Embodied Cognition, Habit, and Natural Agency in Hegel’s Anthropology (preprint, forthcoming in: The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, edited by M. Bykova and K. Westphal, 2020, in print) (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Conception of Habit as a Stage of Hegel's Naturalistic Theory of Mind
Open Information Science 2018., 2018
This contribution aims to address the nature of the normative in Hegel's theory of habits and to highlight that social practices are the outcome of natural and biological characteristics related to the homeostasis of the organism and to the common biological features of the individuals of the same species. This should point out that habits and human practices have a concrete biological background and are the outcome of humans' eagerness to inhabit the world through socially codified activities. The contribution deals also with the relation habits have with the self-conscious life and human world history. Hegel's conception of mind in the Encyclopedia represents an exceptional contribution for understanding the mind-body relation and, particularly, the organic character of the cognitive functions. What Hegel proposes is to conceive of the human mind as a faculty that is developed within the biological evolution of the organism and as a function integrated in the organic living whole of the subject. He deals, therefore, with a soft version of naturalism as he claims that cognitive capacities are strictly connected with natural requisites and maintain a permanent relation with the natural dimension of the organic. Mind is the outcome of a crossed stratification of nature and cognitive dispositions because there is no stage of cognitive activities that can be considered as separated or totally emergent from their natural premises. The rational criterion of Hegel's naturalism is the idea that nature is a system of grades (System von Stufen) (Hegel, 1830, § 249) in which the idea and freedom represent the last step. However, this step can only be achieved by a natural organism having developed an organization of its own life based on self-consciousness and on the " Notion " [der Begriff]. Mind is, hence, an embodied faculty, determined by this embodiment and permanently related to this condition. In the Encyclopedia Hegel undertakes an analysis of the different levels of the cognitive disposition by starting with those that are mostly connected to the organic dimension of life in order to highlight that the highest level of life is freedom, which is attained by a dialectics between the organic requisites and the very pursuit of the mind. In this narrative, habit occupies a very important position for it is placed after the sentient faculty of the body and introduces the actual soul, i.e. the condition in which the soul conceives of its body as its own other and distinguishes itself from the outside environment, becoming an individual subject (Hegel, 1830, § 411). The notion of soul in the Hegelian conception of the mindful disposition is intended to correspond to the classical notions of anima and ψυχή in the ancient philosophy. Therefore, it is not a fully rational and self-conscious disposition because it is not based on a conceptual activity; it is rather much closer to sensibility and to what animates individual agency and behaviour. The
The Place of Habit in Hegel's Psychology
"Hegel's Philosophical Psychology" ed. by L. Ziglioli and S. Herrmann-Sinai, Routledge 2016
In this paper, I will explore the role of habit in Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, arguing that its relevance should not be restricted to the Anthropology. Hegel distinguishes between habituality as the second nature of the embodied self and a more sophisticated form of habituality presented in the Psychology as memory. Memory is the function of intelligence that is committed to the production of language, thereby giving rise to thinking and the possibility of theoretic freedom. Since Hegel himself warns against the automatic and impersonal character of habituality, I wish to explore to what extent habit and memory influence the development of theoretical spirit. Is there any room for a notion of freedom that is independent from habituality? I will first assess the difference between habit and memory. Then, I will tackle the possibility of freedom from a Hegelian standpoint.
Why is Habit the Hardest Problem for Hegel? Contradictions of Habit in Hegel’s Anthropology
2021
Despite Hegel himself drawing our attention to the habitual neglect of habit in the formation of the spirit, the concept of habit has remained generally unstudied in the Hegel scholarship. In this paper, I will present how the concept of habit holds several contradictory determinations in itself, and in so doing I will give an answer to the question of what motivates Hegel to cite habit as the hardest topic (am schwersten) to comprehend. By closely analyzing Hegel's account of habit in the Anthropology section of his Encyclopedia, I will reconstruct his account in thirteen contradictory pairs, which are the essential contradictions which make up Hegel's whole system. Specifically, Hegel defines habit as second nature which makes possible the transition from nature to Geist. The debate among Hegel commentators on the meaning of 'second nature' reveals that to situate habit and second nature in Hegel's system means to determine the very character of Hegelian philosophy.
Hegel—Jahrbuch (in press), 2021
In this paper, I argue that Hegel‘s concept of habit is not one, but two: consisting of human habit on the one hand and animal on the other.
