I. Introduction: assumptions and shortcomings of contemporary ‘normative expressivist’ readings of Hegel's theory of action

Nearly forty years after the publication of Charles Taylor's seminal paper on Hegel and the Philosophy of Action (Reference Taylor, Stepelevich and Lamb1983/2010), a both expressivist and normative understanding of Hegel's theory of social action has become the hegemonic model in contemporary literature (see Laitinen and Sandis Reference Laitinen and Sandis2010: 7). But how has Taylor's expressivist legacy been appropriated and transformed?

First, leading interpreters such as Michael Quante, Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard and Robert Brandom strongly endorse Taylor's distinction between the causal model of action and the qualitative model of action. As for the causal model of action, inspired by Davidson (Reference Davidson and Honderich1973), intentions would be understood as some unique ex ante causal power consisting in an internal mental state, which would cause external bodily motions. As for the qualitative model of action, to be found in Hegel according to Taylor (Reference Taylor, Stepelevich and Lamb1983/2010: 33–36), the relation between intentions and actions would instead be understood as an intrinsic expressive relation to be further qualified. Let us call the strong opposition between the qualitative and the causal model the first assumption of contemporary normative expressivist readings of Hegel's theory of action.

A second assumption shared by contemporary paradigmatic interpreters of Hegel, and one which can in some way be traced back to Taylor, concerns the opposition between the causal explanation of action and the justification of action. Accordingly, Hegel's theory of action would be mainly (Quante Reference Quante and Moyar2004: 2), if not exclusively (Pippin Reference Pippin, Laitinen and Sandis2010), interested in the matter of interpretation, attribution, justification and evaluation of action, rather than in the task of explanation of action.

A third assumption shared by such interpreters, one which already departs from Taylor's approach, concerns the strong intentionalist approach to action they attribute to Hegel. Applying the Anscombian model, which understands action as an event under intentional description in the first person, they assume that ‘only intentional actions are actions’ (Quante Reference Quante and Moyar2004: 97; see Brandom Reference Brandom2019: 387–38). This leads Pippin for instance to make a strong demarcation between action and non-action, and to broach a distinction between ‘genuine action’, understood as something done intentionally and voluntarily, and something that is ‘merely done by me’ (Pippin Reference Pippin, Laitinen and Sandis2010: 76). Pippin then reads in this light of Hegel's distinction between Handlung and Tat, action and deed.

A fourth assumption concerns the normative and constructivist approach to the expressive relation, which is understood here as a matter of social self-constitution of normative states (see also Bowden Reference Bowden2015). As Pinkard for instance writes, ‘we are self-conscious, self-interpreting animals […] our status as geistig, as “minded” creatures is a status we “give” to ourselves in the sense that it is a practical achievement’ (Pinkard Reference Pinkard2012: 18). Hence, ‘to be an agent is to be able to assume a position in a kind of normative space, which, so it will turn out, is a kind of social and historical space’ (Pinkard Reference Pinkard2012: 7).

This latter assumption is explicitly marked by Pippin as departing from Taylor. While paying debt to Taylor's expressivist model, Pippin criticizes him for neglecting ‘problems of rationality, legitimacy, and normativity’ (Pippin Reference Pippin, Laitinen and Sandis2010: 77, n5). But this is not the only point where the appropriation and reconstruction in normative terms of the allegedly Hegelian expressivist model of action departs from Taylor's reading. More generally, as I will argue, the contemporary normativist appropriation of expressivism on action by authors such as Pippin, Pinkard, Quante and Brandom seems to have led to certain consequences that contradict some of the fundamental desiderata that for Taylor an expressivist theory of action should have satisfied. This has also led to a sort of anti-naturalistic understanding of action.

First of all, Taylor criticized the causal theory of action for making conscious, reflective action the only kind of action, and for considering unreflective, unconscious and habitual events as non-action (Taylor Reference Taylor, Stepelevich and Lamb1983/2010: 23). The expressivist account of action, on the contrary, should have been able to overcome such a dualism, and allow for unmonitored, unconscious and habitual activities to be understood as actions in the proper sense. For Taylor this would be one of the main reasons for the superiority of an expressivist over a causal account of actions.

