The paper considers the main topic of the conference of the International Hegel-Congress (Bochum, May 17-20 2016) by accounting, in Part I, for the spiritual development of the ‘I’, from its characterization as an abstract and simple being, as it were a simple soul in opposition to the material composition of its corporeality, to its becoming concrete by confronting (and assimilating) the multitude of external objects. In Part II, the paper reconstructs the logical and anthropological grounds for the concrete becoming of the thinking I. I suggest that Hegel’s articulation of spirit’s ‘higher’ free (self-producing and self-actualizing) reality is entangled with the ‘lower’ necessitated extrinsecality of nature through the double mediation of the boundsman’ and master’s different conscious experience of their mind-body union.
