Connie Wang

Connie Wang

Doctoral DAAD Fellow

Period at the center: October 2023 – August 2024

Research Project: Being Too at Home in the Other: Seelenkrankheiten as Pathologies of Immediacy in Hegel’s Anthropology

Email: cw3123@columbia.edu

Connie Wang is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy Department at Columbia University. Her historical research interests lie in Hegel, Kant, and Aristotle, while her thematic interests lie in social and political philosophy, moral philosophy, and psychoanalysis (specifically, object relations theory).

Research Project

Being Too at Home in the Other: Seelenkrankheiten as Pathologies of Immediacy in Hegel’s Anthropology

My research project articulates and defends a Hegelian account of pathologies of immediacy or pathological forms of ‘being too at home in the other,’ or what Hegel refers to as ‘illnesses of the soul’ [Seelenkrankheiten]. It contends that the resources for such an account can be found within Hegel’s Anthropology, which contains Hegel’s theory of the soul [Seele], a widely neglected and understudied component of Hegel’s philosophical system. The first part of this project defends an interpretation of the soul as a highly primitive form of subjective awareness, wherein neither self nor other qua objective external world exist as distinct and discrete self-standing entities. It captures an immediate way of relating to what is other—that is, a ‘self’-other relation wherein the boundaries between self and other are so porous and inchoate that, properly speaking, neither ‘self’ nor ‘world’ exist at this stage and instead remain in a tangled immediate unity. It is because Hegel’s conception of the soul exhibits precisely this structure of being too at home in the other that, or so this project argues, a theory of pathologies of immediacy can be generated from it.

The second part of this project concerns the elaboration of this theory and its social and political implications for the ‘spiritual’ (or ‘mental’) illnesses [geistige Krankheiten] which result from these disordered ways of relating to the world and the possibilities of their treatment. For Hegel, these pathological forms of being too at home in the other include, on one end of the spectrum, the aggrandizement of our subjectivity in madness, wherein our sense of self becomes so inflated that it ceases to recognize the right and power of the objective external world over us. They can also, on the other end of the spectrum, take the form of ‘death by habit,’ wherein we have become so habituated to the norms, customs, and practices of our social world that we become unthinkingly subservient and subordinate to it, unable to recognize its failures or our own capacities to remold it to reflect our ethical ideals.