But if we now consider normative expressivist interpreters, we can see that they risk falling back to the kind of dualism between action and unreflective automatism that was a consequence of the causal theory and that involves a sort of anti-naturalistic discontinuity between these two levels. For instance, Quante writes that ‘in the sense of the terminology chosen here, traditional action is therefore not action’ and concludes ‘that traditional action presents a problem for Hegel's theory precisely in those actions that have grown natural through custom or habit’ (Quante Reference Quante and Moyar2004: 53, n42). Hence, habit and custom would not be actions properly said: action in the proper sense would be here opposed not only to natural but also to second natural activities. Even Pippin's understanding of genuine action as reflective normative scrutiny tends to pose habitual dispositions on the side of what is not action properly said, and to conceive of them as causal, natural enabling conditions rather than as constitutive of action.

Such a result, which to my mind not only contradicts Taylor's intentions but is also at odds with Hegel's spirit, is due not only to the introduction of the third assumption—the strong intentionalist reading of action—but also to its combination with the fourth assumption—the normative approach to expressive relations. Once expressive relations are understood as basically normative relations of justification, expressivism is essentially transformed.

Returning now to Taylor, how does he understand expressive relations? According to him, expressivism is characterized by two basic tenets: (1) the idea that mental activity is the inner reflection of an embodied life process rather than a given, and (2) that ‘this inner reflection is itself mediated by our formulations in an expressive medium’ (Taylor Reference Taylor, Stepelevich and Lamb1983/2010: 32). Expressive activities are thus understood as bodily activities (involving the use of gestures, signs, spoken or written words) whose first uses are relatively unreflective, and which develop through a long, slow process whereby we develop finer and more discriminating ways to get things in clearer focus.

It is important to appreciate that for Taylor ‘the very notion of expression is that of self-revelation as a special kind of bodily practice’ (Taylor Reference Taylor, Stepelevich and Lamb1983/2010: 35) and that the principle of embodiment is in this account crucial for the understanding of the role of the expressive medium. Moreover, expressive self-relations should be understood as ‘first a relatively unreflective bodily practice’. Hence, the core of expressive relations is not understood here in terms of reflective normative relations, as Pippin and Brandom do, but rather in terms of pre-reflective bodily practices. The fundamental move of what I have labeled so far ‘normative expressivism’ consists exactly in reducing the expressive media to normative practices, that is, in assuming that normative vocabulary is basic for the specification of expressive practices, thereby neglecting the embodied character of the expressive medium.

The understanding of expressive relations under the model of unreflective bodily practices was directly connected by Taylor to Hegel's understanding of agency as an expressive matter.

When it comes to the relation between intentions and actions, expressivism assumes that intentions are ontologically inseparable from the unfolding of actions that express them, and, second, that these intention-actions are inseparable from how they are expressed in interpretative activity; that is, they are inseparable from their embodied expressive medium. The basic tenet of Hegel's qualitative understanding of action would according to Taylor be the principle of expressive embodiment, that is, ‘the principle that the subject and all his functions, however spiritual they may appear, are inescapably embodied’ (Taylor Reference Taylor, Stepelevich and Lamb1983/2010: 29). And it is exactly such a principle that would have allowed the expressivist account to overcome that dualism between reflective action and unreflective activities, action and bodily automatism, and to appreciate that ‘action may be something totally unreflecting; may be something we carry out without awareness’ (Taylor Reference Taylor, Stepelevich and Lamb1983/2010: 28). One can easily see that this interpretative model by Taylor is influenced by the phenomenological tradition, and is more exactly an attempt to establish some sort of reflective equilibrium between Merleau-Ponty's take on bodily practice and Hegel's account of experience. As I will argue, such a rational reconstruction of Hegel is justified by the relevance played in his philosophy of action by the notion of embodiment, which to my mind is a powerful tool to bring into play the legacy of German Classical Philosophy, Phenomenology, and Pragmatism.

