Gilleleie (1 August 1835) Journals 1A; this is considered to be one of the earliest statements of existentialist thought.”

    What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.

  • Attributed to Soren Kierkegaard:

    “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”

  • Attributed to Soren Kierkegaard:

    “The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”

All 7 Soren Kierkegaard quotes on mind →

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