Reason
Observation of Self-Consciousness
(in its Purity and in its Relation to External Actuality:
Logical and Psychological Laws)
Many things are wonderful, but none more wonderful and awesome than humanity.
It should be no surprise by now that this chapter, too, will end in failure. Consciousness presses on throughout the Phenomenology, following Samuel Beckett’s words – ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ – until it reconciles itself with that which makes it move in the first place.1 When consciousness takes on the role of observing reason, it turns towards the world to try and proves its instinctive idea that the world is rational; in other words, and as we have already seen many times, reason wants to observe the world and find itself looking back. In its observation of inorganic and organic nature, however, reason was only able to grasp its object as static and dead, reduced to a kind of hollow mechanism.
Rational consciousness’s subsequent turn to itself, which Hegel explores in this section, is not just another analysis of the formation and transformation of self-consciousness (as we had in the chapter named after self-consciousness); rather, it is the moment where rational self-consciousness becomes an object for itself, in just the same way that nature was previously. As Harris has suggested, the observer of self-consciousness is best described as a biographer.2 To start with, the observer is going to try and find ‘logical and psychological laws’ that govern conscious thought. Consciousness observes its own thought, and then asks: by what standards or rules is this thinking carried out? Consequently, this part of the Reason chapter is Hegel’s analysis of logic; and, interestingly, it is only a few pages long.
In the search for logical and psychological laws, the observer first finds within herself ‘the laws of thought’ – what we might identify as the law of non-contradiction, the law of identity, and so on.3 Now, since pure thinking as such is an ‘abstract movement’, concerned with universal ideas rather than particular objects, these laws of thought are ‘supposed’ by the observer ‘not to be the entire truth but nonetheless to be formally true.’4 For instance, the law of identity on its own (x = x) expresses only the abstract form of an arbitrary possible object, rather than an object present in reality. This is a common critical idea regarding logic: it is too formal, too abstract, to tell us anything about the world. However, Hegel’s critique is that the opposite is true. The observer is mistaken; logic is not devoid of content, but in fact devoid of form. Insofar as the logical ‘laws of thought’ are derived from mere observation of a particular creature (that is, the observer themselves), they take the form of ‘a found content’, or ‘a given’.5 The observer has mistaken the same mistake that was made in the observation of nature: the very act of observation, and the attempt to find law, has taken the inherent dynamism and movement out of the world, rendering it as something wholly static. As Hegel writes,
In the course of being studied, [the ‘laws of thought’] are torn away from the context of movement and are arranged as singulars … these determinatenesses are not lacking in content since they in fact have a determinate content. What they lack is form, which is their essence.6
As it stands, the laws of thought aren’t actually ‘universal’ rules of the forms of thinking (and of thinkable things); in fact, they are mere contingent observations of ‘the content of thought’. Thus, ‘observation is not knowing itself’, and it ‘inverts its nature into the shape of being, i.e., it grasps its negativity’ – that is, its movement – ‘only as laws of being.’ Yet again, the shortcoming of observing reason is that it finds doing in the world, and falsely renders it as static being.
Psychology
Consequently, the observer must observe self-consciousness as an active process, if it is to find the laws that govern it. Hegel actually suggests that, in taking this step forward (i.e. towards the acknowledgment of self-consciousness as active), the observer is ‘guided by the very nature of the matter which is at issue’, though they do not yet comprehend ‘the way this all hangs together.’7 Though it’s not entirely clear, this might be a hint that the observer is getting closer to realising its own role in that which it is observing. Either way, the observation of self-consciousness as active marks a decisive move away from logic and towards psychology, which Hegel defines as follows:
Psychology contains the class of laws according to which spirit conducts itself in various ways towards the various modes of its actuality as an only found otherness.8
There are a few interesting things to note in this single sentence. First of all, this definition makes reference not to self-consciousness but to spirit, both as an active force ‘conducting itself’, and as something with ‘various modes of actuality’. In this context, we should therefore understand ‘spirit’ in two different senses: first, it is the set of ‘habits, mores, and ways of thinking’ in which we found ourselves as self-consciousness: this is spirit in the sense of ‘actuality’. Secondly, spirit is that which is manifest as self-consciousness; in other words, spirit is the mental, social, and historical context which is manifested in every individual self-consciousness. As such, the ‘class of laws’ contained in psychology concern the way that acting self-consciousness ‘conducts itself’ in the context of its contemporary habits, mores, and so on.
