Transformativism and Expressivity in Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind

1 Introduction

In a recent influential paper, Matthew Boyle has offered a re-reading and defense of John McDowell’s Mind and World. Specifically, Boyle suggests that McDowell defends a ‘transformative’ approach to the mental architecture of human rational subjects.^[1] According to this approach, a human being’s higher rational capacities radically transform or alter the way their lower-level mental capacities, such as perception and desire, operate, rather than just being added on to the lower-level mental capacities as a separate layer. Boyle argues that the latter view, which he dubs ‘additive,’ gives rise to philosophical problems that are structurally similar to the ones arising in the context of Cartesian dualism. Against this background, the main philosophical virtue of the transformative approach is said to lie in its anti-dualist stance.

A number of Hegel scholars have adopted Boyle’s McDowellian conceptual framework, arguing that Hegel, too, assumes a transformative approach to the rational mind.^[2] In this paper, I want to pursue an alternative to this interpretive trend: I want to show that Hegel’s philosophy of mind diverges in crucial respects from the transformativist line of McDowell and Boyle. Moreover, I argue that this is a theoretical advantage of Hegel’s position, in that it allows him to avoid a potentially problematic implication of the transformativist position.

The implication I have in mind is that even though the transformativist approach is explicitly presented by Boyle as anti-dualist, it nevertheless gives rise to a form of dualism which I shall call ‘methodological dualism’. In McDowell’s work, methodological dualism comes into view in the context of his claim that rational phenomena do not admit of what he calls a sideways-on account.^[3] McDowell holds that insofar as lower-level mental capacities are said to be permeated or transformed by rationality, we cannot adequately ascribe them to a subject without ascribing capacities for conceptual thought and judgment to them as well. For instance, in order to describe what it means for a rational subject to have a certain perceptual experience, we must refer to the conceptual judgments that adequately describe the content of that experience.^[4] Similarly, in order to describe what it means for a rational subject to have a certain desire, we must say that it potentially gives them a reason to xyz, where a reason is something that is (conceptually) grasped by the subject as speaking in favor of doing xyz.^[5] Thus, the sphere of the rational mind in its entirety—its lower levels included—cannot be described or accounted for from outside of the space of conceptual thought and judgment, i.e., of McDowell’s ‘space of reasons.’

Matthew Boyle shares this assumption: with regard to the perception of rational subjects, for instance, he writes that an “account of our sort of perceiving must itself appeal to capacities connected with rational thought and judgment.”^[6] By contrast, phenomena that fall outside of the sphere of the rational mind do not require being described or explained from within the space of reasons: instead, they can be described and explained through whatever account is appropriate for non-rational phenomena—for instance, through an account that identifies lawful causal connections between such phenomena.^[7] To sum up, on this view, rational and non-rational phenomena belong to two fundamentally different orders of explanation: only the former are to be accounted for from within the space of reasons.

In the following, I want to defend the claim that Hegel’s position differs from the standard transformativist one in that Hegel does not share the assumption of methodological dualism. For Hegel, we can give a fully adequate account of some (lower) layers of the rational mind, without also ascribing capacities for conceptual thought and judgment to the latter, in other words, without placing the subject fully within the McDowellian space of reasons. As we shall see, this makes for a more fine-grained account of human mental architecture than the standard transformativist one.

I shall proceed as follows. In section 1, I offer some reflections on Hegel’s conception of rationality; specifically, I argue that on Hegel’s account, expression is a constitutive aspect of rationality. This thesis is pivotal for my claim that Hegel rejects methodological dualism. In the following sections (2–4), I discuss in detail Hegel’s account of human mental architecture as presented in his Anthropology—the first part of his Philosophy of Mind—in light of two examples. My discussion focuses specifically on his attempt to bring into view the trait of expressivity, which is constitutive of rationality, by means of methods that are similar in kind to the methods that were typical of the natural sciences of Hegel’s time. In section 5, I return to methodological dualism and explain why Hegel takes a stance different from it.

