Julia Peters - Hegel on Beauty

A habit, one might think, is simply a pattern of regular behavior, which can be observed in animals as well as in human beings. A herd of animals, for instance, may form the habit of always attending the same watering against the sensation in question, that is, one will cease to sense it as strongly as before. However, whether the onset of the relevant mechanism or the effect of hardening does in fact occur is not under the subjects immediate control. Rather, this is an effect with regard to which she is passive. She is here dependent on her body reacting in an appropriate way to her deliberate attempts at formation.

From Hegels point of view, this shows that the successful acquisition of a habit involves essentially both our spiritual and our natural side. For Hegel, the essence of spirit is freedom. Thus, to the extent that the acquisition of habit involves deliberate, intentional actionthe deliberate, intentional repetition of the same course of actionit qualifies as a spiritual process. At the same time, to the extent that the acquisition of habit involves processes that are beyond the subjects intentional, deliberate control, such as the mechanization of bodily processes or the hardening against sensation, it qualifies as a natural process. Accordingly, the process of the acquisition of habits is partly natural, partly spiritual.

However, putting it this way is not yet quite accurate. Hegels view is not just that when human individuals acquire habits, they exercise on the one hand their spiritual side and on the other hand their natural side; he does not have in mind the combination of two heterogeneous elements. Rather, he holds that where human habits are acquired, a unity of spirit and nature manifests itself. That is to say, we are here presented with a process in which our spiritual and our natural sides are joined together or unified in one overall movement; moreover, this overall movement qualifies as a spiritual one. In other words, the acquisition of habits is for Hegel a spiritual process in which natural processes play an essential role. To see why this is the case, we need to look at one example of the acquisition of habits more closely. Let us consider Hegels example of the acquisition of bodily skill.

We can here draw on an example Hegel himself discusses at various places, the example of the skill of writing. The acquisition of writing skill requires the deliberate repetition of the same movements many times. Furthermore, human individuals do not possess something like an instinct for writing. Writing is a cultural technique, invented by humans, and typically employed for the pursuit of cognitively complex purposes such as communication and memorization. It is in this twofold sense that the acquisition of the skill of writing is an exercise of human freedom. On the other hand, to acquire the skill of writing means to develop certain mechanisms of movement. A skilled writer is characterized by the fact that when she wishes to write a word or sentence, she only has to pursue the overall purpose of writing the word or sentence, and her fingers will carry out the relevant movements mechanically, without her having to think about how exactly to move her fingers. This aspect of the possession of skill also has a phenomenological side. We can illustrate this in light of the example of writing. Let us suppose a subject learns to write the capital printed letter A. Someone demonstrates to her how to write a capital A in printed letters, instructing her to draw three lines, of different lengths and at different angles. She has never performed this sequence of movements before. As she now tries to follow the demonstration, she deliberately performs three different bodily movements, making an individual effort for each one, thereby drawing three different lines. As a result, the three lines she has drawn end up constituting the capital letter A. What is crucial about this process as described here is