The observer (who, for now, we can call ‘the psychologist’) finds that self-consciousness conducts itself in two ways towards the actualities of spirit. Firstly, it conforms by ‘receiving into itself’ the norms and mores of its culture, allowing itself to be the form to social content. In this regard, self-consciousness ‘comes to be according to these’ cultural phenomena. Secondly, however, the self has the option to rebel. Like the slave from the self-consciousness chapter, the activity of the rebellious self-consciousness takes the form of transformative work; self-consciousness makes what is objective come to be adequate to itself,’ Hegel explains.9 This second, rebellious tendency of self-consciousness itself has two varieties: on the one hand, if ‘the individual sublates that universal actuality [culture and the actualities of spirit, etc.] in an only singular manner’, they count as a criminal. On the other hand, if the self’s rebellion is ‘in a universal manner which thereby acts for all,’ its activity ‘brings about another world’ with a transformed spirit, and thus the self is a revolutionary. (Incidentally, it is interesting that, apart from a metaphorical usage in Force and the Understanding, the notion of criminality has its first appearance in the Phenomenology in the examination of psychology. This might lend itself to a comparison with Foucault’s historical work, 150 years after Hegel, which examines the ‘Great Confinement’ of the modern age, wherein psychological classification became part of a legal punitive process.)10
Of course, these tendencies of self-consciousness’s psychological activity are only two among many others. As a whole, Hegel calls them ‘universal modes’, and he is aware that the psychologist cannot help but be ‘astonished’ that so many different ‘faculties, inclinations, and passions’ can reside in one mind, ‘restless movements’ that somehow sit next to one another.11 This point resonates even more today, after Freud’s discovery of the multiple antithetical drives that exist within the human psyche. In all their variety, how are these universal modes (or ‘faculties’) to be observed in their manifestations in individual people? As Hegel points out, it is possible for the psychologist to simply enumerate the varying ‘inclinations’ in different people, or their differing intellectual strengths, and so on, like an IQ test does. But in practice, this strategy is of little more use than ‘enumerating the species of insects, mosses, and so on,’ he writes, because it takes each individual as a ‘contingent separation’, entirely divorced from the social and cultural influence on their minds.12 If the psychologist wants to find reason in the individual’s psyche, they must acknowledge that ‘the essence of individuality is the universal of spirit.’ In other words, the individual’s cultural environment, with all of the actualities of spirit, must inform the psychologist’s observation.
How can the relation between an individual and their ‘circumstances, situations, habits, mores, religion’ be understood as law?13 A psychologist might want to claim that an individuality’s personhood is nothing but a reflection of their environment; a historian of so-called ‘Great Men’ might want to claim the reverse, that a particular era’s culture and environment was nothing but the reflection of the will of a few strong individuals. For Hegel, any such law – which cleanly places ‘the individual’ on one side and ‘society’ (and culture, religion, etc.) on the other – is mistaken. This is for the simple reason that no individual is born entirely separate from their environment. To suggest so would presumably be a contradiction of the very meaning of ‘environment’! Rather, Hegel points out, individuality ‘comes to be in accordance with [the norms of its environment] as conducting itself in opposition to them.’14 In other words, an individual and their environment – that is, the environment around them as they experience and understand it – are so irretrievably interrelated that one cannot be comprehended without reference to another. As Hyppolite puts it clearly,
The world that acts on us is already “our world”; we see it through ourselves. And we can come to know an individual’s world only if we begin with that individual. We can specify an influence only if we know the person who undergoes it, and thereby determines it.15
This realisation has a fatal consequence for the psychologist: if the particular relation between an individual and their world is determined by the individual – that is, on account of individual freedom – how can the necessity of a law enter the picture? Hegel thus concludes:
The individual either lets the stream of actuality with its flowing influence have its way in him, or he breaks it off and turns that stream of influence on its head [i.e., negates it]. Psychological necessity thereby becomes such an empty phrase that it includes the absolute possibility that what is supposed to have had this influence could very well also not have had any influence whatsoever.16
Physiognomy
Having found no place for law in the individual’s free mind, our observer gives up their short-lived career in psychology and turns to the more visible aspect of human existence: the ‘distinctive determinateness’ of individuality, the ‘rigidly fixed being’ of an individual’s actuality: that is, the body.17 This move seems plausible: it seems intuitive that the body is closer to an individual’s ‘inner life’ than the aforementioned actualities of spirit are. Moreover, while logic studied only the purely universal elements of human consciousness (that is, the laws of thinking), and psychology studied the particular shape of the human in its environment, physiognomy and phrenology take a slightly more sophisticated route by understanding the individual as an individual; that is, as an incorporation of both previous logical moments, universal and particular: the individual that the observer now examines is the result of an outer expression of an inner essence.
