Commentary on Subjective Spirit, Chapter 34
What of This Still Holds Today
Not the correlations with the sciences of his time. What Hegel says about somnambulism, the doctrine of temperaments, or physiognomy depends on the state of knowledge in 1830 — and he himself says that wanting to raise physiognomy to a science is “one of the most vacuous notions.”
What carries are three distinctions, and each has been developed at one place in this volume.
The three hang together, and in the order in which they appeared: the first concerns the relation to what one finds already there; the second the relation to what one has made of it; the third the relation to another who likewise has both behind him.
Universal, particular, singular. The three moments of the concept are not three things and not a rank order. The universal is what holds throughout; the particular is its determination to this and not that; the singular is both together as this one here. None subsists without the others: a universal that does not particularize itself is empty, and a singular without a universal cannot be uttered. What stands in which position therefore says what happens to it — and exactly on this rests the division of this volume into anthropology, phenomenology, and psychology. At length in Der Begriff als lebendige Selbstbestimmung.
The first, from Chapter 13: what one does not make one’s own makes one its own. The task of § 403 has no neutral failure — whoever does not work through a particularity is dominated by it. This holds independently of what psychiatry has discovered about the cases Hegel used to illustrate it.
The second, from Chapter 14: habit is not the opposite of freedom but its condition. What binds attention is not freely available; what has become habitual sets it free. From here the philosophy of right takes its concept of second nature — this habit is meant, and not mere habituation.
The third, from Chapter 19: recognition is not a concession but a form of knowledge — “the affirmative knowledge of oneself in the other self” (§ 436). Whoever recognizes does not make the other into a means and not into an end, but knows themselves in the other.