2 Rationality and expression

A crucial premise in my argument is that, for Hegel, a constitutive aspect of the rational mind is expression. According to McDowell and Boyle, to be rational is, essentially, to be consciously guided by reasons both in judgment and in action. Hegel does not disagree with this account of rationality, but holds that something crucial needs to be added to it. In order to offer or accept a justificatory reason, one needs to show or understand that an action or judgment accords with a norm. But in Hegel’s view, there is no way in which a subject can decide all by herself whether or not her judgment or action can legitimately be considered to be in accord with the norm or not. Rather, in order to prevent such decisions from being mere stipulations, they have to be communicated to and negotiated with other subjects. It is therefore a constitutive part of rational activity for Hegel to make our thoughts, intentions—more generally, our inner states—accessible to other subjects, thereby opening up a communal space of mutual understanding and recognition. Thus, Hegel’s account of rationality differs from McDowell’s in that the emphasis is not only on justification but equally on communication and the mutual responsivity between subjects.

One of the places in Hegel’s work where this is made most explicit is in the introduction to his Philosophy of Mind in the final version of his Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. Hegel here describes the rational mind as being constituted by a twofold movement. On the one hand, there is the radically negative movement of abstracting from everything that is dogmatically or immediately affirmed, of criticizing it and putting it into question. The rational mind, as Hegel puts it, “can abstract from everything external and from its own externality, from its very life.”^[8] On the other hand, there is the positive, affirmative movement of assuming or putting forward a concrete shape that can be considered as rationally justified.^[9] Rationality can never be just a critical or negative enterprise for Hegel—it is only rational to the extent that it involves a positive, affirmative aspect as well. It is with regard to this second, affirmative movement that the notion of expression becomes important. Hegel describes this aspect of the rational mind in the following terms: “Therefore the determinacy of mind is manifestation. The mind is not some one determinacy or content whose expression or externality is only a form distinct from the mind itself.”^[10] Assuming that ‘manifestation’ is roughly synonymous with ‘expression,’ we can read this passage as saying that being expressed is not external to, or optional for, a rational content. Rather, it is constitutive of the content qua rational content that it be so expressed. This is because communicating an inner state and its content to other subjects and thereby opening up a communal space in which reasons can be negotiated and agreed upon is essential for rational affirmation.^[11]

My next argumentative step is to demonstrate that expression for Hegel, while being constitutive of rationality, lies on a continuum that ranges from lower-level, primitive forms, to higher-level, more complex and advanced forms. We can express thoughts in sentences, or intentions in deliberate actions. In these cases, expression involves the capacity for conceptual thought and judgment. But, as we will see in more detail below, there are also forms of expression that are not located within the space of reasons, and that do not (yet) involve the use of conceptual judgments on the side of the subject who engages in them. In order to make clear that we are here not concerned with expression as an intentional activity, we can reserve the term ‘expressivity’ for these lower-level forms of expression. For a piece of behavior or cognitive process to exhibit expressivity, it is sufficient for it to be functional with regard to the aim of communicating an inner state by externalizing it such that it becomes accessible to other subjects; it need not be intentionally designed or deliberately brought about for the sake of communication. What is crucial for our purposes is that this kind of functionality can be adequately accounted for as such without appealing to capacities of conceptual thought and judgment. In other words, expressivity, even though being constitutive of rationality, admits of a sideways-on account, i.e., an account from outside of the space of reasons.

What is more, accounts of expressivity as a trait of human cognitive faculties are actually available from Hegel’s point of view in the anthropological empirical sciences of his time. Hegel’s own discussion of human lower-level cognitive faculties is to be found in his Anthropology. This part of Hegel’s philosophy is extremely well informed by the relevant empirical sources.^[12] As I will demonstrate, one of Hegel’s central aims in his Anthropology is to make apparent, by drawing on such empirical sources, how human lower-level faculties exhibit the trait of expressivity, i.e., of being functional with regard to the aim of communicating inner states. Thus, Hegel’s rejection of methodological dualism has two aspects: on the one hand, there is the general view that there are parts of the rational mind that admit of what McDowell would call a sideways-on account, i.e., an account which does not appeal to capacities of conceptual thought and judgment; on the other hand, there is the more specific view that the methods for giving an adequate account of these parts of the rational mind are to be found in the empirical sciences of his time.^[13]

