From Kant to Hegel via Philippe Pinel

Abstract

This excursus reviews Kant’s treatment of Affectus and Leidenschafte (affects and passions) in the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (lectures given over a span of many years). Having argued that empirical psychology was scientifically unfeasible and established his rational psychology as beyond the fictions of dogmatic metaphysicians, Kant could only treat affects from the perspective of practice in the world, like a behaviorism before its time. Nevertheless, his classification of passions ran as if parallel with psychopathologies—ordered according to representations, imagination, judgement, and reason. Building on his 1763 essay “Negative Magnitudes,” the anthropology was profoundly critical of affects, pointing to those “tensions constantly ready to explode,” and requiring vigilance. In sharp contrast, Hegel reintegrated passions into his mature Philosophy of Mind (1813) arguing that inclinations and passions overcame their subjective enclosure thanks to the idea of freedom. He supported his arguments using the French revolutionary psychiatry of Philippe Pinel. Pinel’s original taxonomy had the advantage of being monist; thus different from the binary of neurosis and psychosis, Pinel argued in favor of forms of “mania.” Crucial for Hegel was that even manias with delirium, grouping passions around an idée fixe, an indestructible kernel of rationality endured. This allowed Hegel to claim that freedom and nature were rooted in reason, and although reason might find itself tangled in contradictions it never entirely disappeared. This audacious claim resignified the function of reason as Geistlichkeit (spirituality) apt to integrate psychology into the dialectical movement of mind subjective.