The Place of Habit in Hegel's Psychology (original) (raw)
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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 aim of this chapter is to discuss the central role of the notion of " habit " (Gewohnheit) in Hegel's theory of " embodiment " (Verleiblichung) and to show that the philosophical outcome of the Anthropology is that habit, understood as a sensorimotor life form, is not only an enabling condition for there to be mindedness, but is more strongly an ontological constitutive condition of all its levels of manifestation. Moreover, I will argue that Hegel's approach somehow makes a model of embodied cognition available which offers a unified account of the three main senses of embodiment understood as both a physiological, a functional, and a phenomenological process. In this sense Hegel's approach to habit can make a useful contribution to the contemporary debate on embodiment in philosophy of mind, the cognitive sciences, and action theory. For a long time habit in 20th century philosophy and science has been mostly read in a negative way, identified with mechanical and repetitive routine. The reconstruction of Hegel’s approach is particularly relevant here and can fruitfully contribute to this discussion, since it offers us not only a model that assigns to habit a positive constitutive role in the formation of embodied human mindedness but which also overcomes the dualism between habitual motor routine and intentional activities that is prevalent nowadays in the cognitive sciences and in action theory, and allows for some sense of natural agency as belonging to animal life. Furthermore, Hegel’s approach cuts across the great divide between associationist and holistic approaches to habit that has for a long time dominated the philosophical debate on habit and still shapes the current opposition between classical cognitive science and embodied cognitive science.
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.
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'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.
Hegel: Habit, Custom, and Government
The aim of this paper is to understand the relationship that exists, in Hegel’s philosophy, between his conception of “habit” and that of “the world of right”, insofar as both are defined by Hegel as “second nature”. First of all, we will focus on the Hegelian conception of habit, as it is formulated in his anthropology (first section of the philosophy of subjective spirit). Secondly, we will show the connection between the concept of habit and that of custom, as it is formulated in the philosophy of right. Finally, on this basis we will provide an insight into some of the fundamental structures of the Hegelian conception of the State as the “actuality of the ethical idea”.
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.
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.
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.
Hegel's Psychology (The Oxford Handbook of Hegel), draft
Despite its central importance in Hegel’s mature system, the section Subjective Spirit in his Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences has attracted relatively little attention in the reception history of Hegel’s work. The most influential early readers of Hegel were mostly interested in other parts of Hegel’s system; and relatively soon after Hegel’s death more empirically oriented approaches to the topics of Subjective Spirit won the day, displacing the overly ‘speculative’, armchair philosophical approach that Hegel was seen as representing. Hegel’s direct disciples and moderate ‘centre Hegelians’ Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz and Karl Ludwig Michelet did write extensive commentaries on Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, but their influence paled in comparison to the more politically astute and independently creative Hegelian ‘left’ who mostly focused on the Philosophy of Right or the Phenomenology of Spirit, as well as to the Hegelian ‘right’ who were mostly interested in Hegel’s views on religion and history. The long neglect of Subjective Spirit shows even today in the curious way in which the recent revival of Hegel as an epistemologist and a philosopher of mind, or of “mindedness”, has mostly ignored this text —even if systematically speaking Subjective Spirit is the part of Hegel’s system where issues of knowledge and of the mind are explicitly at stake. There is also a widely spread view according to which Hegel was engaged in his Jena-writings in a project of ‘detranscendentalizing’ the Kantian subject of knowledge and action problematically divided between the empirical and transcendental, or in other words of consistently conceptualizing it as a living individual human person embedded in the natural and social world, in language and in intersubjective interaction. According to this view, after Jena Hegel for whatever reason gave up this project and in his later work regressed into a dubious metaphysics of a ‘spirit’ which obfuscates the concrete lived reality of the human individual. Whatever the truth about Hegel’s metaphysics, this article aims to show that in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit Hegel develops a thoroughly ‘detranscendentalized’ account of the human person as the “concrete” flesh and blood subject of knowledge and action, an account which deserves much more attention than it has so far received. In short, whereas the section ‘Anthropology—Soul’ of Subjective Spirit (see previous chapter) deals with the bodily aspects of the concrete subject, the section ‘Phenomenology of Spirit—Consciousness’ deals with the various dimensions of intentionality, or in other word of the subject’s theoretical and practical relation to objectivity, and finally the section ‘Psychology—Spirit’ deals with the intrasubjective or mental processes and activities at work in the various object-relations. Eventually all of the three chapters contribute to a holistic picture of the human person as the “concrete subject” of knowing and acting, yet reconstructing this picture requires a proper understanding of the structure of the text which at first sight, on a simple linear reading, appears rather fragmentary and thus confusing. This article focuses on the Psychology-section, and the thematically closely connected Phenomenology-section. I will first (1.) reconstructs the ‘parallel architectonics’ of the Phenomenology and Psychology, the understanding of which is essential for comprehending the substantial views Hegel puts forth in them. I will then (2.) draw on this reconstruction and introduce central elements of Hegel’s account of the human person as the concrete subject of knowledge and action as it unfolds in the text.