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DANIEL BERTHOLD-BOND
INTRODUCTION
theory of insanity or madness (Verrucktheit)has been largely ne
glected. This is partly due, no doubt, to the facts that his one detailed
discussion of the topic is confined to a few pages inhis Encyclopaedia,1 and
Hegel's
that he makes only passing reference to insanity inhis other works. And yet
many of the themes Hegel develops inhis anatomy ofmadness are mirrored
inhis phenomenology of the healthy or rational mind.2 Madness is inmany
respects the invertedmirror of the developed consciousness, incorporating
the structures of rationality within a different construction of the relation
ical project.
One such theme, which will serve as the focus of the present article, is
the role of the unconscious inmental life.As in the case ofmadness, Hegel
does not often directly refer to the unconscious inhis writings, and does not
explicitly develop this concept as a central principle of his phenomenology.
We might therefore think that Hegel is simply one more of "the philoso
phers" so frequently criticized byNietzsche and Freud, who, as Freud says,
"protest that they could not conceive of such a monstrosity as the uncon
"
scious, and are thus doomed to a fundamental misunderstanding of human
experience
1991 The
Pennsylvania
State University,
University
Park, PA.
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194
DANIEL BERTHOLD-BOND
body.(GS Pref?2)
And
of.
. . the
unconscious,"
as one
... a
misunderstanding of the
commentator
suggests.4
The
idea
unconscious
unconscious
inmadness
points towards the domain of the body, nature, instinct. As Nietzsche says,
the new psychology will be a "physio-psychology, . . . daring to descend to
the depths," and will "translate man back into nature," into the "eternal
basic text of homo natura" recovering the biological roots of human
experience
spiritualistic tradition of
speaks
ing them back to the "infernal regions" of the unconscious?Hegel
ofmadness as a reversion to the unconscious, where "the earthly elements"
of the body have theirhome, and "the dark, infernal powers of the heart are
set free." (PM ? 408 6k Z) Only a phenomenology of these infernal regions
of mental
life.
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195
consciousness
Consciousness
613)
And Nietzsche:
The world of which we can become conscious
sign-world.(GS ? 354)
isonly a surface-and
the unconscious
shadows of our feelings" (GS ? 179), he would still agree on the intimate
connection between thought and feeling, consciousness and the uncon
scious. Nature, the domain of spirit sleeping and hence unconscious to
itself, is a "riddle," Hegel says, since while it appears alien to spirit, it is
become pathological."6
Indeed, we will see thatNietzsche views a certain
formof illness as essential to health. Further, Nietzsche tends to locate the
source of disease not in the unconscious, as Hegel and Freud do, but in
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196
consciousness.
DANIEL BERTHOLD-BOND
itself is often described as a disease and a
Nietzsche
will often stand as counterpoint
such,
to Hegel and Freud in their thoughts on illness.
Consciousness
state.7 As
pathological
rather than companion
displacing the centrality of the reality principle and the "laws of the ego" by
a more primitive language of fantasy.
Hegel's and Freud's definition ofmental illness as a regression shows that
they both see madness as presupposing a healthy consciousness (see PM ?
408 Z). Insanity is a response to the developed mind's encounter with an
is
experience of pain that it cannot cope with. In this sense, madness
ironically a therapeutic attempt, an effort to heal what Hegel calls the
"wounds of spirit" through a self-protective gesture of retreat.9
But there is an even stronger relation between the mad and healthy
selves than the fact that madness presupposes health: Insanity and ra
tionality share some of the same basic underlying structures. For both Hegel
and Freud the basic desire of all mind is to achieve a reconciliation and
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197
unity between the inner and outer worlds, subject and object, self and
other, and yet all mind is perpetually confronted with the experience of
disunity and contradiction. This iswhy for Freud ego development "con
initial state of unity of
sists in a departure from primary narcissism"?the
self and world in the infant, prior to the "cathexis" or "binding" of an
instinct of life,of growth, the drive toward union with the other, while the
death instinct is regressive and destructive, the urge to recreate and restore
a primal sense of unity and rest, "to return to the quiescence of the
inorganic world." (BPP 62)
There is a quite similar duality inHegel's portrait of desire. While Hegel
ismost known forhis emphasis on the progressive, evolutionary character
of desire, there is also what Ihave called elsewhere a "second face of desire"
in his dialectic, which is retrogressive and nostalgic, calling consciousness
back
to a past
that
it yearns
for as a scene
of peace
and
repose.11
In madness,
the power of the death instinct, or Hegel's second face of desire, becomes
dominant, leading the rational consciousness back to the archaic world of
the unconscious. As for the life instinct, inmadness it isdisplaced from its
search for unity in the external world and now assumes the function of
autonomy. (PS 1040 While Hegel shows that this desire to completely
coincide with oneself is inherently unstable, the condition of the 'I am V
remains a continuing object of nostalgic desire in all the subsequent shapes
of consciousness, a sort of seductive siren's song promising a sense of
womblike
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198
DANIEL BERTHOLD-BOND
Freud also sees the goal of the instincts to be the attainment of unity.