Against this background, I will discuss in the next two sections two forms of human expressivity that Hegel considers in his philosophy of mind. The first is related to the experienced affinity between moods and colors in human color perception, which Hegel tries to get a theoretical hold of through the lens of Goethe’s theory of colors. The second is the expressivity of human bodily processes such as crying, laughing and blushing. I will discuss the first one briefly, the second one more extensively. This is because in the first case, Hegel can draw on a body of scientific research he finds to be in line with his own theoretical aims. The second case is slightly more complex because here we see Hegel venturing into scientifically uncharted territory, adjusting and correcting the physiological theories available to him in such a way that they better suit his own theoretical purposes. In doing so, he sketches the outlines of an unorthodox, tentative science he calls “psychical physiology.” In both cases, Hegel is concerned to look at the phenomena under consideration as instantiating the trait of expressivity, and thus as pointing towards a central activity of the rational mind: expression.

3 Hegel on expressivity (1): the affinity between color perception and moods

In his Anthropology, Hegel addresses a variety of cognitive and physiological phenomena which at first sight seem to belong to the natural life of higher animals in general, not just human animals: sensation, feeling, self-feeling, habituation.^[14] Two things stand out in his anthropological treatment of these phenomena. First, Hegel draws on a great variety of empirical sources of his time, from the rising discipline of empirical anthropology—which included physiology and empirical psychology—from psychopathology, as well as from other scientific projects he was intrigued by, such as Goethe’s theory of colors. Second, Hegel’s discussion of these phenomena often takes a surprising turn when compared to other contemporaneous approaches. Take the example of sensation. Hegel offers an account of sensation neither from the point of view of a transcendental self who has already accomplished the conceptual capacity to say ‘I’ to itself, nor is he concerned with the neurological mechanisms underlying human sensation. Instead, he focuses on what he calls the “symbolic” aspect of the human sensation of color, sound and smell, claiming that it is in virtue of this aspect that sensation has “a peculiarly human character” and “becomes something anthropological.”^[15]

In spelling out what the symbolism of human color sensation amounts to, Hegel draws extensively on Goethe’s theory of colors. Goethe’s theory impresses him insofar as color is treated as a phenomenon located not only in the physical and chemical world but also in human perception. Goethe’s theory is congenial to the very idea that to grasp the essence of color requires understanding both its physical and chemical constitution, and the way it becomes manifest to the perceiving human subject.^[16] Drawing on Goethe’s results concerning the prismatic origin of color, Hegel seeks to show that in human beings, there is an experienced affinity between the perception of certain colors on the one hand, and the experience of certain moods on the other.^[17]

Broadly, the idea is that what it feels like for a human subject to perceive a color is similar to what it is like for them to undergo a mood. For instance, deep, purple red is considered to be a powerful, majestic, perhaps even aggressive color, in the sense that what it is like to see red is experienced as evoking the experience of power and might. Crucially, this experienced affinity between particular colors and particular moods is not idiosyncratic or situationally variable, but rather intra- and intersubjectively stable; this is what makes it a proper object of scientific, anthropological inquiry.^[18] It is in virtue of this feature that the experienced affinity between moods and color perception can be said to be functional in relation to the aim of communicating inner states, such as moods; because subjects are bound to experience the same moods as being associated with the same colors, it is possible for one subject to convey to another what it feels like for her to be in a certain mood by pointing to, or drawing on, the relevant color.^[19] What it feels like for a subject to be in a certain mood is therefore not something utterly private and incommunicable; rather, it can be communicated to others via its affinity with color perception. Thus, drawing on the terminology introduced above, we can say that in virtue of the systematic experienced affinity between colors and moods, human color perception exhibits the trait of expressivity, i.e., of being functional with regard to the aim of communicating an inner state by externalizing it such that it becomes accessible to other subjects.^[20]

The experienced affinity between a color and a mood is not based on the perception of similarity between the mood and color, along with the ensuing judgment, or proto-judgment, that this perceived similarity is justified.^[21] Nor is it based on a merely conventional agreement. Rather, there occurs an immediate, primitive connection between the perception of a certain color and the experience of a certain mood:

[E]xternal sensation itself is what arouses the mood. But this effect is produced by outer sensation in so far as an inner meaning is immediately, i.e., without conscious intelligence needing to intervene, associated with it. By this meaning, the external sensation becomes something symbolic.^[22]

We therefore need not place a human subject within the space of reasons in order either to ascribe to her color perception the trait of expressivity, or to adequately account for this trait. The expressivity of human color perception simply consists in the inter- and intrasubjectively stable experience of an immediate affinity between colors and moods—an experience that is not based on a conceptual judgement or proto-judgment.

