Abstract
This paper offers a reading of key passages in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit, which can serve as the basis for an argument to discuss the shortcomings of two contemporary readings of Hegel’s notion of ‘second nature’. It investigates two micro-processes which Hegel discusses within his Philosophy of Spirit, the process of transition from sound to speech and the process of transition from natural will to ethical will. Thereby, the text is able to mark the differences between mere habit, second nature of an ethical agent, and self-mediated self-determination of spirit. Second nature is neither a falling back into nature and therefore a limitation of human freedom, nor is it a notion that in itself could explain the process of Bildung as Hegel sees it. Instead, second nature should be understood within the framework of freedom as practical self-determination which allows spirit to relate to itself as other through its product.
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Notes
- 1.
For a critical discussion of different accounts of the relationship between first and second nature, see Kern 2020, even though I do not follow exactly her labels of the debate.
- 2.
This reading can be found in McDowell 1996.
- 3.
de Laurentiis 2021 makes a strong case for a similar point in her excellent book on Hegel’s Anthropology, especially in her discussion of Hegel’s Descartes.
- 4.
As Thomas Dwoschak discusses in Dworschak 2020, the right of individuality remains in tension with Hegel’s theory of freedom in a state.
- 5.
Enc3, §384 Z: ‘Absolute mind recognizes itself as positing being itself, as itself producing its Other, nature and finite mind, so that this Other loses all semblance of independence in face of mind, ceases altogether to be a limitation for mind and appears only as the means by which mind attains to absolute being-for-itself, to the absolute unity of its being in-itself and its being-for-itself, of its concept and its actuality.’
- 6.
Enc3, §381 Z: ‘As the distinguishing determinacy of the concept of mind we must designate ideality, that is, the sublation of the otherness of the Idea, the Idea’s returning, and its having returned, into itself from its Other;’ as well as §382 Z: ‘But the freedom of mind is not merely an independence of the Other won outside the Other, but won within the Other; it attains actuality not by fleeing from the Other but by overcoming it.’ – For a discussion of the methodological links between the Science of Logic and Subjective Spirit, see Ng 2016.
- 7.
PR §31 Remark: ‘This development of the Idea is the proper activity of its rationality, and thinking, as something subjective, merely looks on at it without for its part adding to it any ingredient of its own. To consider a thing rationally means not to bring reason to bear on the object from the outside and so to work on it, but to find that the object is rational on its own account [für sich]; here it is spirit in its freedom, the culmination of self-conscious reason, which gives itself actuality and engenders itself as an existing world. The sole task of philosophical science is to bring into consciousness this proper work of the reason of the thing itself.’
- 8.
Cf. Testa 2009: ‘[…] ethical life […] has to objectify itself in social habits of recognitive interaction stabilized through habit and internalized by individuals’ (Ibid, 354).
- 9.
Full quote: ‘So in one of its aspects habit resembles natural qualities. But habit also has an aspect that is related to the will as such, and from this perspective it appears as a necessity in relation to freedom. According to the first perspective in reference to the natural determinations and particular feelings, habit is a liberation. But in reference to the will, habit is a necessity.’ (LPS, 152/53).
- 10.
Bertram attributes this conception of second nature to Kant and McDowell: ‘In summary, I think that the Kantian conception takes second nature to be an achievement, because it holds that second nature is reconstituted over and over again after being established. And it is an achievement in a double sense, because it is achieved by a collective and, at the same time, by individual human beings.’ (Bertram 2020, 71)
- 11.
For this distinction between mere habituation and ethical habituation see also Herrmann-Sinai 2020.
- 12.
Enc3, §401 Z: ‘In the melodious-sounding voice, therefore, we believe we can safely recognize the beauty of soul of the speaker, and in the harshness of his voice, a coarse feeling. In the first case, the sound evokes our sympathy, in the latter case our antipathy.’
- 13.
Enc3, §410 R: ‘The essential determination is the liberation from sensations that man gains through habit, when he is affected by them.’
- 14.
Cf. Magrì 2016b, 253–54: ‘The rules that we follow in habit are those that we have given ourselves in the originary act of learning, but we no longer need to recall them to perform the habitual action. Thus, the self constantly refers to itself without having itself as content of thought.’
- 15.
Hegel distinguishes between speech and language in that only the latter is ‘articulated’. For the step discussed here, articulation is not necessary. ‘Articulated’ means language rather than speech and implies some syntactical distinctions (Inwood 2007, 364, R. 28).