the "oceanic feeling" of "being one with the external world as a
whole," is explained by Freud as a nostalgic vestige of the firstperiod of
Thus
infancy,when the ego does not yet distinguish anything outside itself. (CD
117ff)Our instincts reflect the universal human desire to recover this state
exorcise
(BPP 12ff,38)
goal" of quiescence.
This basic structural dynamic of the mind, the desire for unity which
leads to themovement of withdrawal, is, again, precisely the fundamental
structure of madness. Nostalgia, whether qualified as madness or not, is
always on the borderline of disease,
sion to a more primitive condition
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199
occurs when the rational mind has reverted to the lifeof feeling,
and when the connections to reality have been severed, while the healthy
mind retains these rational threads of association with reality. But Hegel
should have considered this question more carefully,13 since his phenome
nology of the developed, rational consciousness is so strongly committed to
Madness
showing how the connections between self and world are never stable.
The goal of the unity of consciousness and reality is constantly under
mined, beset again and again by the essential "negativity" of lifewhich
entails an "infinite pain." (PM ? 382) The path of consciousness seeking its
reconciliation with reality is a road of loss, a "pathway of despair," to use
Hegel's well-known image.We need not go as far as Jean Hyppolite, who
sees this essential negativity of life as itself entailing that "the essence of
is to be mad [forHegel]."14 It does seem plausible, however, to assume
that the struggle of the rational mind with its experience of despair will
constantly threaten consciousness with the possibility of becoming radi
cally dislocated from itsworld, and beckon the mind to "sink back" into
man
madness.
Freud takes the question of the distinction between health and disease
more seriously than Hegel, and tends to see the substantial mirroring of the
formal structures of these states as blurring the line of demarcation. The
difference between madness and health is essentially a practical rather than
a theoretical one, having to do simplywith a matter of degree: "If you take
up a theoretical point of view and disregard thismatter of quantity [degree],
as of an antithesis.(WP ? 812)
Health
I have delayed Nietzsche's entry into the dialogue with Hegel and Freud
until this point because, typically, he ismuch more elusive inhis definitions
of health and illness.16 One might try to discover similarities with Hegel's
and Freud's characterizations
of mental
disease
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200
DANIEL BERTHOLD-BOND
movement
gives it up again and again, and must give it up." (GS ? 382)
By this valuation, genuine health incorporatesdisease as itsclosest com
panion, its secret sharer, itsnecessary other. The great health sees disease as
necessary for self-transcendence, as an education into new ways to see and
create: It is a "health which cannot do without even illness itself, as an
instrument and fishhook of knowledge, . . .which permits paths tomany
opposing ways of thought." (HH Pref ? 4) Disease is the descent or going
under (Untergang) that is necessary for health: Only "from such abysses,
from such severe sickness," is one able to "return newborn, having shed
one's skin." (GS Pref ?4)
Nietzsche
thus revalues the opposition between health and disease,
reconstructing the pedestrian definition of health as herd morality, and
disease as any way of thinking that calls the common value of "rationality"
and tap the source of a more elemental creativity. That which is truly sick
seeks to repress nature, the body, the unconscious world of instinct; of these
our rational, logical schemes are merely epiphenomenal
sign-languages.
