From Folk Psychology to the Philosophy of Culture — The Line That Draws Both Spirits Together
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The three transformations treated so far — folk psychology, philosophical anthropology, interpretive sociology — share a presupposition that none of them states. All of them take a particular section out of Hegel’s system and translate it into an individual science. Alongside them, however, a fourth line arises in the same period that takes the opposite path: it takes Hegel’s objective and absolute spirit together and gives the whole a new name — culture.
This line has not so far been described as a line, because its representatives appear in different places in this account: Lazarus and Steinthal in section 8a.1, Simmel in section 8a.3 as a sociologist, Cassirer in section 7.5 as a neo-Kantian. Taken together, however, they form a distinct movement of reception with its own question and its own price.
The Coherence of the Line
The starting point lies in what section 8a.1 described as the program of folk psychology: to investigate the collective objectifications — language, myth, custom, law, art — as spiritual realities that are created by human beings and yet precede the individual. Lazarus’s formula, that it was to be investigated “how the people forms out of individuals, and how objective spirit forms out of its soul,” already names everything that will later be called culture.
What is notable here is what this enumeration does to Hegel’s classification. In Hegel, language, custom, and law belong to objective spirit; myth and art to absolute spirit. Folk psychology treats them as one object. This is not carelessness, but the consequence of its approach: if one asks what a community produces in the way of spiritual formations and what acts back upon it, then the boundary between law and myth does not run where Hegel draws it.
Georg Simmel gives this movement its sharpest diagnosis. Alongside the analysis of social forms treated in section 8a.3, he develops the concept of objective culture — the stock of language, knowledge, technology, institutions, and works of art that a society has produced. Opposed to it stands subjective culture: what the individual can take up from this stock into himself and make into his own formation (Bildung). Simmel’s thesis is that the two drift apart and the gap widens. The stock grows faster than a single life can absorb it; what was created as a means of formation becomes an overwhelming mass. This is the “tragedy of culture” — tragic because the destructive force does not come from outside, but stems from the very movement that produces culture.[1]
For the reception of Hegel this is a precise sharpening. Hegel had determined objective spirit as the sphere in which spirit gives itself its reality and is at home within it. Simmel shows a case in which this reality becomes independent and confronts the individual as something alien — not through decline, but through success. This is alienation without exploitation, a finding that neither Hegel nor Marx had in this form.
Ernst Cassirer finally provides the systematic execution. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923-1929) treats language, myth, and scientific cognition as equally ranked ways in which spirit gives itself a world.[2] None of these forms is a preliminary stage of another; each has its own lawfulness and achieves what the others cannot. This carries out what folk psychology had formulated as a program — and at the same time abandons Hegel’s order of stages: where Hegel arranges art, religion, and philosophy as ascending shapes of absolute spirit, in Cassirer the symbolic forms stand side by side.
The Systematic Conclusion: Hans Freyer
What was developed in scattered form in this line received a systematic formulation in 1923, and its title already says everything: Theorie des objektiven Geistes. Eine Einleitung in die Kulturphilosophie (Theory of Objective Spirit: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Culture).[3] Hans Freyer takes Hegel’s concept literally as his title and carries it over into the philosophy of culture — exactly the movement this section describes.
The starting point is an observation of great simplicity. A stone is an object of mineralogy; that it “was once roughly hewn into a hammer by a few crude blows, or that crooked marks are scratched onto it, makes it a document of a form of humanity.” This determines objective spirit by means of an example about which nothing can be disputed: human action that has left its trace in a thing and remains legible across time.
Freyer’s structure is in two parts. The first part treats objective spirit as being and develops, out of the relation of sign and meaning, a sequence of stages of objectification. From it he derives five principal forms: artifact (Gebilde), tool (Gerät), sign (Zeichen), social form, and formation (Bildung). The second part treats objective spirit as process — the cycle of understanding, the relation of soul and work, and finally the “coming-to-independence of objective-spiritual forms,” under which tradition and revolution appear as two modes of the same event.
For the question of this section, the theory of forms is the decisive yield. Two of its five categories designate exactly what remains underexposed in Hegel: tool — technology, developed from the idea that a segment of a means-end chain is detached and objectified as the meaning-content of a form — and sign, that is, language and writing. Both stand here on equal footing beside social form, under which law and institution fall. This carries out, within a theory of objective spirit, what the culture-line elsewhere carries along only incidentally.
It is also notable that Freyer treats the capitalist economic order as a separate example — as a meaning-content that can be interpreted like a work. This is an application that Hegel does not know and that Marx pursues differently: not as ideology critique, but as the interpretation of meaning in an objectified form.
The price of the position lies where it lies for the whole line, and Freyer sharpens it. If law and tool, language and formation are five forms of the same thing, then the question of validity — what is binding, and what decides this — is no longer a question that the theory of forms can answer. It can say how something bears meaning, not whether it ought to be valid.
