Hegel S Theory Of Madness

This book shows how an understanding of the nature and role of insanity in Hegel's writing provides intriguing new points of access to many of the central themes of his larger philosophic project. Berthold-Bond situates Hegel's theory of madness within the history of psychiatric practice during the great reform period at the turn of the eighteenth century, and shows how Hegel developed a middle path between the stridently opposed camps of "empirical" and "romantic" medicine, and of "somatic" and "psychical" practitioners. A key point of the book is to show that Hegel does not conceive of madness and health as strictly opposing states, but as kindred phenomena sharing many of the same underlying mental structures and strategies, so that the ontologies of insanity and rationality involve a mutually illuminating, mirroring relation. Hegel's theory is tested against the critiques of the institution of psychiatry and the very concept of madness by such influential twentieth-century authors as Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz, and defended as offering a genuinely reconciling position in the contemporary debate between the "social labeling" and "medical" models of mental illness.

This book offers the first genuinely systematic treatment of Hegel’s eschatology in the literature. It is an investigation into Hegel’s project to demonstrate the ultimate unity of thought and being (consciousness and reality, self and world). The author traces the project through Hegel’s epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of history. The grand synthesis creates a basic tension, an ambivalence, that reaches its most acute formulation in Hegel’s eschatological language of a final completion or fulfillment of history. This conflicts with his dialectic and Heracletian metaphysics of becoming. Berthold-Bond concludes that a substantially new approach to Hegel’s eschatology is needed.

The current rise in new religions and the growing popularity of New Ageism is concomitant with an increasingly anti-philosophical sentiment marking our contemporary situation. More specifically, it is philosophical and psychoanalytic reason that has lost standing faced with the triumph of post-secular "spirituality". Combatting this trend, this treatise develops a theoretical apparatus based on Hegelian speculative reason and Lacanian psychoanalysis. With the aid of this theoretical apparatus, the book argues how certain conceptual pairs appear opposed through an operation of misrecognition christened, following Hegel, as "diremption". The failure to reckon with identities-in-difference relegates the subject to more vicious contradictions that define central aspects of our contemporary predicament. The repeated thesis of the treatise is that the deadlocks marking our contemporary situation require renewed engagement with dialectical thinking beyond the impasses of common understanding. Only by embarking on this philosophical-psychoanalytic "path of despair" (Hegel) will we stand a chance of achieving "joyful wisdom" (Nietzsche). Developing a unique dialectical theory based on readings of Hegel, Lacan and Žižek, in order to address various philosophical and psychoanalytic questions, this book will be of great interest to anyone interested in German idealism and/or psychoanalytic theory.

Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism explores some long neglected but crucial themes in German idealism. Markus Gabriel, one of the most exciting young voices in contemporary philosophy, and Slavoj Žižek, the celebrated contemporary philosopher and cultural critic, show how these themes impact on the problematic relations between being and appearance, reflection and the absolute, insight and ideology, contingency and necessity, subjectivity, truth, habit and freedom. Engaging with three central figures of the German idealist movement, Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte, Gabriel, and Žižek, who here shows himself to be one of the most erudite and important scholars of German idealism, ask how is it possible for Being to appear in reflection without falling back into traditional metaphysics. By applying idealistic theories of reflection and concrete subjectivity, including the problem of madness and everydayness in Hegel, this hugely important book aims to reinvigorate a philosophy of finitude and contingency, topics at the forefront of contemporary European philosophy. MARKUS GABRIEL is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, NY. He has published a number of books and journal articles in German, including Der Mensch im Mythos (De Gruyter, 2006), and Das Absolute und die Welt in Schellings Freiheitsschrift (Bonn University Press, 2006).

The first extended treatment of Hegel’s theory of the unconscious and his anticipation of Freud.

This book relates Hegel to later philosophers and philosophies.

A critical introduction to Hegel's metaphysics and philosophy of nature.