Kommentar zum subjektiven Geist, Chapter 14
Habit as Second Nature (§§ 409–410)
Here stands the most fruitful thought in the whole section, and it is detachable from the Anthropology.
Hegel’s determination: habit is “a self-feeling of the soul that, within the particularity of its sensations, exists only as the abstract, that is, simple universality of the subject as such, such that this particularity is for it no longer limiting, and subjectivity is thereby free from it and unconcerned within it” (§ 410).
What this means: in habit the body is “made serviceable to the soul as a docile and unsensed organ and instrument” (§ 409). Whoever has learned to walk no longer feels the walking — and is precisely thereby free to do something else while walking.
The point one easily misses: habit is not, for Hegel, the opposite of freedom, but its condition. What has not become habitual binds attention; what has become habitual releases it.
The connection with insanity is the same one developed in Chapter 15, now seen from the other side: both are ways in which a particularity becomes fixed.
Hegel himself establishes this connection by treating both immediately one after the other. And the difference is specifiable: in insanity the particularity remains intractable and dominates the subject; in habit it loses its intractability and sets the subject free.
What this depends on, § 410 says: the particularity is “for it no longer limiting” — it has not vanished but has ceased to stand in the way. Whoever has learned a language has not forgotten the vocabulary; they simply no longer notice it. [KF]
The lecture course gives this section a frame the printed text lacks. The task is stated there in one sentence: “The soul is the power over its corporeality in general and must posit this as its own. This is still the anthropological standpoint; the standpoint of consciousness is that the soul [enters] into an external world” (§ 322 of the first edition).
And the starting condition: “In nature the soul is not yet master of the body. But the body must become its simple organ; corporeality must be ideal within the soul, must be reconciled with it. We no longer have natural impulses here, but determinations of the soul” (§ 325).
Reconciliation, not subjugation. The printed addition to § 411 spells out what this means — and it is one of the few places where Hegel turns practical:
“First, then, I have to maintain myself in this immediate harmony of my soul and my body; I need not, to be sure — as, for instance, athletes and tightrope walkers do — make it into an end in itself, but I must let my body have its due, must spare it, keep it healthy and strong, and must not treat it contemptuously and hostilely. Precisely by disregarding or even mistreating my body would I bring myself into the relation of dependence and external necessity of connection […] and force it to rebel against me, to take revenge on my spirit. If, on the other hand, I conduct myself according to the laws of my bodily organism, then my soul is free within its body.”[1]
Two failures, one middle path. Making the body an end in itself — Hegel’s example is athletes and tightrope walkers — fails just as much as disregarding it. Both make it into a counterpart: once as work, once as enemy.
And the justification is not moral but structural. Whoever disregards the body brings themselves “into the relation of dependence” — they make it into something negative and thereby become dependent on it. The revenge of the body is not a punishment but the consequence of a form of relation.
The same figure as with insanity: what is not appropriated dominates. Only shown here from the other side — not what happens when it fails, but how it succeeds. [KF]
With this, habit is placed before it is even treated: it is the way in which this reconciliation succeeds — not the domination of the body, but its ceasing to stand in the way. [KF]
In the lecture courses Hegel develops this further, and there the objection one might raise against the determination is anticipated:
“One usually says habit is a kind of compulsion, but precisely for this reason the satisfaction of the impulse is of no interest anymore, for habit is not an interest for us. At first, in natural impulse, I am submerged in the impulse, the limit is not sublated; through habit, however, the impulse becomes my being, as being of the soul, and hence ideal — the soul is then, in habit, for itself, detached from the impulse; the impulse has been made its own.”[2]
The objection runs: habit is compulsion. The answer: precisely for this reason, the impulse no longer holds any interest — and what does not interest us does not bind us.
And the sentence naming the yield: “The human being habituated to life is out of the impulses, and the ideal ground thereby posited is the ground for the higher determination.”
Habit is the ground on which everything further stands. Whoever is still occupied with walking is not going anywhere in particular.
And Hegel names it outright: “Habit is one of the most difficult determinations.” [KF]