My bone structure can be altered by surgery or violence, but at any given moment it is simply what it is. Character is malleable in a way that bone structure is not.if someone is apparently glaring at me and I accuse him of being angry with me, he has only to retort that he was thinking of something quite different and I shall have no way to rebut him. The rules that we use in everyday life in interpreting facial expression are highly fallible. MacIntyre explains that the process of interpreting expressions is not automatic, but culturally and historically contingent, and they have to be learned. There is nothing more to his character than the sum-total of what he does. Character is the sum total of those actions.Ī man’s character is not something independent of his actions and accessible independently of his actions.It is not what the face is, its bone structure or the way the eyes are set, that is the expression of character or action it is what the face does that is such an expression.” While the physiognomist sees facial expressions as revealing the true expression of inner character, in daily life we treat expressions as “parts or aspects of actions.” This leads Hegel to make the following four points: Hegel points out the contradictions between how physiognomists read facial expressions and how we interpret them in daily life. In some cases the cause of the face’s being as it is the character’s being as it is, but in other cases certain experiences, such as the experiences incurred in certain occupations, may leave their marks both on the character and on the face. Character consists of a set of determinate traits, and the face of a set of determinate features. The central claim of physiognomy was that character was systematically revealed in the features of the face. Illustration in a 19th-century book about physiognomy Physiognomy (And which is the whole raison d’être for the wonderful Neuroskeptic blog.) In his lecture on this chapter Bernstein draws on Alasdair MacIntyre’s essay “Hegel on faces and skulls” which can be found in the book Hegel on Action and I thought Savage Minds readers would be interested in a summary of MacIntyre’s argument, especially since he makes an important comparison to the kind of neuroscience reductionism which is still so popular today. I have been listening to Jay Bernstein’s two-semester course on the Phenomenology ever since Ann Stoler mentioned it in her conversation with Rex and I absolutely love it. For those of you who actually read Hegel’s Phenomenology in its entirety it will not come as news that there is a chapter on physiognomy & phrenology, but if you are like me and never made it that far on your first try, discovering his unique approach to criticizing these pseudosciences for the first time is quite an eye opener.
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