In ancient times, Plato had supposed that the human body was designed by the gods to house the soul, and that every basic function of the body could be traced back to this purpose.18 In Hegel’s own era, scientists like Johann Kaspar Lavater revived the discipline of ‘physiognomy’, claiming that one could discern somebody’s character and personality based on an observation of their physical appearance (especially, in the case of Lavater, of the face). In this final part of Observing Reason, Hegel will criticise physiognomy and phrenology as forms of pseudoscience; their shortcomings, we will see, are somewhat similar to those of psychology.
For the physiognomist, Hegel says, the body is an outer sign of an individual’s inner life. Indeed, since we cannot literally peer inside the mind of a person, we rely on the body and its activity (facial expressions, speech, and so on) as it ‘makes known what he [the person] is, in the sense of putting his original nature into practice.’ With this idea, we arrive at another formulation of the ‘outer-expressing-inner’ motif that appears so often in the Phenomenology. The body is understood as a kind of ‘record’, signifying what the individual has done: it is the congealed history of an individual’s activity.19 According to some, this idea is a classic element of Enlightenment thinking; as Adorno and Horkheimer wrote, ‘animism spiritualized the object, whereas industrialism [of the modern, ’enlightened’ era] objectifies the spirits of men.’20 Quite quickly, however, Hegel takes apart this ambitious idea that the appearance of our bodies is a tell-tale sign of what lies within us. First of all, he points out that the process of human acting isn’t rightly understood as something ‘inner’ eventually manifesting as something ‘outer’; rather, ‘the inner … is the activity itself.’21 An individual’s activity is nothing at all until it is acted out, so we have no basis for supposing some prior, ‘inner’ cause of the activity. Alasdair MacIntyre puts this criticism in the following way:
When we see someone with a sad expression on his face, we do not infer to an inner sadness he feels on the basis of an observed correlation between such a physical arrangement of the facial features and inner states of sadness. We read or interpret the expression as one of sadness in the light of the conventions in our culture for interpreting facial expressions.22
MacIntyre’s reference to our interpretation (‘in light of conventions’) of bodily expression leads to Hegel’s second point; namely, that when our activity becomes visible to others through our facial expression, body language, and so on, it becomes ‘an actuality cut off from the individual.’23 When individual activity is ‘publicly’ manifested, the actor has no authority on what this activity ‘means’, signifies, and so on. In Hegel’s words, ‘language and labor’ – that is, all the visible activities of an individual – ‘are expressions in which the individual on his own no longer retains and possesses himself; rather, he lets the inner move wholly outside of him and he thus abandons it to the other.’24 Imagine that I mean to act in a certain way, and that my activity doesn’t deceive me: my ‘meaning’ is interpreted by an Other accurately. Now, as previously stated, there is really no difference between my ‘meaning’ and the activity itself; consequently, ‘no opposition remains between [the activity] and the inner’, and there is thus no ‘relation’ within which the observer can find a law.
Finding no stable law within the activity of a body, the physiognomist can still turn to the features of a body to try and access an individual’s inner life. Rather than the words that someone’s voice speaks, or the gestures that their hands perform, the physiognomist can instead look to the ‘tone and range of the voice’, and ‘the simple lines of the hand’, taking these features to be signs of something inner.25 There are two advantages to this strategy: first of all, like the signs (that is, ‘signifiers’) in language, these features are stable and consistent, especially when compared to the fluidity of body language and vocal expression. Secondly, in Hegel’s words, ‘the organ of activity is just as much a being as it is a doing’: that is to say, body parts like the mouth and hand are so central and essential to an individual’s activity that, in a sense, what they are is simply what the individual does. It is ‘the hand by which a person brings himself to appearance and actualizes himself’, Hegel writes: ‘It is the ensouled artisan of his fortune.’26 The physiognomist can thus suggest that these features are a ‘mediating middle’ between the individual’s inner life (intentions) and their externalities (actions). Harris directly identifies this thinking with Lavater, and explains it in the following way:
The individual’s deeds are many and various, but all are mediated, all pass through hand or mouth, so hands and face and tone of voice (and the handwriting) are where the simple disposition will show. All that the agent has done, and all that she has suffered through circumstance and destiny, is recorded in these organs of the will.27
A ‘mediating’ organ like the face is thus taken to be an outer sign of the inner, but – just as before – this notion of signifiying leads to significant problems. The face is ‘indeed an expression’, Hegel writes, ‘but at the same time it is so only in the sense of a sign, so that the makeup of that through which it is expressed is completely indifferent to the content expressed.’28 Hegel is here referring to what in linguistics is known as the ‘arbitrariness’ of a sign: something that Ferdinand de Saussure, who wrote a century after Hegel, is often credited with. The arbitrariness of signs is not a Saussurean concept, or even a particularly unintuitive concept: it is simply the fact that a sign – whether that is a word (for instance, ‘squirrel’) or a face – has no inherent relation to that which it signifies (for instance, an actual squirrel, or an individual’s inner state). The face renders visible the invisible, Hegel concedes, ‘but without [the invisible inner] itself being intertwined with this appearance.’
