The soul’s perfection as spirit is also man’s own exhaustion and death

Evidence

At the moment when the soul has perfected itself as a ‘work of art’, it ceased to be a soul: ‘The soul, thus setting in opposition its being to its (conscious) self, absorbing it, and making it its own, has lost the meaning of mere soul, of the immediacy of spirit.’ In its highest moment, the soul has turned itself into spirit. In this expiring, it is also man who has become exhausted and died, leaving nothing behind except the part created by habit, that is, the mechanism of self-feeling, which will live on as the foundation of all the forms of theoretical and practical spirit. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 606

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows that for Hegel the soul’s highest achievement annihilates the soul — a key reversal in the Anthropology.
• XREF: The ‘work of art’ soul recalls the plastic self-shaping that grounds the reader’s neural plasticity concept. — connects to: Habit entails spirit’s self-sacrifice into lifeless determinate form — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1053; The soul’s perfection into spirit simultaneously exhausts and kills man

Broader Connections

• The soul’s perfection into spirit simultaneously exhausts and kills man #corroborates (1.00)