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Hegel, the phenomenology of spirit, a guide in mp3 voice
19TheObservationOfSelfConsciousness.mp3
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The Observation of Self-Consciousness
Having failed to find any satisfactory role for laws at the level of inorganic and organic nature, consciousness now turns upon itself, and moves from the observation of nature to the 'Observation of Self-Consciousness', in an effort to find laws governing the human mind. Hegel begins by discussing the attempt to treat laws of logic as laws of human thought, governing the way in which we reason. Hegel argues that although such laws are meant to be necessary and universal, 'the way in which this form or content presents itself to observation qua observation gives it the character of something found, something that is given, i.e. a content that merely is' , so all that can be established is how as a matter of fact we do think, not why we must think that way, or why we should so think. Observing Reason then turns from trying to find laws governing the subject's thoughts, to trying to find laws governing its actions, and so arrives at observational psychology. As before, it begins by trying to describe and classify people into different types, but it quickly finds that this is unsatisfying, 'much less interesting even than enumerating the species of insects, mosses, etc.' . Observing Reason therefore begins to frame psychological laws instead: 'it . . . seems now to have a rational aim and to be engaged in a necessary activity' . Observing Reason then looks for links between how the individual behaves and its social environment, to determine how the latter affects the former. However, there is always an element that distorts this effect, namely how the individual himself chooses to respond to his environment. This freedom possessed by the individual makes a nonsense of attempts by psychology to establish law-like correlations between the way in which individuals behave and their social circumstances: 'The individual either allows free play to the stream of the actual world flowing in upon it, or else breaks it off and transforms it. The result of this, however, is that “psychological necessity” becomes an empty phrase, so empty that there exists the absolute possibility that what is supposed to have had this influence could just as well not have had it'. Hegel emphasizes that this freedom means it is not possible to see the individual as determined by their social environment, although he is happy to allow that 'if these circumstances, way of thinking, customs, in general the state of the world, had not been, then of course the individual would not have become what he is' . The reason is that while the individual may choose to conform to that environment, he may also choose to rebel against it, so while this environment will have a role to play in understanding him or her, what role that is will ultimately depend on the choices made by the individual, and these choices lie beyond the kinds of explanation offered by the social psychologist. For Hegel, therefore, Observing Reason is here once again operating with a simplistic model of the relation between the individual and the universal qua 'habits, customs, and way of thinking already to hand': 'On the one hand, Spirit receives these modes into itself . . .; and, on the other hand, Spirit knows itself as spontaneously active in face of them, and in singling out from them something for itself, it follows its own inclinations and desires, making the object conform to it: in the first case it behaves negatively towards itself as an individuality; in the second case, negatively towards itself as a universal being'. Observing Reason does not properly grasp this complex interrelation. As Observing Reason can find no laws governing its thought or actions per se, or its thought and actions as they relate to the world outside the subject, it now looks to find some sort of correlation between its thoughts or actions as mental phenomena with the body in which the mind belongs; it therefore moves to the 'observation of the relation of self-consciousness to its immediate actuality', in the third subsection on Observing Reason. In this subsection, Hegel turns on the pseudo-sciences of physiognomy (which attempted to draw conclusions about a person's character from anatomical features) and phrenology (which attempted to do the same using the shape of the skull), where both of these approaches had considerable popularity at the time Hegel was writing (due to the work of J. C. Lavater and Joseph Gall respectively). Beginning with physiognomy, Hegel accepts that we ordinarily use a person's expression as a way of gauging their thoughts or emotions, treating the former as signs of the latter; but where physiognomy claims to go beyond this and become a proper science, is in making predictions about how people will behave on the basis of their anatomical features, and in being prepared to use such features to tell a person about their character in a way that overrules the evidence of their actions and their own self-knowledge. As a result, this science is forced to treat character-traits as hidden dispositions, a despe P 常 POST /forum/post.jsp HTTP/1.1
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