Amphibian Habits: Freedom, Death, and History in Hegel's Account Of Second Nature

Hegel's concept of habit is key to his account of social freedom. But it also appears preclude free reflection on social norms. Recent readers have either minimized this problem or concluded from it that social freedom necessarily implies new forms of unfreedom. This paper aims to avoid the latter conclusion while taking seriously its critical insight. I do this by noting Hegel's association of habit with death, which he sees not as an abstract end to life but as the source of more complex forms of life. Modern social habits structure life in ways that are not transparent to the individual subject. That subject thus retreats into the moral idea that they are individually the source of the legitimacy of those norms. But this undermines their binding force, and without this force, subjects lose their habitual grounding in the world. They are thus tempted to reverse into an unreflective submission to social habits that I call spiritual death. But, I argue, construing the problem in this way also allows us to see its solution: before spiritual death ensues, our habitual relationship to norms is momentarily disrupted in a way that allows us to develop a new relationship to them.