The rise of computers and robots, heralded in science fiction and pervading ever more daily experience, has fostered a rampant temptation to model mind as a mechanism and expect machines one day to simulate all mental reality. This temptation reflects more than technological developments, however. It arises from the perennial dilemma of two complementary approaches to mind that proceed from the assumption of a mind/body duality: one conceiving mind to be wholly immaterial and the other reducing mind to inanimate matter. Exploring the difficulties of these views puts us in a position to evaluate the relation of mind and machine, helped along the way by key insights from Hegel.

The notion that mind cannot be material seems confirmed in every moment of self-consciousness, whose purely temporal flow of mental content testifies to the apparent nonspatial existence of mind. Yet so long as mind is construed as immaterial, it lacks the resources to have any temporal ordering, possess any unity, or retain any specifically mental character. Deprived of materiality, mental life is hardly distinguishable from a succession of logical categories that exhibit determinacy in general rather than anything particular to mind. The possibilities of any non-logical content are excluded. Lacking any embodiment, mind has nothing with which passively to receive content in the manner of sensibility, or to retrieve and refashion any such sensible content in images. Mind could perhaps generate conceptual content, but this would be indistinguishable from the thoughts that logic produces in its thinking of thinking.

In this paper, I will try to propose a general characterisation of the spirit in Hegel's Encyclopaedia. This characterisation is based on the opposition between nature and spirit. More precisely, in my view the Hegelian spirit can be defined as the activity of bringing the natural exteriority back to a living totality.

We know that for Hegel the notion of spirit takes so many shapes that their unity is difficult to find. For instance, what does the soul in the subjective spirit, property in the objective spirit and the cult of the Greek gods in the absolute spirit have in common? Furthermore, when we consider property, for example, the problem is knowing if the spirit is here constituted by the owner, by the deeds of ownership or by the living relationship between the owner and the possessed goods.

Moreover, the Hegelian spirit is a philosophical descendant of several different traditions. The question is, therefore, to know how these traditions are linked in the Hegelian notion. I will present these briefly before stating my general hypothesis about the definition of the spirit.

First, the Hegelian spirit is connected to the noûs of the Greek philosophers (the Latin spiritus, intellectus). The noûs — on the one hand, an immaterial entity leading the universe, and, on the other, a faculty of the soul — is most often distinguished by its separate and rational nature. For Hegel too, the spirit, as a non-perceptible entity, constitutes the freest and most rational stage in the development of the Idea.

In an attempt to make sense of the argument in Hegel's Science of Logic, I have suggested that, when we focus our attention on a concept, we find that our thought moves to other, related concepts. We can then turn our thoughts not only to those other concepts, but also to the movement itself: the transitions, ‘becomings’, or processes that lead from one to the other. Reflection can in its turn look back over these processes, along with their beginnings and endings, to consider them as synthetic wholes. Finally, thought can collapse those syntheses into simple unities that become new conceptual starting points. The whole dynamic described in the Logic is something that takes place in the realm of thought as a result of the activity of thinking.

One of the earliest and most penetrating reviews of my On Hegel's Logic (Burbidge 1991) by George di Giovanni (di Giovanni 1982) took exception to this approach because it committed the fallacy of psychologism. Rather than basing logic on the concepts as objective entities that have a life of their own, I was subordinating it to the subjective processes that occur in the minds of thinkers — and as subjective, logic was amenable to contingencies and distractions that would betray its strict objectivity.

The fallacy of psychologism was first identified by Gottlob Frege. Once I examined his arguments, I found it quite relevant to my study of Hegel. Initially, Frege draws a sharp contrast between ideas and concepts — at least that is how the English translators have rendered his German.

In quest of an authoritative text for determining the relationship between Hegel and feminism, nearly all writers on the subject have turned to his interpretation of Antigone in chapter six of the Phenomenology of Spirit. There are at least two compelling reasons for this. In the first place, as the comprehensive introduction to Hegel's writings, the Phenomenology of Spirit is the obvious place to begin in exploring Hegel's arguments on the subject (compare Forster 1998: 13-14). Because the description of gender relations in the world of ancient Greece in chapter six is Hegel's only extended discussion on the topic, this obviously recommends that discussion as a starting point for study. In the second place, Hegel refers back to the division of gender roles in that chapter in some of his discussions concerning gender and women in subsequent ethical writings, most notably in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. This would suggest that Hegel himself took the discussion there as authoritative on matters of gender.

Despite general agreement that Hegel's account of Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit is significant, scholars differ on how best to interpret that significance. Kelly Oliver argues that Hegel's restriction of women to traditional family roles in chapter six prevents them from participating in later stages of the dialectic, a fact that ‘undermines Hegel's entire project in the Phenomenology’ (Oliver 1996: 69). Patricia Jagentowicz Mills claims that ‘Hegel's interpretation of Sophocles’ play Antigone is central to an understanding of woman's role in the Hegelian system' (Mills 1996: 59), but goes on to argue that Hegel uses a distortion of the play ‘to represent woman in the family in transhistorical terms’ (Mills 1996: 78).

In the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel propounds three interrelated theses:

In his essay What is living and what is dead of the philosophy of Hegel?, Benedetto Croce praises Hegel for bestowing the highest value on beauty, in particular artistic beauty. He emphasises Hegel's ‘tendency to make art a primary element in human life, a mode of knowledge and of spiritual elevation’, and the ‘constant contact of Hegelian speculation with taste and with works of art, and the dignity which it assigned to the artistic activity’ (Croce 1985: 121). This tendency, Croce writes, is what makes Hegelian speculation congenial to the great aesthetic theories of the Romantic period. In this paper, I shall put forward some considerations which render support to Croce's observation that there is a strand of unreserved and absolute appreciation of beauty, in particular artistic beauty, in Hegelian philosophy. My focus will be in particular on the question of why Hegel thinks that the experience of beauty — which I will be referring to, in short, as aesthetic experience — is of special, even absolute value for human beings. This will involve, in the first part of the paper, an analysis of what Hegel takes to be the content of such experience; hence an analysis of Hegel's notion of beauty.

Such emphasis on the absolute value of beauty invites of course the question of how beauty relates, in Hegel's system, to what Hegel regards as the highest value of all: reconciliation. Hegel believes that both philosophical speculation — which culminates in knowledge of the absolute truth — and the achievement of the highest practical good, the participation in civic life, are ways of reconciling the human individual with the world they live in. Does the same apply to beauty, or aesthetic experience? I will briefly touch on the relation between aesthetic experience and reconciliation in the second part of the paper. In this context, we will also consider an objection to the view that Hegel's appreciation of aesthetic experience is unrestricted or absolute, which arises from consideration of Hegel's famous claim that philosophy is higher than art.