The arbitrariness of a face’s signification is the first blow to the physiognomist’s search for necessary law. The second is a repetition of a moment that the psychologist already experienced: that is, the freedom of the individual removes any necessary connection between their inner state and its outer manifestation. In psychological observation, this meant that the individual was free to choose how they were affected by their cultural environment. In the case of physiognomy, it poses the following problem:
In the way that in the previous relationships [e.g. that of psychology], in the circumstances lying before us [the cultural environment in the case of psychology, and the face and body in physiognomic context], there was an existent, and the individuality took for itself what he could and what he wanted from it, and he either submitted to this existent or he twisted it around, and for that reason the existent did not contain the necessity and essence of individuality. … [Therefore,] to the individual, the sign is as much its face as it is its mask, which it can remove.29
With this point, Hegel starts to move forward to the conclusion of his critique of physiognomy. In doing so, he provides us with a helpful account of ‘the genuine thought that lies at the basis of … the science of physiognomy’ (though he is reluctant to call it a ‘science’).30 This fundamental ‘thought’ is that of a strict distinction between the ‘theoretical’ and the ‘practical’; that is, between a non-essential outer which is some manifestation of an essential inner. Of course, we have seen this mode of thinking occur time and time again in the Observing Reason chapter. It is no surprise that Hegel should now announce it as the archetypal feature of the observer’s thinking. For observational reason, ‘inwardness’ is ‘supposed to be the true’. In this sense, it is no surprise that Kant, a philosopher for whom reason is of utmost importance, sees the ultimate reality of things as a kind of inner (the in-itself) that lies beyond appearances and manifestations, and sees the true moral worth of an act in its inner intention.31
The problem with physiognomy’s search for the ‘true’ inner is that it never ventures beyond ‘the unconscious judging’ that most of us carry out in everyday life. It’s natural for us to make judgments about someone’s character based on their appearance – whether these judgments are right or wrong. Physiognomy simply has the confidence to suppose that these judgments can be governed by some kind of law. Not only is there no necessity to be found for phsyiognomic laws, as Hegel has shown in multiple ways, but the very subject matter of physiognomy (i.e., bodily appearance) cannot be rendered into words or laws. As Hegel puts it, the individual’s expression (appearance) is ‘infinitely determinate’: the physiognomist is stuck with the same kind of uncertainty that sensuous certainty suffered from, because no quantity of words and concepts will ever exhaustively describe all the determinatenesses of an individual, especially when one is concerned with devising law, and not just a poetic or literary portrait.32
Physiognomy, in short, is incoherent. The everyday habits it emerges from might remain worthwhile to a poet or an artist, but no scientific theory can emerge in the practice of someone who radically separates individuals into an ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, and then tries to repair this separation on the grounds of mere assumption, inexpressible in language. In his last paragraph on physiognomy, Hegel quotes Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s 1778 book Über Physiognomik, wider die Physiognomen, which mocks Lavater’s ‘science’ of physiognomy:
If someone said, ‘To be sure, you act like an honest man, but I can see from your face that you are forcing yourself to do so and are a knave at heart,’ then any upright fellow, when addressed in that fashion, will, until the end of time, respond with a slap in the accuser’s face.33
Hegel sees more than just a joke in this remark. When the ‘upright fellow’ retorts with a slap in the face, Hegel sees ‘the refutation of the first presupposition’ of physiognomy: ‘namely, that the actuality of a person is supposed to be his face, etc.’ The upright fellow is performing the refutation, namely, the fact that action – ‘his deed’ – is the real actuality of an individual, not some ambiguous sign of a merely assumed inner. The slap in Lichtenberg’s remark is a wake-up call to the physiognomist, saying: ‘my character is not in my face, not in my appearance, but in what I do!’ Thus, Hegel takes Lichtenberg’s point – which he endorses himself – to be this:
The deed is something simply determinate [contrast with the ‘infinite determinateness’ of the face], universal, to be grasped in an abstraction; it is murder, theft, beneficence, a courageous act, and so on, and what it is can be said of it. The deed is this, and its being is not only a sign, it is the matter at issue itself.34
This is an early sign of Hegel’s insistence on individuals as primarily doing, acting beings – the insistence that will eventually drive us out of Observing Reason entirely. For now, however, the stubborn observer makes one last attempt at a science of observing the individual: namely, phrenology.
