Habit and Mental Illness from an Hegelian Perspective
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Habit and Mental Illness from an Hegelian Perspective Manfred Man‑fat Wu1 Received: 3 August 2020 / Revised: 9 October 2020 / Accepted: 13 October 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Hegel proposes cultivation of habit as one of the major cures for mental illness. According to him, habit not only involves embodiment and dexterity but also mental activities and ethical elements. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the types of habit Hegel prescribes for curing mental illness in his original works. A three-level framework comprising the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and spiritual levels is adopted, and results show that although Hegel points out that habit is ethical and spiritual in nature, in his discussions on mental illness Hegel makes the majority of references on habits that involves the body such as physical movement and laboring. Habits that belong to the interpersonal and spiritual aspects are relatively neglected. This paper proposes that habits in the interpersonal and family realms, habits that function in the transition from the subjective to objective spirit, and habits in the morality sphere, which are equally important in Hegel’s philosophy, should be taken into consideration in future research and interventions for mental illness. Keywords Hegel · Habit · Madness · Second nature · Ethical life · Mutual recognition
Introduction As a philosopher of the eighteenth century, Hegel’s terminologies on mental illness inherited those of his predecessors.1 Instead of using more diversified and refined terms, in his discussions on the modern-day termed mental illness, he centered on madness and insanity.2 Terms such as madness and insanity were widely used before the second half of the nineteenth century, but with the development in psychiatry and psychology, more specific terms such as psychosis have become more prevalent and their meanings also evolved over time (Bürgy, 2008; Gomory, Cohen, & Kirk, 2013). Hegel’s conceptualizations of mental illness are very different from those of modern psychology and psychiatry which have 1
Some examples are madness, insanity, dementia, and mania. See, for example, Doob (1974), Gomory, Cohen, and Kirk (2013). 2 Hegel provides an account of a few types of mental illness such as idiocy, the distracted mind and the rambling mind in the Zusätz of §408 of his Philosophy of Mind (PhM) (Hegel 1971). However, the descriptions are relatively short and most of them cover about one page only. * Manfred Man‑fat Wu [email protected] 1
Research Office, The Open University of Hong Kong, Ho Man Tin, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China
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experienced long and complex development particularly since the World War II. Hegel treats madness involving problems between the Soul and Spirit (Niarchos, 2014: 129). He also regards insanity as a state in which the psychical elements are in direct opposition to objective consciousness (Hegel, 1971: 125). In fact, the incident that Hegel’s younger sister Christiane suffered from psychosis which included a
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