Now it seems to me that the intentionalist and normative reappropriation of expressivism within contemporary post-metaphysical normative expressivism has been obtained at the price of losing sight of the principle of embodiment and of its relevance for our and Hegel's understanding of social action. While endorsing on the one hand Taylor's notion of expressive agency, and substituting Taylor's metaphysical reading of spirit as a monistic substance with a more adequate (and implicitly pragmatist) interpretation of spirit as a social activity, interpreters such as Pippin, Pinkard and Brandom have on the other hand the tendency to employ a very thin understanding of sociality as a mere constitutively normative, intersubjective matter. Not only has this led to the expulsion of habitual action from the proper domain of action, it also neglects Hegel's analysis of the natural structure of agency. This does not mean that such interpreters do not consider the fact that we are, according to Hegel, natural and embodied creatures. But even when this leads to the idea that there is some sort of Aristotelian naturalism in Hegel, as is the case according to Pinkard's interpretation, embodiment tends to be considered only as an external enabling condition of action (Pinkard Reference Pinkard2012: 7)—a matter of natural causal explanation which would not pertain to action theory, understood rather as a normative matter of the justification of action (see also Pippin Reference Pippin2008: 37–38).

In this paper I will follow a different route and try to relocate Hegel's notion of embodiment at the core of his explanation of action. Rather than following Taylor's hermeneutical reconstruction of the principle of embodiment, I will try to reconstruct it by putting at its core the notion of habit formation with the help of conceptual tools taken from contemporary embodied cognition approaches. I will first discuss Hegel's theory of ‘embodiment’ (Verleiblichung) in the ‘Anthropology’ and argue that habit, understood as a sensorimotor embodied life form, is not only an enabling condition for action, but is more strongly an ontological constitutive condition of all its levels of manifestation. According to this reading, the Hegelian approach to embodiment offers a model that not only assigns to habit a positive, constitutive role in the formation of human mindedness, but which also overcomes the dualism between habitual motor routine and intentional activities—a dualism that is currently prevalent in cognitive sciences and both in causal and normative expressivist action theory. Moreover, Hegel's approach allows for some sense of natural agency as belonging to animal life. If we approach Hegel's theory of action from this vantage point, we can gain a perspective which allows us to appreciate a further strand of Hegel's naturalism and distance ourselves from some basic assumptions of contemporary normative expressivist readings of Hegel on social action.

II. Habits and the conditions of agency

In his ‘Anthropology’, Hegel offers an ontological account of animal life as an individuated phenomenon that manifests an embodied, self-organized, and interactive activity. Organic bodiliness (Leiblichkeit) is connected with the idea that the body ‘constitutes my individual life’ (EM: §410A, 135)Footnote ¹, that is, it is connected to the individuated character of natural living beings. Moreover, life's activity is modeled as a self-organizing process, analysed by Hegel as a dialectical relation between the intertwined processes of inwardization and externalization, which are in their turn analysed as two correlated aspects of the process of embodiment (EM: §401). Finally, life's activity is understood by Hegel as a relational process not only because it involves a dynamic coupling with its environment, but more specifically because it is always the manifestation of a natural genus or species (Gattung), of a ‘life form’.Footnote ²

A central role in Hegel's analysis is played by sensorimotor coordination. This already happens in his analysis of ‘sensation’ and of ‘feeling’ (EM: §403), understood as a kind of bodily self-relation that results in some form of proprioception—‘Self-feeling’—which takes place within sensorimotor processes of habit formation (EM: §410R). But the ‘Anthropology’ very often deals with activities in the more specific sense of ‘doings, activities [thun]’, which involve sensorimotor schemes, and are described in action-theoretical terms. If one equates action with intentional action (the third assumption of contemporary expressivism), then one could be tempted to say that, since intentional consciousness is not yet thematic in the ‘Anthropology’, when Hegel speaks here of doings he does not mean action in the proper sense; but this would be a mistake. To my mind, Hegel's ‘Anthropology’ is extremely relevant for his action theory, since it allows us to appreciate that according to him individual action first has to be framed as a process rather than as a singular event. Secondly, this process has to be understood as a manifestation of vital activity which actualizes a life form. Thirdly, if this holds, then intentional action is a subspecies and not the general model under which action falls. Hegel's ‘Anthropology’ would then allow for some sense of natural agency as belonging to animal life. Using the vocabulary later used by John Dewey (Reference Dewey1982: 130) and other contemporary pragmatist approaches in the cognitive sciences (see Testa Reference Testa, Caruana and Testa2020; Testa and Caruana Reference Testa, Caruana, Caruana and Testa2020), this natural sense of agency is firstly connected with the crucial role that motor action plays as sensorimotor coordination of the system of the senses. And the notion of habit, as we shall see, introduces here a sense of patterned, organized behaviour which is not only an enabling precondition of action but is constitutive of it.