Phrenology
The head that will become a skull is already empty.
That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once. How the knave jowls it to the ground, as if ’twere Cain’s jawbone, that did the first murther! This might be the pate of a Politician, which this ass now o’erreaches; one that would circumvent God, might it not?
Hegel recognises phrenology as the ‘one relationship left over’: the only way that remains for the observer to understand the relationship between the individual and spirit.35 Psychology considered the spirit of the individual to be formed in relationship to their external surroundings; physiognomy located spirit as something signified by the outer aspect of the individual, and was therefore more ‘zoomed-in’ to the individual than psychology was. Phrenology zooms in even closer, understanding spirit to be – and not merely to be expressed by – the individual’s ‘immediate, fixed, purely existing actuality’: namely, the skull. As Slavoj Žižek writes,
The final result of physiognomy is its utter failure: every signifying representation ‘betrays’ the subject; it perverts, deforms what it is supposed to reveal; there is no ‘proper’ signifier of the subject. And the passage from physiognomy to phrenology functions as the change of level from representation to presence: in opposition to gestures and grimaces, the skull is not a sign expressing an interior; it represents nothing; it is – in its very inertia – the immediate presence of the Spirit.36
It is quite surprising that Observing Reason, a huge section of the Phenomenology that deals with the development of natural sciences, should come to its climax with a theory as pseudoscientific and utterly obsolete as phrenology. It makes sense, however, when we consider that phrenology marks the final reductio ad absurdum of reason that is content to merely observe: for as long as we ignore that the real rationality of humanity is in our social activity, in our deeds that realise us and leave a mark on the world after our death, we will always end up with a picture of the human spirit as something dead and abstract: ‘spirit is a bone’, the phrenologist will (ridiculously) come to conclude.37 Indeed, Hegel will actually briefly return to phrenology in his final chapter (§790), reflecting on how it proves that, when taken as devoid of activity, sociality, and culture, spirit is nothing at all.
Why is it the skull in particular that the observer chooses as the immediate actuality of its focus? To start with, Hegel points out that the majority of bodily organs are, as the physiognomist recognised, ‘mediating middles’ between the individual and the external world: the hands physically manipulate the world, the sexual organs look to reproduce the individual, and so on. In this sense, most organs are ‘instruments’.38 In trying to find not a signifier of spiritual individuality, but instead individuality itself, the observer must find an organ wherein ‘the individual is not turned outwards but is instead reflected in his action’ – that is, an organ which is for itself. What about the brain and the spinal cord? Taken together, this system ‘may be considered as the immediate presence of self-consciousness persisting within itself’, Hegel writes.39 Indeed, as soon as it becomes visible to an Other, ‘it is a dead being’ that has lost its functionality. Is this not a sign of an organ that is exclusively for-itself? However, the activity of the brain and spinal cord, no matter how inwardly contained it might be, is active for the sake of articulating the body in any particular way; as such, Hegel explains that
the being reflected-into-itself of spirit in the brain itself is again only a mediating middle between its pure essence and its bodily articulation, a middle which must thus have the nature of both and also of the existing articulation in it.40
The observer is thus forced to ‘step back’ further, and focus on the skull and spinal column: the ‘motionless fixed things’ that indifferently encase the brain and spinal cord. Now, as Hegel understands it, the phrenologist is focused only on the skull (and not the spinal column) for two reasons: firstly, ‘anyone who thinks of the genuine location of spirit thinks not of the spine but only of the head’; secondly, since ‘knowing and acting’ (or the instructions telling the body and mind to act and to know) are driven ‘through the spine’, the spine cannot be seen as a stable site of spirit.41 The phrenologist is thus left with the skull, the ‘caput mortuum’ (dead head), as their object of focus.