The common ideal of health, which forNietzsche is pathology, is a sort of
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201
ority of the physician over the philosopher, and the deposing of the pursuit
ofTruth with the agenda of diagnosing the causes of cultural pathology, the
sources of decadence, weariness, nihilism, ressentiment, and guilt.
Hegel, of course, has gone down in the annals of the history of philoso
the pursuer of Absolute
phy as the consummate Weltanschauung-builder,
Truth in the grand style.And as such he is seen as the archetypal opponent
of the Nietzschean
and Freudian critiques of philosophy. Yet we must be
constructions
of reality.
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202
DANIEL BERTHOLD-BOND
standbsenIndividualitatV
(PM ? 400)23
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203
(Tl p. 486)?there
nature, Apollo with Dionysus, the "beautiful illusion of the inner [dream]
world of fantasy" (BT ? 1) with the primal unconscious force of nature
which is the heart of all great art. Nietzsche argues that art becomes sick
when dream is detached from nature, as occurred inGreek tragedy with
(See BT ?? 10-15)
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204
DANIEL BERTHOLD-BOND
our unconscious?both,
instinct" of
pre-historical way of being, as the "innermost, unconscious
to
is
For
all
socialization.
which
nature,
(RH 30)
genuine history to
prior
to
we
move
must
of
T
of 'We', which
the
that
from
arise,
standpoint
requires, Hegel insists, that the purely private, isolating language of feeling
be sacrificed, renounced, surrendered, (see PS 136-39, 212f) Similarly,
regression from reason to feeling, fromhistory to fantasy, is the emergence
of disease.26
At least at firstglance, itwould seem that Freud and Nietzsche depart
fromHegel on this point, and would see his call for the sacrifice of the
particularity of feeling as simply a call for repression, and hence as an
invitation to disease itself. For Nietzsche, the "slanderers of nature" (GS ?
294) who sacrifice the body and fightagainst instinct as a sickness, are the
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MADNESS
205
Finally, Nietzsche
regards the sublimation of passion and instinct as
as
to
crucial
health
well. And like Hegel and Freud, he looks to art as a
paradigm of sublimation. "Every artist knows how far from any feeling of
lettinghimself go his 'most natural' state is"?the goal isnot a "laisser aller"
but rather an "education" and "discipline" of the passions; not a crude
reveling in nature but self-conquest, self-elevation, self-transcendence.
(BGE ? 188) "In man creature and creator are united: in man there is
material, fragment, excess, clay, . . . chaos; but inman there is also creator,
form-giver," the artistic force by which the chaos of nature is "formed,
broken, forged, torn, burnt, made
incandescent,
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206
DANIEL BERTHOLD-BOND
who needs his masks and concealments, his "citadel of secrecy," who prizes
interiorityover community and silence over language. (BGE ?? 26, 289)
"All community makes men?somehow,
somewhere, sometime 'com
mon,'" "unclean," unhealthy. (BGE ? 284) Nietzsche's great "nausea" is in
fact his "nausea over man," which can be cured only by solitude, a "return
tomyself."(EH I ? 8)
idealization of the
Second, while Freud does not share Nietzsche's
of a genuinely
is
the
of
he
individual,
possibility
skeptical
equally
private
our
individual is
For
social
construction
of
Freud,
"every
being.
healthy
of
sublimation
an
social
culture"
and
of
every
9),
enemy
(FI
virtually
instinct is inherently unstable, precisely because it demands so much by
way of sacrifice. (IL 23) Hegel ismore optimistic here, seeing the human
struggle forcommunity and social synthesis as a genuinely achievable goal,
and indeed as a goal that has been achieved in every great epoch of world
history.
We must be careful, however, not to reduce Hegel to the sort of cartoon
image that compares his optimism to that of "Voltaire's Doctor Pangloss
[who] sees only the harmony of all things."31 Hegel isnot ignorant of the
force of the death instinct, the destructive power that lies so close to the
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MADNESS
of the people
207
what Hegel calls a "double center" of reality.The mad self is "driven out of
its [rational] mind, shifted out from the center of its actual world and . . .
has two centers"?the displaced, decentered, lost but still recollected trace
(as in a dream) of its rationality, and the new center constructed by the life
of feeling. It is in this sense that Hegel refers to madness as a double
personality: "The insane subject is therefore in communion with himself in
a subject
the negative of himself, . . . but knows himself [only as] ...
two
into
different
408
?