4 Hegel on expressivity (2): the bodily expression of affects

Hegel’s treatment of the human bodily expression of affects involves a more complicated methodology than his treatment of the expressivity of color perception. In the latter case, he can draw on a readily available body of scientific research that concurs with his own methodological ideals. In the former case, Hegel is an avid reader of contemporary scientific accounts of human bodily expression of affective states such as shame, sadness, joy, fear. However, while he draws on them extensively, he is also not fully satisfied with what they have to offer, as we shall see shortly. He therefore takes a more daring approach than with regard to color perception: he modifies the scientific theories available to him.

Human subjects express emotions through bodily processes in various ways: we blush when we are ashamed, we pale and tremble when we are terrified, we laugh when we are amused, we smile when we are happy, we weep when we are sad.^[23] There was no shortage of attempts at offering scientific explanations of human bodily expression in Hegel’s time. In fact, human bodily expression was a topic of special interest for eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century anthropologists. For instance, anthropologist Ernst Platner explains the occurrence of expressive bodily processes by reconstructing the physiological mechanism connecting the occurrence of a mental state—such as sadness—with the triggering of a bodily process—such as the activation of the lachrymal gland and the resulting shedding of tears.^[24] Similarly, Tübingen-based physician Wilhelm Gottfried Ploucquet holds that all emotions (Gemütsbewegungen) causally affect the nervous system according to certain laws that are not further explicable.^[25] But Ploucquet complements such explanations with a functional perspective: all such bodily processes, he suggests, ultimately serve the function of enabling the human being or animal to react as quickly as possible, without allowing deliberation to intervene, to an imminent danger or enemy, by either enabling flight or reducing suffering.^[26]

This functional perspective is also taken up by Ploucquet’s colleague Johann Heinrich Ferdinand Autenrieth, Hegel’s closest confidant in matters of empirical anthropology. According to Autenrieth’s account of weeping from sadness, for instance, our eyes shed tears when we are sad because this offers relief from a preceding tension. The tension arises, on the one hand, from the accumulation of blood in the region of the eyes, which is a result of the typical facial expression of sadness. On the other hand, blood also accumulates in the chest during sadness, and therefore, indirectly, in the brain; the tension of this accumulation, too, is relieved through the shedding of tears.^[27] Thus, on the whole, the shedding of tears is serviceable to the animal by reducing suffering.

Hegel does not follow Autenrieth in his account of weeping.^[28] In one of the transcripts of Hegel’s Anthropology lectures, we find a comment that gives us a first hint as to why. It reads:

Physiology considers the functions of the organs, of the limbs, the liveliness (Lebendigkeit) of the body, but it considers the body only as a living organism, i.e., as animal organism, as self–preserving. But here it has a different meaning: its various members are destined to become organs of various inner affections.^[29]

Similarly, in the Encyclopedia, Hegel states: “In physiology the viscera and the organs are regarded as moments only of the animal organism; but they form at the same time a system of embodiment of the mental, and in this way get an entirely different interpretation.”^[30] To the extent that we look at parts of the body as “organs of inner affections,” or as “embodiments of the mental,” Hegel suggests here, we need to abandon the perspective of physiology. Orthodox physiology considers every bodily process in light of the function it fulfills with regard to the organism’s overall aim of self-preservation; this is what it means to consider the organism merely as an animal organism. Autenrieth’s account of weeping from sadness exemplifies this approach: assuming that the organism is aimed at maintaining the health and integrity of its particular organs, thereby securing its own self-preservation, we can understand that tears must be shed in order to release pressure and thereby reduce strain on the eyeballs. In contrast to this perspective, Hegel calls for a “specific science of its own,” which he tentatively calls “psychical physiology (psychische Physiologie).”^[31] The fact that he speaks of this science in the subjunctive mood indicates that he does not consider it as a properly established discipline. However, Hegel then proceeds to give his own account of weeping from sadness, and we may assume that this account exemplifies at least the general direction the discipline of psychical physiology would have to take in his view:

