Commentary on Subjective Spirit, Chapter 8
What Anthropology Is Not
The name is the most misleading thing here, and Hösle has shown how far.
It is not a doctrine of the difference between human and animal. Most of the determinations treated there — racial difference, ontogenetic development, the relation of the sexes, waking and sleeping, sensation, the states of the feeling soul, in a certain sense even habit — apply equally to higher animals.[1]
And Hegel knows this. In the addition to § 411 he says of the involuntary embodiment of inner sensations that it is “in part something the human being has in common with animals.”
Only at the end does he name what distinguishes the human being — and these are the same features already known to ancient anthropology: the upright form, the hand, laughter and weeping.
He determines the hand in two turns of phrase, and both count: as “absolute tool” and as “the tool of tools.” What distinguishes it is not that it grasps, but that it can guide every other tool.
And Hegel himself marks an exception: he explicitly attributes habit only to the human being, “in distinction from the animal soul” (§ 412 addition) — though this, as Hösle notes, depends on the concept of habit in question.
What follows for the reading. The Anthropology does not treat what separates the human being from the animal, but what he shares with it — and how he relates to it. The difference lies not in the material but in the relation.
This is the same distinction Erdmann later applies to death: that a human being dies while an animal merely perishes lies not in a different process but in the fact that one relates to it. [KF]
Hösle, Hegels System, chap. 6.2. The observation first appears in Reiner Wiehl (1979), p. 121: “features come to the fore that are shared by animal and human and that are used for human self-differentiation.” ↩︎