Hegel's discussion of habit takes place at two critical junctures in his work. In the Philosophy of Right it occurs in a well-known paragraph at the outset of the discussion of ethical life. Habit in this context is used to show the limitations of Kantian autonomy and morality as a model for the kind of freedom possible in a modern society. The second juncture, which has received much less attention and which is the focus of this paper, is the discussion of habit in the subjective spirit. In the Encyclopaedia Hegel makes a strong claim for the importance of habit in the development of spirit, describing it as "what is most essential to the existence of all spirituality within the individual subject". 1 There he argues habit is critical to the emergence of consciousness and is the key bridge between nature and spirit. 2 What I want to argue in this paper is that habit is more than just a transition point, dissolving itself and nature with it in the move from nature to spirit. The way Hegel conceives habit, particularly his characterization of it as second nature, challenges the dualism of nature and spirit.
Discussions of Hegel's Philosophy of Right usually focus on two central aspects of his theory of objective spirit: the model of freedom it articulates and the related issue of just what is innovative in his account of ethical life (Sittlichkeit). It is not my intention here to enter directly into the contested terrain of what exactly he means by these terms. My concern in this paper is rather to understand why the opening discussion of the third, final and arguably most important part of the Philosophy of Right, 'Ethical Life', makes appeal to the notion of habit. Habit, it will be argued, has an important transitional role in the development of Sittlichkeit and freedom, but habit is not just a moment on the way to the development of these core notions. It also has an ongoing role to play in Sittlichkeit.
The Concept of Habit and the Notion of Immediacy - Sean Mc Stravick 2019
Hegel, Logic and Speculation, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019
In the present chapter, I wish to explore the correspondence at work between the anthropological notion of habit [Gewhonheit] and the ontological notion of immediacy [Unmittelbarkeit] in Hegel's philosophy. Nonetheless, I will deliberately not define the specific type of correspondence at work-that is, whether habit and immediacy are identical or equivalent, or whether habit is a paradigm of immediacy. Those questions go beyond the aim of this chapter, which is to clarify the function of immediacy as absolute secondarity. I believe this enables us to grasp the speculative nature of the relation between being and thought, and understand the spiral structure of spirit [Geist] and thus its absolute negativity.
Expressive Embodiment: Hegel, Habitual Agency, and the Shortcomings of Normative Expressivism
Hegel Bulletin, 2021
In this paper I tackle the normative re-appropriation of the legacy of Charles Taylor’s expressivist understanding of Hegel’s theory of action. I argue that a normative understanding of Hegel’s expressivist notion of agency by interpreters such as Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, Michael Quante and Robert Brandom, has been obtained at the price of losing sight of the principle of embodiment and of its relevance for our and Hegel’s understanding of social action. I aim at relocating Hegel’s notion of expressive embodiment at the core of his explanation of action. Rather than following Taylor’s hermeneutical reconstruction of the principle of embodiment, I try to reconstruct it by putting at its core the notion of habit formation with the help of conceptual tools taken from contemporary embodied cognition approaches. I first discuss the Anthropology and argue that habit, understood as a sensorimotor embodied life form, is not only an enabling condition for agency, but in fact an ontological constitutive condition for all its levels of manifestation. According to this reading, the Hegelian approach to embodiment offers a model that not only assigns to habit a positive constitutive role in the formation of human mindedness, but also overcomes the dualism between habitual motor routine and intentional activities. If we approach Hegel’s understanding of agency from this vantage point, we can gain a perspective which allows us to appreciate a naturalist strand of Hegel’s expressivism about action and to free it from certain basic anti-naturalistic assumptions of contemporary normative expressivist interpretations of Hegel on social action.
The Problem of Habitual Body and Memory in Hegel and Merleau-Ponty
Hegel Bulletin, 38 (1), 2017, 24-44., 2017
In this paper, I shall focus on the relation between habitual body and memory in Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. Both Hegel and Merleau-Ponty defend a view of the self that is centred on the role of habituality as embodied activity situated in a context. However, both philosophers avoid committing to what Edward Casey has defined habitual body memory, i.e., an active immanence of the past in the body that informs present bodily actions in an efficacious, orienting and regular manner. I shall explore the reasons why neither Hegel nor Merleau-Ponty develops an explicit account of habitual body memory. This will shed light not only on Hegel's account of lived experience, but also on Hegel and Merleau-Ponty's common concern with the habitual body.
Habit and the Limits of the Autonomous Subject, Body and Society, 2013
After briefly describing the history and significance of the nature-reason dualism for philosophy this paper examines why much of the Kantian inspired examination of norms and ethics continues to appeal to this division. It is argued that much of what is claimed to be rationally legitimated norms can, at least in part, be understood as binding on actions and beliefs, not because they are rationally legitimated, but because they are habituated. Drawing on Hegel's discussion of ethical life and habit it is argued that human subjects identify through self-feeling, not reason, most practices and norms as their own. It is on this basis that norms are taken not just as the basis for action but are constitutive of human identity, an identity that is spiritual, embodied and affective. While habit is central to the way Hegel reconfigures ethics and norms as well as the distinct model of freedom that he develops in his social and political thought, habit, it will be argued, has its limits as a model for human freedom, limits