Some conditions of action are already introduced in the previous paragraphs of the ‘Anthropology’, such as corporeal individuation and separateness of living beings, and proprioception as a sense of selfhood. But it is with the analysis of habit in §409 that action becomes the focus of Hegel's analysis. First, Hegel underlines many times the ontological role that habit plays in the constitution of the individual. It is in particular in the analysis of ‘hardening’ as the first form of habit that Hegel affirms that habits constitute the mode of being of living individuals. In the lectures given by Hegel at the University of Berlin, he says the following: ‘I am this habit. It is my universal mode of being. What I am is the totality of this habit. I can do nothing else. I am this’ (LPS: 153/VGeist: 124; cf. VPhG: 726).

Secondly, the notion of habit is connected to a sense of agential individuality. The ‘mode of being’ of habit is described as something that endows me with a sense of doing. ‘The second point’, says Hegel, ‘is that habit is a universal mode of my doing, the particular is subsumed under it’ (LPS: 153/VGeist: 124; cf. VPhG: 727). This universal mode of my doing regards the generality of habitual dispositions, the fact that they can generate a multiplicity of particular actions.

The structure of habits is understood by Hegel as ‘possibility [Möglichkeit]’, ‘capacity or resource [Vermögen]’ (LPS: 128/VGeist: 156; VPhG: 734) of doing and acting. Habitual dispositions are thus to be understood as bodily schemes which anticipate possibilities of action in a variety of individual situations. In this sense habitual motor patterns, by implicitly recollecting our reactions to past occurrences of sensation and feelings, allow us to take a step back from what is currently present in our sensory experience, and as such anticipate possible courses of action (see EM: §410A/134). This is an embodied form of minded anticipation of experience. Habits are thus understood by Hegel as self-organizing, self-referred universal modes of doing. It is thus this kind of ‘universality [Allgemeinheit]’ or ‘generality [Allheit]’ (LPS: 153/VGeist: 124–25) which seems to characterize habits.

If we now take a look at the passage where Hegel describes habit in §410 we can appreciate further aspects of the relevance of habit for the analysis of action:

The universal mode of action in which habit consists is here connected with a sense of taking possession of one's own deeds. Hence to my mind habit satisfies that ownership condition that according to Pippin belongs to the Hegelian normative expressivist theory of action and distinguishes it from standard causal accounts of action (see Pippin Reference Pippin2008: 37–38)Footnote ³. Moreover, and most importantly, the notion of habit is explained in terms of the notion of ‘being-together-with-one's-own-self [bei sich selber-sein]’ that is crucial for the Hegelian theory of action and freedom. In Hegel's own words, ‘[t]his being-together with-one's-own-self we call habit’ (EM: §410A/134). As we have seen in the passage above, habit does not distinguish itself from its content, nor is it absorbed in it, but possesses it as a mode of its being. And in this sense habit is free of its content: it can actualize, even if this does not necessarily happen, that structure of being at home with one self in the other that for Hegel is constitutive of freedom. That is why the final stage of the development of habit in the ‘Actual Soul’ section is described as an actualization of its structure where ‘the self or the I intuits its own self in its Other and is this self-intuiting’ (EM: §412A/141).

