Kommentar zum subjektiven Geist, Chapter 15
The Body as Sign
At the end, the soul is “in its thoroughly formed and self-appropriated corporeality as an individual subject for itself” — and the decisive sentence reads:
“This externality does not represent itself but the soul, and is its sign” (§ 411).
This is more precise than it sounds. A sign is neither a copy nor an effect. Upright posture, gaze, hand, facial expression — they do not show what the inside looks like; they are the way in which this inside exists.
What belongs to human expression, Hegel lists: “upright form as such, the formation especially of the hand as the absolute tool, of the mouth, laughter, weeping, etc., and the spiritual tone poured over the whole, which immediately reveals the body as the externality of a higher nature.”
Corporeality is “the work of art of the soul” and has “pathognomic and physiognomic expression” — that is, the mobile expression of gestures and mien and the enduring one of facial features.
And then the restriction that saves him from physiognomics. The spiritual tone is “so light, so indeterminate and unsayable a modification,” because the form as something natural “can be only an indeterminate and quite imperfect sign for spirit.” Form, in its physiognomic determinateness, is “something contingent” — and hence the harsh judgment: “wanting to raise physiognomics, and even more so craniology, to the status of sciences was one of the most vacuous notions.”
This is remarkably precise. The body expresses — but imperfectly, indeterminately, contingently in its particulars. Whoever wants to make a science of it confuses a sign with a proof. Hegel thereby rejected both Lavater’s physiognomy and Gall’s phrenology, both fashionable in his time.
And phrenology is not his only target. Gall was no charlatan but the first to link cognitive functions to the cerebral cortex — a claim that has since prevailed. What Hegel objects to is not the link to the brain, but the inference from location to capacity.
The objection can be stated in one sentence: a capacity is not a thing that lies somewhere. What someone can do shows itself in what they do, not in a protrusion — and not in an area either.
With this, the critique stands against a form of thought, not against a finding — and thus outlives its own occasion. The neurophysiologist Detlev Linke has applied it to present-day localization models, which “have found an ally in psychometry to underwrite an ontology of piecework.”[1]
This is the place where Hegel’s Anthropology still has something to say today — not against brain research, but against a certain way of interpreting its findings: as an assignment of capacities to locations. That an area is involved when someone speaks does not mean that speaking resides there.
And the reason for this stands in the Anthropology itself: the body is a sign, not a container. A sign indicates something; it does not contain it. [KF]
A remark on the impact of this argument belongs here too. It has not landed in the debate it aims at.
Stederoth notes this soberly: in the disputes of neuroscience and the philosophy of mind, “one will search almost in vain for the name Hegel.” Michael Wolff’s Das Körper-Seele-Problem (1992), explicitly conceived as a contribution to both sides, “unfortunately failed insofar as it only found attention in Hegel scholarship.” The only exception is Linke — a neurophysiologist who, however, also studied philosophy.
This was twenty years ago, and since then further works have appeared in the German-speaking world — from Königshausen & Neumann and from the milieu of Marxist Hegel reception. Little has changed about the situation.
Why this is so is not hard to see. An objection that concerns the interpretation of findings, not the findings themselves, has no place in a debate that understands itself as empirical. It would have to be conducted at the level of concepts — and there no one who can produce measurements feels responsible.
For this volume, nothing follows about correctness. It follows only that the topicality of a thought and its reception are two different things — and that one should not measure one by the other. [KF]
And he says what the more perfect sign is: “for spirit, this is only its first appearance, and language is straightaway its more perfect expression.” For the animal, the human form is the highest — for spirit it is the beginning. [KF]
With this, the task of § 403 is resolved: what one found by way of bodily states is no longer something that happens to one, but something in which one expresses oneself. One has become the power over oneself — not by mastering the body but by the body becoming one’s expression.
Why It Cannot Stop Here
The transition in § 412 is often skimmed over because it appears in a single sentence. But its reason can be stated.
“In itself, matter has no truth in the soul; as being-for-itself, the soul separates itself from its immediate being and sets this before itself as corporeality, which cannot offer any resistance to its being formed into it.”
And precisely here lies the deficiency. What offers no resistance gives no information either. Corporeality is so completely appropriated in the actual soul that it no longer opposes anything — and therefore there is nothing more to be experienced from it.
The soul needs a counterpart that cannot simply be formed into it. Hegel’s formulation: it distinguishes its reality from itself “as an other,” against which it “breaks as against its merely existing determinateness — which is to be an object distinct from the subject. The soul, thus as I, is infinite being-for-itself — consciousness” (§ 412).
So the transition is not merely asserted, but grounded: an appropriation that succeeds completely sublates itself. Where nothing offers resistance anymore, nothing is left to experience — and therefore something must stand opposite that is not appropriated. That is the object, and with it the Phenomenology begins.
The reader can carry out this step themselves: consider what one experiences of a thing that offers no resistance. [KF]
What the Anthropology Has Developed as a Whole
Looking back, the movement can be stated in a single sentence: How what one finds becomes what one is.
The natural soul has its determinatenesses — climate, origin, temperament, age. The feeling soul relates to them, in such a way that it can fail: whoever does not work through a particularity is dominated by it. The actual soul has made them its own, so completely that the body has become expression.
And then, at the boundary of success, the reversal: what is fully appropriated no longer yields anything to be experienced.
I.4 The Phenomenology (§§ 413–439)
Detlev B. Linke, quoted in Stederoth, op. cit., p. 112. On Gall’s place in the history of brain research, ibid., pp. 113 f. ↩︎