Commentary on Subjective Spirit, Chapter 12
The Five Senses — and Why Hegel Holds Them Complete
Attached to sensation is a claim that at first strikes one as strange: the number five, for the senses, is not accidental but conceptually determined. “It is thus no accident that there are five senses, but a necessity of the concept; there can be fewer, but not more, for these are the totality.”[1]
The argument stems from the philosophy of nature. The senses correspond to the elements and to the three spheres of the physical: touch for earth and the mechanical, smell for air, taste for water, sight and hearing for light and sound.
There can be fewer senses — in animals restricted to a narrow sphere of action. Not more, because the series of natural determinations is exhausted.
And Hegel himself provides the counterexample. He notes that “in Swabia one does not distinguish smelling and tasting” — both are called “Schmack” there. Stederoth draws the obvious point: what applies to animals would then apply to Hegel’s own countrymen.
The objection is more serious than the joke suggests. If a linguistic community does not distinguish two senses, then the number of the senses is not a matter of nature alone but also of the distinctions one draws. And then it cannot be derived conceptually.
What remains: the correlation with the elements does not hold — it depends on a philosophy of nature that is itself outdated. What holds is the question behind it: whether the senses form an order or a mere list. That a being with different senses would sense differently, no one disputes; that it would therefore have less world is a claim that would need to be established. [KF]
And from this the turn against the philosophy of feeling that Hegel inserts at this point: “Feeling is, as shown, only form for any content whatever.”
Whoever says that what matters is religious feeling says nothing thereby about the content — for the same form carries any content. Walter’s transcript preserves Hegel’s sharpening: it is “the standpoint at which one grows impatient with reflection.”
This is no aside. It is the reason why sensation cannot be the final term — a form that carries any content does not distinguish among them. [KF]
The Two Directions (§ 401)
Hegel distinguishes what comes from outside and what comes from within, and both movements run against each other:
From outside to inside: “What the sensing soul finds within itself is, on the one hand, the natural immediate, as ideal within it and made its own.” What is sensed is appropriated.
From inside to outside: Conversely, what originally belongs to being-for-itself becomes “determined into natural corporeality” — anger into the clenched fist, shame into the blush.
Erdmann’s transcript elaborates this, on a series absent from the printed text: anger, shame, fear, terror, weeping, and laughing.
The underlying thought is the same throughout: underlying these expressions is “the sensation of a contradiction.” In weeping, “my self, my sense of life, is injured; I sense its negativity — that is the contradiction.”[2]
And he determines shame via anger: “Shame is also a kind of anger — indignation at appearing in a certain manner […] also a beginning of anger directed at oneself.”
Why tears bring relief, he explains from embodiment itself: “it is a crisis, where the inner determinateness becomes sensation and expresses itself all the way to tears […] in that sensation gains this externality, the oppression of the breast ceases. If the pain is concentrated inwardly so that it cannot come to tears, it is still stronger and can produce illness, death.”
This is the movement from inside to outside in its clearest shape. What does not find its way out builds up — and embodiment is not a consequence of feeling but its completion.
Hegel adds a remark on cultural history that shows how seriously he means this: “connected with this are the mourning women of the ancients” — an institution that provides the pain with expression where it does not arise of itself. [KF]
This is the reason why the Anthropology ends with the body. What begins here as a double movement becomes, in § 411, embodiment: the body is then no longer that in which sensations happen, but that in which an inner life expresses itself. [KF]
How the Feeling Soul Arises from This (§ 402)
The transition stands in a single sentence, and it is the most precise step in the entire Anthropology:
Sensations are “singular and transitory determinations, changes in the substantiality of the soul […] But this being-for-itself is not merely a formal moment of sensing; the soul is in itself the reflected totality of it — sensing of the total substantiality that it is in itself, within itself — feeling soul.”
What happens here: individual sensations come and go. What has them remains — and not as an empty container, but as something that senses itself within them.
With this, the step at issue is accomplished: from one who has sensations to one who has itself in them. And precisely here the task posed by § 403 attaches.
Lecture on the philosophy of nature, 1819/20 (NPh 135), quoted in Stederoth, op. cit., pp. 184 f.; the passage on the Swabians follows the transcripts by Walter (Wl 79) and Griesheim (Gr 142). ↩︎
Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des Geistes. Berlin 1827/1828, transcript by Erdmann, on the natural soul (85, 995 ff.). ↩︎