It is important to note that the sense of ownership we are endowed with by habit, and that is a condition of agency, is for Hegel connected with the idea that the structure of habit allows for self-distancing. Habit frees us from its content insofar as it consists in a form of detached embodiment which enables us to keep our distance from aspects of our sensory life. The break felt between mindedness and bodiliness is enacted by habit in a bodily format. It is in this sense that Hegel writes that ‘spirit is essentially for itself in its body, but also against its body’ (LPS: 162/135). Habit then implements the structure of negativity at the level of bodily action that in Hegel's model is one of the crucial conditions of free agency.Footnote ⁴

Given this structural relation between habit and detached embodiment, I think that Pippin is misled when he traces an opposition between embodiment and negativity. According to Pippin, the kind of self-relation which is a condition for freedom requires ‘a negative relation to, rather the immediate embodiment of, the natural conditions and states of a being’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2008: 52). Besides, Pippin understands this negative relation as a form of keeping a distance from nature which is inherently normative—a form of taking up attitudes rather than of being in something—and opposes such normative relations to causal relations, affirming that freedom does not depend on any individual causal power. Now Pippin somehow admits that it is natural beings, on the basis of their ‘natural capacities’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2008: 53), that develop such negative attitudes, but does not give any account of what exactly this means. If we now consider that the ‘keeping a distance’ attitude is constituted by habit as detached disposition, then firstly we can see that there is no reason to oppose ‘embodiment’ and ‘negative relation to nature’, since this negative relation is in Hegelian terms a form of detaching embodiment. And secondly, the opposition between normativity and causal powers as regarding Hegel's conception of freedom does not hold, since the capacity of detachment which is a condition of freedom, of course depends on habit and the causal structure of the process of habituation. Moreover, habit's actualization of that negative relation does not in itself require normativity to take place.

When analyzing habit as skill or dexterity, which is a higher form of habitual organization than hardening against external sensations—the inurement of the body against external sensations such as cold and heat—and indifference towards satisfactions—the habit of being able to delay practical urges of the body such as thirst and hunger—Hegel strongly underlines that skilled habits are stage setting, that is, they empower us insofar as they constitute novel modes of doing that were not previously available. Skill ‘belongs to me and thus becomes a possibility to me, and the activity [Tätigkeit] becomes a capacity or resource [Vermögen]’ (LPS: 156/129). Habits in this sense play a constitutive role in the socio-ontological sense of the term (see Searle Reference Searle2010: 9–10). Habit is then constitutive of action, and not just an enabling necessary condition of it. For instance, the upright posture is not just a causal anatomical mechanism necessary for us to walk, but is constitutive of what walking is.

A further important point is that for Hegel the form of habitual formation which leads to the acquisition of skills constitutes some kind of purposive activity. Habituation as a process of training of the body makes it possible to express aims and purposes. In this sense some forms of habituation are enactments of action in bodily behavior also insofar as they embody subjective purposes in bodily motor schemes. In this sense habit can account for the purposive structure of action, even if this does not mean that habits are in themselves purposive (see EM: §410A/135). As we have seen, skills are already complex forms of habituations, whereas hardening is a less complex form of habit which does not exhibit purposive structure. Subjective purposiveness is then the result of some habit formations. Furthermore, habits in this sense do not presuppose subjective purposes, but are rather understood as structures through which those subjective purposes are constituted.

With the constitution of action purposes, habit can account for goal-directed action. Hence, the notion of habit Hegel uses does not refer only to automatic, stimulus-triggered routines, but embraces also goal-directed behavior. It is in any case important to note that Hegel's reconstruction of skilled action is not intrinsically an analysis of action as having representational intentional content, nor of action as intentionally willed. Skilled action applies not only to reflective conscious and voluntary actions (which Hegel focuses on in the last two paragraphs of the ‘Anthropology’), but also embraces animal dexterity and involuntary embodiments.

III. Expressive embodiment, normativity and causality

Three main points are worth making concerning the relation between habit and action.