But that precisely the eyes should be the organ from which the pain pouring out in tears surges forth, this lies in the fact that the eye has a twofold determination: on the one hand, it is the organ of sight, thus of the sensation of external objects; and secondly, it is the place where the soul reveals itself in the simplest manner, since the eye’s expression displays the fleeting, as it were exhaled, portrait of the soul—and that is why people, in order to know each other, start by looking each other in the eye. Now the negativity which someone senses in pain inhibits his activity, reduces him to passivity, clouds the ideality, the light of his soul, and more or less dissolves the soul’s firm unity with itself; accordingly, this state of soul embodies itself by a dimming of the eyes, and still more by a moistening of them which can act so obstructively on the function of sight, on this ideal activity of the eye, that the eye can no longer stand looking out.^[32]

Hegel gives corresponding accounts of the bodily expression of other affects. In shame, on Hegel’s analysis, a subject becomes aware of herself by becoming aware of a contradiction or mismatch between what she thinks she ought to be and what she is. Hegel calls this a “mental outward–directedness.”^[33] On the side of the body, this mental outward–directedness is expressed by what Hegel describes as a physical outward-directedness: blood rushing to the visible surface of the body (especially the face). In the case of terror, the “shrinking into itself of the soul” characteristic of the experience is matched by a collapsing, shrinking sensation: the receding of blood from the face. In important respects, the account Hegel here gives of the bodily expression of inner states such as sadness, shame, or fear, stands in continuity with the explanation of the same bodily processes given by the physiologists of his time. Like the latter, Hegel looks at these processes with a view to the function they fulfill in the organism’s life. At the same time, Hegel’s account diverges from the orthodox physiological one in one decisive respect: it looks at whether and how the processes under consideration are functional with regard to the aim of communicating inner states, rather than the aim of self-preservation. Let me spell this out in more detail in light of the example of weeping from sadness, as described by Hegel in the quotation given above.

Hegel’s description of the process of weeping is intended to draw attention to how this process is functional in relation to the aim of communicating the inner state of sadness to other subjects. To begin with, the shedding of tears from one’s eyes is a process that happens on the surface of the body and is visible to others (in this respect, it is similar to the process of blushing, smiling, or turning white in the face). In fact, as Hegel points out, tears are being shed from a human being’s eyes, i.e., from a part of their body that is not only readily visible to others under normal circumstances but especially salient in that it is that part of a human being’s face we naturally turn to when looking for an expression of the other’s ‘soul.’ Furthermore, not only is the process of shedding tears potentially visible to others, it is also such that the subject herself can possibly become aware of when it occurs. To illustrate this further, imagine a counterfactual scenario in which the inner state of sadness, instead of leading to tears, is lawfully correlated with completely different bodily processes—such as a lowering of blood pressure or a change in electrodermal activity—which could therefore be considered as reliable indicators that the inner state of sadness is present in a subject. However, in contrast to such hypothetical bodily processes, the shedding of tears from one’s eyes is not only a reliable indicator of the state of sadness in a subject but also an indicator that is manifest both to other subjects as well as to the subject herself. In virtue of these latter features, shedding tears is functional in relation to the aim of communicating one’s inner state to another subject.

Hegel, however, describes the process of shedding tears as functional not just for communicating inner states but specifically for conveying the inner state of sadness. Shedding tears from one’s eyes is a bodily process consisting of several parts organized so as to express sadness. In weeping, a moistening and clouding of the eyes takes place that is simultaneously an obstruction of sight—just like the inner state of sadness amounts to a ‘clouding’ of one’s mental condition. There is a correspondence between the content of the inner state and the bodily process that expresses it.^[34] This kind of specific expressivity also holds for other expressive bodily processes on Hegel’s account. For instance, in blushing from shame, a visible body part, the face, is being made more salient by changing color—a process particularly apt for articulating the shameful feeling of standing out from the crowd, of being alienated from one’s peers. In the case of blushing from shame, there is also a further dimension to be noted with regard to its general expressivity: one blushes primarily in the presence of other people. The occurrence of blushing is therefore audience-sensitive, and its audience sensitivity accordingly reflects its function of communicating the inner state of shame to others.