Having arrived at the skull as the supposed location of spirit, the first task of the phrenologist is to understand the causal relationship between the spirit, embodied in the skull, and the individual’s body (specifically, the brain, since this is the body part most directly related to the skull). This might be a simple case of causation in one direction: perhaps the brain itself is able to ‘press the skull’, ‘widen it or flatten it’, and so on; alternatively, perhaps it is the skull that ‘presses on the brain’ and thus determines the boundaries and capacities of the brain.42 Franz Joseph Gall, the originator of phrenology, believed the former. It seems that a phrenologist would be unable to believe the latter; since, if the skull influences the brain, it therefore influences the individual’s knowing and acting, too – and this externalisation of the skull’s influence would deny its existence as purely for itself. It seems that even Darwin (later than Gall and Hegel) also adhered to the idea that the skull, being affected by the brain, was an indication of mental capacity:
The belief that there exists in man some close relation between the size of the brain and the development of the intellectual faculties is supported by the comparison of the skulls of savage and civilised races …
… As [humans started to walk on two feet], the internal pressure of the brain, will, also, have influenced the form of the skull; for many facts shew how easily the skull is thus affected. … [I]f the mental powers were to be much increased or diminished without any great change in the size of the body; the shape of the skull would almost certainly be altered.43
Of course, the causal relation between skull and brain might not be simple and one-way: there is also the possibility of a ‘pre-established harmony’ determining the form of brain and skull at the same time. Now, while this notion of pre-established harmony is found famously in Leibniz’s work, Hegel points out that this kind of skull-brain harmony wouldn’t necessarily imply an actual correspondence between skull and brain. They would have the same loose relation as that of ‘the form of the grape and the taste of wine’.44 Consequently, even though this pre-established harmony between the skull and the brain is the closest to the actual truth of the matter (as we know today), it is rejected by the phrenologist.
For Gall, the brain must be an assortment of multiple organs to account for the numerous psychological functions that were attributed to the brain in the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century.45 He thus divided the cerebral cortex into around forty regions, assigned to functions as diverse as comparison, destructiveness, hope, comprehension of size, and so on. The area of skull that covers a particular brain region can be examined to reveal the particular individual’s capacity for whatever function is carried out in that region. On this basis, the phrenologist’s second task is: given a causal relationship between the skull and the brain, what do the effects of this relationship actually look like? Does a stronger capacity lead to a ‘more expanded brain-organ’, or a ‘more contracted brain organ’?46 Gall himself believed that a protrusion on the skull (indicating a larger brain region) indicated a stronger capacity for a particular function, but this was essentially an assumption made on minimal grounds. The solution to this second task, Hegel points out, remains ‘undetermined’.
But as it turns out, this isn’t necessarily a problem for the phrenologist, who is able to make a distinction between the brain as an ‘animal part’ and the brain as ‘the being of self-conscious individuality.’47 Observing consciousness is only interested in the brain in the latter sense, the brain that ‘receives its value only through its indwelling meaning’ – that is, through the individual’s spirit. As Harris puts it, phrenology – understood properly as a form of observing reason – is not interested in the ‘skull/brain’ relation, but the ‘skull/mind’ relation. For this reason, the brain can be understood as an organ that gains its ‘value’ or significance through an individual’s spirit, and the skull can be understood as the actual existence of this spirit. Thus: ‘The actuality and existence of man is his skull-bone.’48
This is the conclusive statement in Hegel’s reconstruction of phrenology; we are now prepared to see its destruction – and thus the eclipse of reason’s purely theoretical, observing phase. The apparent absurdity of this conclusion is worth paying attention to: we know – both intuitively and from the adventure in the Self-Consciousness chapter – that individual spirit is formed through social and ethical practices. That theoretical reason should conclude instead that individual spirit is formed in only a few years of infancy, in the ossification of the skull, is a significant embarrassment for reason. It is only through a focus on practice, and not just theory, that reason can grasp the subject (the individual spirit) in its rich, socially-formed existence. The ridiculousness of phrenology is the ridiculousness of (purely) theoretical reason. To fully realise this, however, we need to see exactly how phrenological theory falls apart.
