MacIntyre on Hegel on human action

Phrenology was the pseudoscience that aimed to link psychological traits to the morphology of the skull.  Physiognomy was the pseudoscience that aimed to link such traits to facial features.  In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel critiques these pseudosciences.  Since they are now widely acknowledged to be pseudosciences, it might seem that Hegel’s critique can be of historical interest only.  But as the late Alasdair MacIntyre pointed out in his essay “Hegel: On Faces and Skulls,” Hegel’s main points can be applied to a critique of today’s fashionable attempts to predict psychological traits and human actions from physiological and genetic traits.  (The essay appears in the collection Philosophy Through Its Past, edited by Ted Honderich.)

That idea alone makes Hegel’s arguments worthy of our consideration.  For it would certainly be of interest if it turned out that the fundamental problems with pseudosciences like phrenology and physiognomy had to do, not with their inadequacies vis-à-vis the empirical evidence, but with deeper philosophical assumptions they share with purportedly more empirically plausible and respectable versions of materialist reductionism.  The arguments are not, however, presented with maximal crispness.  But they are suggestive and worth trying to tease out.  What follows is an attempt to do so (and its focus is on Hegel as MacIntyre reads him rather than on Hegel’s own texts).

The appeal to the past

MacIntyre notes several ways in which Hegel takes there to be a mismatch between brute anatomical and physiological facts on the one hand, and human thought and action on the other.  But it seems to me that there are two main lines of argument identified by MacIntyre.  The first, as I understand it, goes like this.  Scientific explanations, including physiological explanations, appeal to general propositions, such as propositions of the form “For every x, if x is F then x is G.”  For example, we might explain why a particular glass of water froze by saying “For every x, if x is water then x will freeze at 32 degrees Fahrenheit.”  Our predicates F and G refer to universals, and we explain the particular phenomenon by simply noting that it is an instance of a completely general truth.

However, Hegel argues, human actions cannot be understood in this way.  Suppose, for example (mine, not Hegel’s or MacIntyre’s), that you have a fight with your brother over some longstanding grudge between the two of you.  Properly to explain this event requires reference to particular earlier events in your history, such as a promise to you that he once broke, or an occasion when you publicly insulted and embarrassed him.  And those events will in turn be explicable in terms of yet other and earlier particular events.  Understanding the character of these events will also involve attention to a variety of contextual details, such as who exactly was present on the occasion you publicly insulted him, and exactly what it was he had promised to do and why it was significant.  Furthermore, it will involve attention to how all the relevant parties conceived of these various details.

These circumstances, thinks Hegel (as presented by MacIntyre) simply cannot be captured in general propositions of the kind to which scientific explanations appeal.  In particular, there are no true generalizations to the effect of “For every x and every y, if x and y are brothers and x breaks a promise to y, then x and y will get in a fight several years later” (or whatever).  What makes the sequence of events intelligible, in Hegel’s view, is not that it is a particular instance of a general pattern, where all events of the one kind will be followed by events of the other.  Rather, that you acted in light of certain particular, contingent historical circumstances is an ineliminable aspect of the story, and cannot be captured in general or lawlike propositions.  You are responding to those circumstances qua particular, not to just any old circumstances that happened to be of that general type.  As MacIntyre writes, “to respond to a particular situation, event, or state of affairs is not to respond to any situation, event, or state of affairs with the same or similar properties in some respect; it is to respond to that situation conceived by both the agents who respond to it and those whose actions constitute it as particular” (p. 329).

What should we think of this argument?  I’m not sure.  Certainly it would need much tightening up before it could be judged compelling.  However, it does seem to be at least in the general ballpark of arguments that I think are powerful.  For example, it is reminiscent of Donald Davidson’s famous principle of the anomalism of the mental, according to which there can be no strict laws by which mental events might be predicted and explained.  (Though Davidson’s argument too needs tightening up.)

The appeal to the future

What seems to me to be a second, distinct Hegelian argument discussed by MacIntyre (albeit not characterized by him as such) is expressed in this passage:

From the fact that an agent has a given trait, we cannot deduce what he will do in any given situation, and the trait cannot itself be specified in terms of some determinate set of actions that it will produce… [T]he crucial fact about self-consciousness… is, its self-negating quality: being aware of what I am is conceptually inseparable from confronting what I am not but could become.  Hence, for a self-conscious agent to have a trait is for that agent to be confronted by an indefinitely large set of possibilities of developing, modifying, or abolishing that trait.  Action springs not from fixed and determinate dispositions, but from the confrontation in consciousness of what I am by what I am not. (p. 331)

The idea here seems to be that to be conscious of oneself as an agent is, of its nature, precisely to be conscious of the possibility of an indefinite number of alternative choices.  By contrast, to understand an anatomical or physiological feature is to know it as limited to a certain specific and relatively narrower range of effects in might have.  Whereas, in Hegel’s first argument, the idea is that a reductionist physiological explanation cannot account for the significance of one’s past, in this argument the idea is that it cannot account for the openness of one’s future.

To make the point a little clearer, consider this passage from earlier in MacIntyre’s essay:

The relation of external appearance, including the facial appearance, to character is such that the discovery that any external appearance is taken to be a sign of a certain type of character is a discovery that the agent may then exploit to conceal his character. (p. 325)

The point here seems to be this.  Suppose someone told me that he could, from my facial expressions, read off my character and thus predict my future actions.  Knowing this, I could make sure that in the future I avoid the facial expressions I would otherwise normally be inclined toward, so that my interlocutor will be thrown off and his predictions will fail.  Similarly, suppose someone told me that, based on what he had determined from scanning my brain, he predicted that I would make a cup of coffee in the next half hour.  Even if I were inclined to do so, I could now choose otherwise simply to prove him wrong.  There’s an openness to alternative possibilities in the behavior of human beings that differentiates them from the rigid behavior of merely physical systems, including those that comprise the micro-level parts of human beings considered in isolation from the whole.

This line of thought calls to mind the similar argument developed by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness.  He famously draws a distinction there between being-in-itself and being-for-itself.  Being-in-itself is the kind of reality had by a mere physical object as it exists objectively or independently of human consciousness.  It is simply given or fixed.  By contrast, being-for-itself, which is the human agent, is consciousness as it projects forward toward an unrealized possibility.  Unlike being-in-itself, it is open to different possibilities rather than entirely fixed or determined.  To deny free will is essentially to conflate being-for-itself with being-in-itself, but this cannot be done, because they are simply irreducibly different.  Naturally, Sartre’s argument, and Hegel’s too, would require tightening up if we are to make them compelling.

Now, the general idea that the conceptual and logical structure of thought are simply irreducibly different from, and inexplicable in terms of, any collection of physical facts and their causal relations, is something I defend rigorously and at length in chapters 8 and 9 of my book Immortal Souls.  I take it that Hegel’s first argument is aiming at something like that conclusion.  And the general idea that human action is irreducibly teleological, and in particular that it cannot be analyzed in terms of efficient-causal relations (of the kind that obtain between physiological phenomena, for example) is something I defend in depth in chapter 4 of the book.  I take it that Hegel’s second argument is aiming at something like that conclusion.

Hence I am, in a very general way, sympathetic at least to the basic idea of the kind of position MacIntyre attributes to Hegel.  I leave as a homework exercise the question whether there are, in that position, ingredients for a line of argument that is both compelling and independent of considerations of the kind I set out in the book.