Consciousness and Soul
Dear Colleagues,
I am working my way through Hegel's Phenomenolo9y of the Spirit. There is so much material here, seemingly untapped by psychology. To take one example, in Hegel's renowned master-slave parable, in the fight to the death the slave submits out of mortal fear of death. Hegel notes that while the consciousness of the master apparently successfully differentiates by being supplemented by the consciousness of the slave, in the end it is the slave's consciousness that differentiates more fully. And this is due to the experience of fear:
"For this [slave's] consciousness has been fearful, not of this or that particular thing or just at odd moments, but its whole being has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of death, the absolute Lord. In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations. But this pure universal movement, the absolute melting away of everything stable, is the simple, essential nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-self, which consequently is implicit in this consciousness." PoS, p. 117.
It is an interesting fact that Freud wrote almost nothing about consciousness. I believe that is due to the fact that he worked from the bottom up, from the instincts and the psychic, and you just cannot reach consciousness that way--just as fruitless as the ancient Babylonians' attempt to build a tower high enough to reach Heaven.
You can only understand consciousness if you start within consciousness. That is what Hegel did. And he concluded that within consciousness there is what Freud would call a "drive" for self-differentiation. Within this framework mortal fear is manifestly useful. Such fear not only prompts but it reflects the "pure universal movement ... of self-consciousness, absolute negativity." To put it more accurately (again, in Freudian terms) there is a drive within consciousness to self-differentiation alongside a powerful resistance against such reorganization.
How many of the assumptions of everyday therapy--which, in the final analysis is beholden to the pleasure principle of minimizing anxiety and depression and promoting adaptation--would change if its stance were not rooted in the body, in the psychic and feelings, but in consciousness itself? Quite a few, I would imagine. But that work of re-imagining psychology from within consciousness would be an undertaking.
Of course, Giegerich's work moves in that direction. And he naturally borrows quite a lot from Hegel. But he chose to ground his psychology in soul, certainly in part for historical reasons. His work grew out of his involvement in Archetypal psychology, whose central concept was soul. Obviously, soul as a notion was important to Jung, but it was really Hillman that established soul as the core of Archetypal psychology's revision of Jung's project.
So, this gets me to my question for which I would appreciate any thoughts you have. What is the essential difference between consciousness--as framed by Hegel, not Freud, who viewed consciousness as an epiphenomenon--and soul? Are there essential differences?
Thank you in advance,
Dan