Hegel frequently identifies ethical life with a “second nature.” This strategy has puzzled those who assume that second nature represents a deficient appearance of ethical life, one that needs to be overcome, supplemented, or constantly challenged. I argue that Hegel identifies ethical life with a second nature because he thinks that a social order only becomes a candidate for ethical life, if it provides a context conducive to the development of what I call “real habits.” First, I show that a (...) criterion for a real habit can be found in Hegel's Anthropology, namely, that of liberation. Next, I explain how the state, as Hegel analyzes it in the Philosophy of Right, provides such an environment by enabling trust toward and within it. I then consider two literary examples of contexts that fail to be similarly supportive—Coates' Between the World and Me and Atwood's Handmaid's Tale—concluding with reasons for thinking that real habits are an integral part of ethical life. (shrink)

The notion of being-at-home-in-otherness is the distinctive way of thinking of freedom that Hegel develops in his social and political thought. When I am at one with myself in social and political structures they are not external powers to which I am subjected but are rather constitutive of my self-relation, that is my self-conception is mediated andexpandedthrough those objective structures. How successfully Hegel may achieve being-at-home-in-otherness with regard to these objective structures of right in thePhilosophy of Rightis arguable. What is (...) at issue in this paper is however to argue that there is a blind spot in the text with regard to nature. In Ethical Life the rational subject's passions and inclinations are brought into the subject such that she is ‘with herself’ in them; with regard to external nature no such reconciliation is achieved or even attempted. In Abstract Right external nature is effectively dominated by and subsumed into the will and it is never something in which one is with oneself. It remains outside the model of freedom that Hegel develops in thePhilosophy of Right. There is something troubling about this formulation, since it excludes nature from freedom, but also something accurate, as it reflects the unresolved attitude of moderns to the natural world. (shrink)

We characterize Hegel’s stance on biological purposiveness as consisting in a twofold move, which conceives organisms as intrinsically purposive natural systems and focuses on their behavioral and cognitive abilities. We submit that a Hegelian stance is at play in enactivism, the branch of the contemporary theory of biological autonomy devoted to the study of cognition and the mind. What is at stake in the Hegelian stance is the elaboration of a naturalized, although non-reductive, understanding of natural purposiveness.

Hegel's discussion of the concept of “habit” appears at a crucial point in his Encyclopedia system, namely, in the transition from the topic of “nature” to the topic of “spirit” (Geist): it is through habit that the subject both distinguishes itself from its various sensory states as an absolute unity (the I) and, at the same time, preserves those sensory states as the content of sensory consciousness. By calling habit a “second nature,” Hegel highlights the fact that incipient spirit retains (...) a “moment” of the natural that marks a limitation compared to “pure thought” but that also makes perceptual consciousness possible. This makes Hegel's account analogous in important respects to John McDowell's “naturalism of second nature.” But Hegel's account of habit can be seen as a version of a Kantian synthesis of the productive imagination—and hence presupposes a given material that can become one's own by means of habit. This does not mean that Hegel falls into the Myth of the Given, but it does suggest that an appropriate account of second nature might be committed to something McDowell wants to deny: that nonconceptual states of consciousness play a role (even if not a justificatory role) in perception. (shrink)

Nada más habitual que el hábito. Y, sin embargo, de seguir a Aristóteles, no existirían virtudes entre nosotros, o sea: aptitudes y habilidades que acaban por configurar la existencia humana. En este ensayo se examina el desarrollo dialéctico del hábito en Hegel, desde la Antropología hasta la Eticidad : en el plano individual, desde el estado fetal y el desvarío en el alma sentiente hasta el autosentimiento de sí y el nacimiento del Yo; en el plano colectivo, se atiende más (...) bien a la génesis del hábito y sus fautores: las corporaciones, las instituciones estatales y la opinión pública, hasta desembocar en el extraño estadio del hábito como deshabituación de todo hábito, en el fenómeno de la guerra. Se pone así de relieve el modo en que el hábito es el modo crucial de ser entre la individualidad animal y el cuerpo sociopolítico como aparato mecánico que promete vida y amenaza muerte. (shrink)