(PM
Z)
disrupted
personalities."
Freud also sees mental
and dreaming, and between reality and appearance, the idea of a double
center of reality becomes questionable. The objective, external reality of
which Hegel and Freud speak so confidently, which is displaced by the
fantastic realities ofmadness, is "abolished" byNietzsche and can no longer
serve as a standard by which tomeasure its "other," the reality projected by
the mind. On the other hand, Nietzsche partly restores the distinction
two centers of reality in his diagnosis of neurotic illness. For
he
anticipates themajor features of Freud's analysis of religion as a
example,
neurosis, which seeks to replace the reality of the earth with the myth of
between
the reality of the body with the illusion of the eternal soul, the
reality of thisworld with the superstition of another world. Thus there are
certain givens of reality forNietzsche,
against which a kind of mental
in
be
the
described
may
projection
language ofmyth, illusion, superstition.
But there is an even deeper sense in which Nietzsche may be seen to
heaven,
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208
DANIEL BERTHOLD-BOND
model
as entailed by the descent into illness. But while Hegel and Freud diagnose
this as pathology, Nietzsche sees it as the potentiality for a great health.
Illness that isnot simply a neurotic denial of instinct brings us closer to the
world of the body and nature and also to the source of all human creativity.
iswhy it is "impossible to be an artist and not to be sick." (WP ? 811)
Neither Hegel nor Freud denies an essential ontological duality of
consciousness, nor sees health as an overcoming of this duality. Freud's
whole psychoanalytic theory insists on a basic doubleness of the lifeof the
mind, a dynamic interplay between conscious and unconscious structures,
and defines neurosis as the repression of instinct. And Hegel's phenome
a "notwendige
nology is committed to what Friedrich Grimmlinger calls
to
The self
mind.32
is
all
internal
that
and
"Doppeltheit"
Zweideutigkeit"
This
209
scious" feature of action (RH 35) that accounts for the "double meaning" of
the deed with the result that the self "become[s] a riddle to itself." (PS 220)
The unconscious, nature, isour internal riddle, and Hegel no more sees the
than does
solution to this riddle to be the denial of the unconscious
Nietzsche or Freud.33 We cannot remove the warp of history from itswoof:
himself."(PS 43)
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210
DANIEL BERTHOLD-BOND
And yet a close reading of his largely overlooked thoughts on madness and
the unconscious shows that these themes are more important than the
space he allots to them might suggest.We get a good sense of the impor
tance of an understanding of madness when we read that "insanity [is] a
Bard College
NOTES
1. In the anthropology section of the Phibsophy ofMind, section 408, and Zusatz (122
translation: see fh 3 below).
139 inMiller's
one of the very few scholars to have written on Hegel's
2. Darrel Christensen,
theory of
and the Role
Verrucktheit, makes this point as well. See "The Theory ofMental Derangement
in Hegel,"
The Personalist 49 (1968): 433-53,
and "Hegel's
and Function of Subjectivity
International Philosophical Quarterly
Analysis and Freud's Psychoanalysis,"
Phenomenological
between Hegel's
I have explored a number of the connections
356-78.
8, no. 3 (1968):
project in a recently completed companion
theory of madness and his larger philosophical
of Reason:
to the present essay, "The Decentering
Hegel's Theory of Madness,"
forthcoming in International Studies in Philosophy.
in
and Freud will be given parenthetically
3. References to the works ofHegel, Nietzsche,
the text and abbreviated. Works cited are as follows:
article
HEGEL
References
are to sections
(?), and
'Z' designates
A Selections
1969.
PCR The Positivity of theChristian Religion, inHegel's Early Theological Writings, ed., T. M.
Press, 1977.
Knox, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania
Oxford: Clarendon
PM Hegel's Philosophy ofMind,
Press, 1978?
tr.,William Wallace,
vol. 3 of the Encyclopaedia of thePhilosophical Sciences.