Freyer’s later development belongs to the finding and not merely to the biography. The author of this theory placed himself at the disposal of National Socialism from 1933 on, and had already prepared this turn in Revolution von rechts (Revolution from the Right, 1931).[4] This does not devalue the analysis of 1923, but it raises a question that belongs to this chapter: a theory that interprets spiritual formations according to their meaning-content, and cannot pose the question of validity, is more easily pressed into service than one that can. What section 8a.1 named as the danger of folk psychology — the reduction of normativity to facticity — has here remained more than a merely methodological weakness.
What Is Gained
The gain of this line is considerable, and it concerns three things that remain underexposed in Hegel.
First, language. In Hegel it belongs to subjective spirit, to the theory of signs, and plays almost no role in the determination of objective spirit. In the culture-line it becomes the paradigm case: the formation that no one made, that everyone makes, that precedes every individual, that enables and limits his thinking, and that consists in nothing but the speaking of all who speak. This is the structure that Hegel develops with regard to property and contract, in a form in which it can be shown more easily.
Second, technology. It scarcely appears in Hegel; tool and machine appear in the system of needs as means, not as a distinct shape of objective spirit. In the culture-line it is a self-evident component of the objective stock — in Simmel explicitly named alongside language, knowledge, and institution.
Third, comparability. The culture-line can place different societies side by side and compare their formations without having to force them into a developmental sequence. This is the methodological presupposition of what later comes to be called cultural studies — and the reason why this line, via Herder, can draw on a tradition older than Hegel.
What the Price Is
The price was already named in section 8a.1 in connection with folk psychology, and it holds for the whole line: the gain in scope is a loss in bindingness.
Hegel’s classification separates objective spirit — the sphere of formations with a claim to validity, where law is valid even if everyone felt otherwise — from absolute spirit, the sphere in which spirit knows itself. Whoever gathers both together under “culture” gains a more comprehensive object and loses this distinction. Law and myth become two kinds of spiritual formation; that one is binding and the other interprets is then one property among others.
Where this becomes a method, the reduction arises that section 8a.1 described as the danger of folk psychology: normativity is traced back to facticity — right is what is customary. Cassirer escapes this, because he thinks from Kant and does not give up the question of validity; the cultural-studies successors do not always escape it.
The Systematic Balance
The culture-line is thus not a false development, but an expansion with an open account. It has made visible what Hegel’s classification pushes to the margin — language, technology, the equal ranking of forms, the comparability of societies. In return, it has given up the distinction that makes objective spirit a distinct object in the first place.
Whoever wants to build on objective spirit today must therefore take both into account: the culture-line for its scope, Hegel’s classification for its bindingness.
A resolution that accomplishes both has only been formulated later, and it comes from an author whom Volume II treats extensively. In his reflection-systems theory, Johannes Heinrichs separates two things that the culture-line draws together.[5] Culture, for him, is one level of social action among four — the third, in which the other appears as a communicative partner and in which values are shared. It thus stands beside economy and politics and below the fourth level, meta-communication about basic values and law. Language, by contrast, is for him not a level, but “the medium of all reflection” — that in which all four levels are enacted in the first place; he devotes five separate volumes to it.
This answers the question differently than the culture-line poses it, and more sharply than talk of culture as medium is capable of. The medium is not culture, but language along with its technical extensions — writing, print, the network. Culture in the narrower sense is, by contrast, a distinguishable domain of action. Whoever separates them in this way gains the scope of the culture-line without forfeiting its bindingness: the fourth level, on which the very conditions of coexistence are negotiated, remains preserved as a distinct one — and it is precisely this level that Hegel had determined as objective spirit.
For the systematics of objective spirit it follows that language, writing, and technology should not be led as a separate sphere, but placed at the beginning: as the purest case of the fact that human action leaves its trace in formations that confront the one who acts. In them is shown, with full clarity, what in property and contract still has to be uncovered.
Georg Simmel: “Der Begriff und die Tragödie der Kultur” (1911), in: Philosophische Kultur. Gesammelte Essais, Leipzig: Klinkhardt, 1911, pp. 245-277. Cf. already idem: Philosophie des Geldes, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1900, chap. 6, where the same movement is developed in relation to the money economy. ↩︎
Ernst Cassirer: The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 3 vols., Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1923-1929 (vol. 1: Language; vol. 2: Mythical Thought; vol. 3: Phenomenology of Knowledge). On Cassirer’s place within neo-Kantianism, see section 7.5 of this account. ↩︎
Hans Freyer: Theorie des objektiven Geistes. Eine Einleitung in die Kulturphilosophie, Leipzig/Berlin: Teubner, 1923. Quotations ibid., introduction, p. 1, and chap. I.3, pp. 45-57. ↩︎
Hans Freyer: Revolution von rechts, Jena: Diederichs, 1931. On this, see Jerry Z. Muller: The Other God That Failed. Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. On Gehlen’s parallel entanglement, see the excursus in section 8a.2 of this account. ↩︎
Johannes Heinrichs: Reflexion als soziales System, Bonn: Bouvier, 1976, on the fourfold division; on language, idem: Sprache der Reflexion, 5 vols., 2007-2014. For a detailed treatment, see Volume II, Ch. 25. ↩︎