By serving the aim of communication, expressive bodily processes are similar to gestures. In fact, Hegel seems to hold that most deliberate gestures we use have developed from involuntary expressive bodily processes. Because the latter are already functional in relation to the aim of expression, they lend themselves to being developed into gestures, i.e., intentional actions performed with the explicit aim of expression. In this way, involuntary expressive bodily processes and intentional gestures form a continuum.^[35] The decisive difference between the two ends of the continuum is that while gestures are performed intentionally and, as a rule, for a reason—the reason being expression—this is not true for the bodily processes under consideration here. Hegel writes: “Our object…is…the embodiment of inner sensations, and more specifically only the embodiment occurring involuntarily, not the will-dependent embodiment of my sensations by means of gesture.”^[36] Thus, while involuntary expressive bodily processes occur for a reason—the reason being that they are expressive—this is not a reason that the subject exhibiting them is aware of. Accordingly, no capacities for self-conscious, conceptual thought and judgment need to be engaged in order for these processes to occur.

5 Hegel’s rejection of methodological dualism

In the introductory section, I stated that Hegel rejects the methodological dualism that is typically implied by transformativist theories of rationality. That is to say, he rejects the view that rational and non-rational phenomena belong to two, fundamentally different orders of explanation such that only the former are to be accounted for from within the space of reasons. Against the background of the preceding discussion, we can now see in more detail what this rejection of methodological dualism amounts to. On Hegel’s view, human lower-level cognitive faculties are permeated by rationality insofar as they exhibit expressivity. In our first example, the trait of expressivity is brought into view through Hegel’s adaptation of Goethe’s theory of colors. Hegel uses Goethe’s theory as a scientific basis for the claim that in human subjects the perception of colors is systematically correlated with the experience of moods; this correlation allows for the expression and intersubjective communication of moods through colors. The experience of this affinity between colors and moods does not involve the capacities for conceptual thought and judgment, as it does not rest on a judgment or proto-judgment to the effect that color and mood share something in common that justifies the connection between them. Similarly, the trait of expressivity in human bodily expression is addressed by Hegel’s hypothetical science of psychical physiology. Hegelian psychical physiology is a type of physiology in that it embraces the same kind of explanation as orthodox physiology: a functional explanation that does not presuppose that the functionality of the processes under consideration is consciously grasped or deliberately pursued by the subjects who exhibit them. At the same time, psychical physiology diverges from its orthodox relative in that it sees human bodily expressions as contributing not to the animal’s self-preservation but to the expression of its inner states.

In both cases, then, the trait of expressivity, as exhibited by lower-level human mental faculties, can be accounted for without appealing to capacities for conceptual thought and judgment. In other words, we can ascribe expressivity to a subject’s lower-level cognitive faculties without thereby placing her within the McDowellian space of reasons. The positive counterpart of this negative claim is that the trait of expressivity can be adequately accounted for by the same kind of account characteristic of the natural sciences of Hegel’s time. If we put these two aspects of Hegel’s view together with the assumption that expression is constitutive of rationality, we arrive at the result that Hegel rejects McDowellian methodological dualism with regard to the mental architecture of human rational subjects. For Hegel, there are lower-level constitutive parts of the human rational mind that can be adequately accounted for in the same way as non-rational phenomena. The scope of the rational mind, then, is for Hegel more expansive than the McDowellian space of reasons.

One of the potential virtues of this reading is that it enables us to draw on Hegel in order to make intelligible the transition from non-human nature to human nature. To be sure, Hegel holds that the trait of expressivity is exclusive to the mental and bodily functioning of human beings; he arguably even believes that expressivity constitutes the key feature distinguishing human nature from animal nature. He comments on this in some detail in his Lectures on Aesthetics, claiming that while the bodies of non-human animals tend to be covered with lifeless substances such as hair, shell, bone, scales or feathers, which inhibit bodily expression, the anatomy and physiology of the human body is inherently more conducive to making the subject’s inner life visible to others on its outer surface.^[37] However, this is one of Hegel’s less convincing arguments, and we are well advised not to put too much weight on it. Instead, we should be open to the possibility that in light of more thorough and more advanced empirical findings, Hegel would revise his stance on the natural expressivity of animals. I suggest that this is one of the virtues of the Hegelian position outlined above: instead of being fixated on a categorical difference between different biological species, it is potentially open to finding traces of rational mind even in higher non-human animals.