PN Hegel's Phibsophy ofNature,
Press, 1970?vol.
tr.,A. V. Miller, Oxford: Clarendon
of the Encycbpaedia.
PS Phenomenology of Spirit, tr.,A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
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211
Reason
Introduction
tr.,William
Wallace,
IN: Bobbs-Merrill,
Oxford:
Clarendon
1953?the
Press,
1975?
NIETZSCHE
references are to sections
All
BGE
ed. W.
Kaufmann,
D Daybreak,
tr., R. J.Hollingdale,
Cambridge:
Cambridge
in The Basic Writings.
EH Ecce Homo,
in The Basic Writings.
GM The Genealogy ofMorals,
University
Press,
New
1982.
1967.
House,
FREUD
references are to the Standard Edition of theComplete Psychological Works
Freud, 24 vols., ed., James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1953fY.
AS An Autobiographical
Study, 1925, SE vol. 20.
BPP Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920, SE vol. 18.
All
CD
Civilization
and itsDiscontents,
1923, SE vol.
of Sigmund
18.
Psychoanalysis
1919, SE vol.
17.
220f,249,RH 26-36.
which
I have
been unable
to locate. Since
Jaspers nowhere
specifies which
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of
212
DANIEL BERTHOLD-BOND
Nietzsche's works correspond to the different volumes of the collected works, Iwill refer the
reader to pages in Jaspers's text, and, for those more fortunate in their search for Elizabeth's
to volume and page numbers of that edition. The present citation is from
Kleinoktavausgabe,
becomes conscious
becomes by the same token
thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, herd signal, . . . falsification, reduction to
. . .
the growth of consciousness
becomes a danger; and anyone
Ultimately,
superficialities.
who lives among the most conscious Europeans even knows that it is a disease." Also BGE ?
constitutes only one state of our spiritual and psychic world
357: "What we call consciousness
state). ..."
(perhaps a pathological
shallow,
8. Christensen
Freud
that Hegel and Freud offer shared analyses of such themes as anxiety and guilt, projection,
dreams, and transference.
9. See Freud's notion of "secondary gain" and the "need for illness," IL 382ff, EL 49, ISA
99f.
10. Nietzsche
also often presents a basic duality of instinct, described variously as the will
denial,
Journal ofAbnormal and Social Psychology 25 (no. 2), 1930, pp. 259f.
Derangement,"
in
and Psychoanalysis,"
tr.,Albert Richer,
14. Jean Hyppolite,
"Hegel's Phenomenology
Warren E. Steinkraus, ed., New Studies inHegel's Philosophy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston,
1971), 64.
vol. 5, p. 159.
15. Jaspers, 112; Kleinoktavausgabe
16. One
factor is that when Nietzsche
complicating
sometimes
has mental
image."(BGE ? 9)
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of Hegel's
revaluation
213
:
Synthesis A
contains,
view of "fixation"
in his article
Social Theory and Practice 15 (no.
"Insanity, Crime and the Structure of Freedom inHegel,"
2), 1989, 156-58.
22. See Fialko, 262: "It is the moment
of corporeity, in which
the spiritual is still
that constitutes the domain where insanity is generated [forHegel]."
undifferentiated,
23. See Hyppolite's
(59-60)
24. See Nietzsche's
discussion
scious."
of what
he calls Hegel's
idea of an "ontological
uncon
See, e.g., IL 179-81, 199,210-11, 213, 226; EL 36-38, 48-49, 55; FI17; CD 13f;and ID
impoverished."(PS 135f)
29. John Dewey, Art as Experience, inA. Hofstadter and R. Kuhns, eds., Philosophies ofArt
and Beauty (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1976), 604-6.
30. Dewey, 614.
31. This quotation
Chase Greene,
appears in an otherwise splendid book byWilliam
Moira: Fate, Good, and Evil inGreek Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 96.
32. Friedrich Grimmlinger,
"Zum Begriff des absoluten Wissens
in Hegels Phanomeno
logie," in Geschichte und System: Festschrift fur Erich Heintel zum 60. Geburtstag, hrsg. von
Hans-Dieter
Klein
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