Hegel’s Anthropology and the Unnatural Birth of Spirit
David Ciavatta
Owl of Minerva, August 31, 2024

Hegel’s Anthropology focuses on the transition from nature to spirit. Here spirit is thought at once as continuous with nature and as arising out of it, as well as a departure from and negation of nature. The de Laurentiis study is a sustained attempt to work through this tension by offering an account that conceives nature and spirit as distinct but inseparable realizations of a more fundamental unity. In this essay, I examine the success of this particular account, and suggest that despite the significant progress it makes, elements of the tension persist. In taking up aspects of the hylomorphic model de Laurentiis defends, I offer what I take to be a more thoroughly dialectical conception of the spirit/nature relation, and propose we must recognize in Hegel an ontologically irreducible “second nature,” in which nature as it is discussed in the Philosophy of Nature appears only in a sublated form.
https://doi.org/10.5840/owl202482746