Abstract

This essay explores two key elements in Allegra de Laurentiis’s book Hegel’s Anthropology: Life, Psyche, and Second Nature. The first is Hegel’s pivotal claim that the most basic determination of the natural soul is not as a thing, which is the way it has traditionally been understood, but as the “universal immateriality of nature.” The second element is the thesis that what identifies the higher determination of the feeling soul is the strange concept of “self-feeling” (Selbstgefühl). Prof. de Laurentiis offers a philosophically rigorous and philologically rich reading of both these important moments in Hegel’s anthropological account of the soul. Nonetheless, I argue that employing a distinctly hylomorphic reading of Hegel’s Anthropology, as Prof. De Laurentiis proposes, despite its many merits, ultimately distracts from and prevents an account that exposes and articulates the most radical and significant aspects of Hegel’s theory.