Hegel quickly gives multiple criticisms of the phrenologist. Firstly, the skull has no movement, no activity, and signifies nothing. Looking at a skull on its own, one could say nothing about the life of the individual who once possessed it. Even when Hamlet speaks emotionally about Yorick, while examining his skull, he is referring only to his memories of Yorick’s life; the skull plays no part in constructing these memories – ‘it is not a reminder of any conscious animation’, as Hegel says.49
More criticisms arise when Hegel considers Gall’s division of the skull into multiple function-specific regions. How are we to determine which region corresponds to a particular function? Perhaps, since our mental activity is often associated with a physical feeling in our head, then ‘stealing, committing murder, writing poetry, and so forth, might each by accompanied by its own proper feeling, [with] its own particular location as well.’50 But is any such feeling in the head determinate enough to give us its location? Of course, Hegel had no knowledge of MRI scans, but a contemporary quasi-phrenologist might want to suggest that a scan of the brain can reveal which particular region is ‘engaged’ during a certain kind of activity. But what if some strange individual was committing murder while also writing poetry – which of their ‘engaged regions’ in the scan (or which of their ‘feelings’, for the traditional phrenologist) is to be associated with each of their activities? As Hegel puts it, a murderer ‘is neither only this abstraction of a murderer, nor does he have only one protuberance and one indentation.’51
These criticisms lead Hegel to suppose that phrenological ‘reasoning’ is, in fact, nothing but imagination. ‘One can imagine the murderer with a high bump here at this place on the skull and the thief with a bump over there’, he explains, but there is no real thinking that takes place beyond this imagination.52 As Harris puts neatly, ‘science is only possible where there is a certain logical structure that makes this free imagining illegitimate.’53 Phrenology has no such structure: like physiognomy, it is simply a ‘natural’ practice of everyday life, tainted with unconscious biases – and arguably constituted of nothing but these biases. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that phrenology was famously used as a post-hoc legitimisation of colonial views, a central part of the British and American racial imagination. James Poskett recounts this story of George Combe, a Scottish phrenologist and intellectual heir to Gall, whose book outsold Darwin’s:
Holding up a Native American skull, Combe pointed out that ‘the Indian has more Destructiveness, less Cautiousness, less Benevolence.’ This explained why Native Americans could not be enslaved. According to Combe, ‘he has retained his freedom by being the proud, indomitable, and destructive Savage which such a combination indicates.’ In contrast, the ‘Negro’ was ‘gentler in nature’ and so more easily subdued. Combe concluded by comparing the Native American and African skulls, suggesting that ‘had the Negroes possessed a similar organization, to make useful slaves of them would have been impossible.’ Phrenology, therefore, both explained and reinforced racial divisions.54
Unfortunately, Hegel doesn’t reflect much upon the relation of phrenology to prejudice – partly because the pseudoscience didn’t truly grip the mainstream until after his death. Nonetheless, he still mocks the phrenologists for having no scientific basis whatsoever. If one is to explain an individual’s behaviour and character via bumps and dents on their head, he says, ‘one may just as well imagine the flying cow which was first caressed by the crab that rode on the donkey’.55
A phrenologist might try to accommodate for individual freedom and for the socialisation of the individual by saying that the shape of the skull is evidence only of an ‘original disposition’, so that, if the phrenological observation seems to be disproved, the phrenologist can respond by saying that ‘this individual really is supposed to be what his skull proclaims him to be according to the law, but he has an original disposition which has not been cultivated and developed.’56 This is an important moment in the development of phrenology, since it is the first time when the observer consciously admits that their work is failing. By acknowledging that phrenological observation only reveals tendencies – and not lawlike necessity – the observer is acknowledging the superior importance of freedom in human character, and the lack of scientific rigor in the theory of phrenology. ‘In this way’, Harris remarks, ‘Observing Reason finally sublates itself.’57 Hegel describes the exact nature of this sublation in concise but revealing terms:
We see the conjecturing brought by the nature of the matter at issue into saying, however unthinkingly, the opposite of what it affirms – into saying that there is something indicated by this bone but also into saying with the same ease that the same thing is not indicated by this bone.58
This is a crucial detail which is important for Hegel’s whole thinking: the contradiction that consciousness arrives at is not due to its limitations, but due to ‘the nature of the matter at issue’ itself. That is, it is not through careless mistakes but careful attention to the object of consideration that consciousness arrives at contradictions. Consider how different this is to the role of contradiction in Kant, for whom contradiction is an inevitable but impassable phenomenon that occurs when reason poses itself questions that it cannot answer. For Hegel, as we’ve seen in the whole of the Phenomenology so far, and as is emphasised by this short quotation, contradiction is the positive sign of progress. Contradiction is not a sign of consciousness’s misturning, but instead a sign of consciousness’s success at interrogating its object – ‘the nature of the matter at issue’.
