Quote image editor
“Geist is Hegel’s counterpart to what figures in Aristotle as the kind of soul that is characteristic of rational animals. It is human beings whom Aristotle defines as rational animals; that corresponds to Hegel’s implicit identification of the philosophy of Geist with the philosophy of the human. On this account, then, Geist is the formally distinctive way of being a living being that characterizes human beings: in Aristotelian terms, the form of a living human being qua living human being. Kinds of soul in Aristotle’s account are not kinds of substance. Souls are not material substances; the only relevant material substances are living beings. And one would miss the point of Aristotle’s conception of the form of a living being qua living if one conceived souls as immaterial substances. So Geist in particular is not a substance, material or immaterial. The idea of Geist is the idea of a distinctive way of living a life; often it is better to speak of Geistigkeit, as the defining characteristic of that distinctive form of life and thereby of the living beings that live it.” — John Henry McDowell