- 16.
What cannot be discussed here is the dimension of time within intuitions an within the being of sounds. Hegel states (Enc3, §459): ‘Intelligence is this intrinsic negativity; thus the more appropriate shape of the intuition that is a sign is a reality in time, − a disappearance of the reality as soon as it is, and, in its further external psychical determinacy, a positedness by intelligence, emerging from its own (anthropological) naturalness, − the sound, the fulfilled externalization of self-announcing inwardness.’ Cf. Herrmann-Sinai 2009.
- 17.
Peters 2016 makes a similar point by focusing on mechanical processes in subjective spirit: ‘the activity in question is spirit’s essential activity of liberating itself from nature, understood both in the negative and in the appropriative sense.’ (127)
- 18.
- 19.
LPS, §153: ‘Here the universality is brought forth, produced, and proceeds out of particular cases. This [process] contains the determination that what is supposed to become habit for us, is a repetition of feeling. Habit is acquired through repetition so that the individual is appropriated to a universality.’ – And LPS, 157 (130): ‘What one does out of habit, one does without thought, mechanically.’
- 20.
PR, §11: ‘The will which is free only in itself [an sich] is the immediate or natural will.* The determinations of difference which the self-determining concept posits within the will appear in the natural will as an immediately existing content, i.e. as the impulses, desires, inclinations, whereby the will finds itself determined in the course of nature.’
- 21.
LPS, §§469, 248: ‘The will [in practical spirit] means nothing else but the end that is active. End and reason are immediately connected; what is rational is an end.’
- 22.
Enc3, §444: ‘[…] its products, in the theoretical mind, are the word, and in the practical mind (not yet deed and action, but) enjoyment.’
- 23.
It can be called ‘subjective action’ for this very reason (cf. Herrmann-Sinai 2016).
- 24.
For the difference between this notion of ‘social practice’ and ‘ethical life’ see Herrmann-Sinai 2020.
- 25.
I do not intend to defend Hegel’s notion of family in toto.
- 26.
But one could argue that practices of art, religion, and philosophy need to be among those protected spaces objective spirit ought to offer, even though it does not determine their content.
- 27.
It would be a sign of dictatorship, whereby one social group or normative practice declares its norms to be laws and therefore applicable to all (such as if all houses had to be timber-framed houses or all spoken languages need to be reduced to one). From a logical point of view, this move would ignore the difference between two types of universality. What explains the difference between subjective spirit and objective spirit is a logical distinction, which Hegel has established within his Science of Logic or its equivalent, the first of the three volumes of the Encyclopedia. Whereas under the universality of reflective allness, that is constitutive of subjective spirit, any content is accidental (Enc1, §175 and §190, Enc3, §410; PR, §10), under the universality of genus-species, which is constitutive for objective spirit, the content is not (PR, §13R). Rather, it contains an immanent relation to its form as the idea of right precisely is the free will as its form as well as content (Enc1, §177 and §191 and PR, §24R).
- 28.
A note on ethical action as compared to subjective action: the legal system defines whether the use of a knife counts as ‘murder’ or ‘performing a surgery’ or that touching wood with a lightened match counts as ‘arson’ (PR, §119 and §121R). Hegel’s notion of Handlung rests on these legal notions not in the sense that his philosophy of action presupposes a particular set of laws. Rather, it rests on the system of right because right determines subjectivity as well as objectivity and allows us to think Handlung as well as Tat as the actualized deed. Because the agent acts in a world, which is already actualizing freedom as objectivity, this world is not only offering opportunities to act, which differ from a mere socially normed practice, it also is able to accommodate the actualized intentions in the deed of an agent. Thus, the agent can have knowledge of what he has done as the actualization of his intention. Intention within objective spirit is Absicht and not just a mere ‘end’ (Zweck) as in subjective spirit. What defines a ‘content’ within the context of ‘objective spirit’ is different compared to what defines ‘content’ in the context of ‘subjective spirit’.
- 29.
Lumsden 2021 writes that Bildung ‘allows individuals to adopt the perspective of the universal’, which would be difficult to formulate if Bildung was exhausted in the acquisition of second nature.
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Herrmann-Sinai, S. (2023). Second Nature and Self-Determination in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit. In: Corti, L., Schülein, JG. (eds) Life, Organisms, and Human Nature. Studies in German Idealism, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_13
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