How does this sublation play out for observing consciousness? In trying to defend phrenology, by relegating it to the realm of disposition and tendency, the observer unwittingly confesses that phrenology has no grasp of scientific law – that is, of necessity. This confession, fundamentally, is the admission that spirit is determined by freedom and social activity that necessarily cannot be rendered in the static rigidity of a skull: ‘being as such’ – that is, any static determinateness like the skull – ‘is not the truth of spirit at all’.59
In the last paragraphs of Observing Reason, Hegel recapitulates the development of observational thinking in order to demonstrate that phrenology marks its ultimatum. He recalls how, in trying to grasp the dynamic, changing objects of the world, reason wanted to find ‘the concept … present as a thing’.60 When observing consciousness was forced to turn to itself, as the only being that holds its movement and development within itself, it consistently failed to find any lawlike necessity in the relation of some ‘inner’ to some ‘outer’; at every stage (logic, psychology, physiognomy), observation fails because the outer content ‘is indifferent to the sign’.61 In trying to overcome this ‘indifference’ – that is, the gap between individual spirit and that which is observable – the observer moves its attention closer and closer to the actual individual. For instance, the move from psychology to physiognomy is a move from the ‘outer’ being the individual’s surrounding environment, to the ‘outer’ being the individual’s outer (i.e. bodily) actuality. Now, one sense in which phrenology is the pinnacle of observing reason is that there is no static actuality closer to an individual than their skull, a ‘dead thing’ which is nonetheless central to the individual’s life. However, Hegel explains, this move to phrenology is particularly distinct; it is not just a further step closer to the individual:
What was sublated by the very first observation of inorganic nature, namely, that the concept is supposed to present as a thing, is established by this last mode of observation [i.e. phrenology] so as to make the actuality of spirit itself into a thing, or, to put it conversely, so as to give dead being the significance of spirit.62
In other words, since the phrenologist takes the skull to be not a sign of spirit but spirit itself, phrenology marks the development of observing reason from (1) searching for spirit presented as a thing to (2) searching for a thing present as spirit. The phrenologist isn’t looking for a representation of spirit, but is looking for spirit itself; in this sense, phrenology is markedly different from psychology and physiognomy. And, as Harris remarks, ‘Without this violent break we could not close the circle of Observation as a whole’, because it is only when observing reason is led to the absurdity of phrenology – the absurdity of claiming that ‘the being of spirit is a bone’ – that the instinctive search for spirit in being as such is shown to be a dead end (as explained above).63
From Theory to Practice
The meaning of an ‘infinite judgment’ is described by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason as follows:
If I had said of the soul that it is not mortal, then … nothing is said by my proposition but that the soul is one of the infinite multitude of things that remain if I take away everything that is mortal.64
So, for Kant, infinite judgments are always negative in the sense that they only state what the subject is not. At the end of Observing Reason, however, Hegel identifies the conclusive statement of observing reason – namely, ‘that the self is a thing’ – as an infinite judgment.65 Since it doesn’t affirm a negative, it doesn’t fit Kant’s criteria for infinit judgments; nonetheless, it is still infinite for Hegel because, as Inwood’s conveys it, ‘the predicates affirmed or denied lie beyond the (finite) range of predicates categorically compatible with the subject.’66 The infinity of ‘the self is a thing’ (or, ‘spirit is a bone’) is in its incorrectness, and its absurdity. The judgment is false, and yet we still take interest in it because it shows the dead-end that lies at the end of the path of observational reason. It is ‘a judgment which sublates itself’, Hegel writes, because it shows that all of the observer’s attempts at mediation have led to the equation of spirit with the immediacy of pure being, and that consciousness can no longer even try to ‘find itself immediately.’67 In this sense, the judgment is infinite in that it is ‘infinitely dissolving’.68
The ‘thing’ that observing reason equated to selfhood and spirit is now ‘determined as a negative object’; in other words, spirit is now to be found as not-being – that is, as an active becoming. Significantly, this is also the long-awaited solution to the alienation of the unhappy consciousness. The climax of unhappy consciousness saw self-consciousness become consciousness: in tragic awareness of their dependence and contingency, the unhappy subject claimed that true self-consciousness, true selfhood and agency, lay not within themselves but within some external being (God, divinity, ‘the beyond’, etc.). Their unhappiness was precisely their lack of a grasp on genuine self-consciousness, and their dwelling among the other lowly things of the world. And this association of the subject with thinghood is exactly what observing reason has returned to, and exactly what is to be overcoming in the activity of self-actualisation! Harris expresses this whole realisation quite clearly:
Reason as Observation adopted the position of the Unchangeable Consciousness who ‘owns all things.’ How unsatisfactory that position is, we finally realize when it tries to own itself as a thing (the skull-record). The immediacy of the ownership relation must now be mediated. The self is to be for itself, by actualizing itself as its own end.69
Hegel finishes the 206-paragraph-long examination of Observing Reason with a joke. The phrenologist, he says, is wrapped up in irony insofar as they allow us to make the profoundest step, wherein ‘spirit pushes out from its inwardness’ and starts to actualise itself, in the most mundane, ignorant manner: equating selfhood and spirit with a dead bone. This weird mix of profundity and ignorance, he suggests, have
the same kind of connection of higher and lower which, in the case of the living being, nature itself naïvely expresses in the combination of the organ of its highest fulfillment, the organ of reproduction, with the organ of urination.70
We are now ready to see how spirit moves on towards its self-actualisation. The stubborn phrenologist, meanwhile, is stuck in an ironic ignorance that conceals a deep profundity; thus, an ignorance ‘which remains within representational thought conducts itself like urination.’