IV. Habit and transformative interaction

Habit, I have argued so far, allows on the one hand for the idea that self-organizing biological systems are not action (and norm) free, making it possible to develop a naturalized notion of action as emerging from biological processes. On the other hand the notion of habitual action makes it intelligible that action is not necessarily intentional and can be originated and regulated in a non-intentional manner. More generally, if it satisfies the structural conditions of action as they have been identified by expressivist accounts such as Pippin's—ownership condition, negativity condition and the being-with-one-self in otherness structure—then habitual action should be considered as genuine action. But most importantly, habit deploys the structure of all kinds of action, both habitual and non-habitual ones, since it is ontologically constitutive of agency as such, a fact which allows us to construct a naturalist continuity between lower and higher forms of living activity. Hegel's analysis of habit is then informed by a naturalistic metaphysics of action; the natural form of habit is not opposed to higher capacities but is both a precondition, a continuous support and a constitutive feature of them. It is in this sense that we have to interpret Hegel's statements that ‘habit is the most essential feature of the existence of all mental life in the individual subject’, and that ‘habit is a form that embraces all kinds and stages of mind's activity [Tätigkeit]’ (EM: §410R/133, 132).

This Hegelian theory of habit has other advantages that can also be appreciated in contemporary debates on the theory of action as well as in cognitive sciences and in social philosophy. It overcomes the dualism between habits as merely stimulus-triggered motor routines and goal-directed intentional action that has dominated both social theory and cognitive sciences in recent decadesFootnote ⁷. Habits can also be goal-directed, and goal-directed action is not always in itself intentional, whereas even intentional action can be understood as an instance of habitual dispositions. Habits are thus to be conceptualized as traversing a continuum from motor routines to goal-directed action.

Moreover, the Hegelian approach to habit is also useful for overcoming the dualism between involuntary and voluntary action, as well as between conscious and unconscious action. Habit is here a sliding door between ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary embodiment’. Analogously to what has also been noted in recent studies on dual tasking,Footnote ⁸ Hegel observes in his analysis of cases such as walking, writing and piano playing, that in this sense habit frees us insofar as, once these tasks have become a part of our being, we no longer need to concentrate our attentive consciousness and will on single details of the basic components of these actions as such, and can open these faculties to other activities. Habit thus has a liberating function, insofar as it allows a ‘post-reflective’ release of consciousness from its focus on immediate goals, refocusing it to different, perhaps higher goals (which can in their turn eventually take a habitual form). But this is again a matter of degrees rather than an all or nothing matter: consciousness is both absent as for the single details, but also present as a sort of post-reflective global awareness of the matter at hand. And if something goes wrong, consciousness can be retrieved in its reflective form and return to monitoring the single details of the task that needs to be readjusted.

In Hegel's holistic picture of habit there is both a top-down dynamic—once we achieve reflective rationality, this also informs our sensorimotor schemes and gives rise to a new kind of reflective habit—and an upward transformation, where our bodily nature also reshapes rationality and gives it the form of post-reflective patterns. In this picture the relation between pre-reflective, reflective and post-reflective, involuntary and voluntary, unconscious and conscious aspects of mindedness is both a bottom-up and a top-down process, where habits traverse this continuum in both directions.Footnote ⁹ In this sense Hegel's habit-based understanding of minded activity differs from those additive theories which, according to Matthew Boyle's characterization (Reference Boyle, Abel and Conant2012 and Reference Boyle2016), understand rational agency as something that is added on top of more basic animal capacities that it does not essentially transform—a horse and rider structure where one power is set over another. In fact the continuum of habit formation describes a holistic process of transformation of the way we exercise our powers. Still, classical transformative theories of rationality such as Aristotle's and McDowell's, as characterized by Boyle (Reference Boyle2016), and constructivist readings of Hegel's such as Pippin's and Pinkard's (see Levine Reference Levine2015), seem to admit only a downward and not reciprocal transformation process, where rationality reshapes top-down our bodily nature and has authority over it without being reciprocally influenced by it. In contrast, in Hegel's model of habit, the transformative process also involves an upward and reciprocal dynamic, where habituation constantly reshapes from below our spiritual, rational powers, and has a certain sort of ‘authority’ for our thinking and acting.Footnote ¹⁰ Habit is hence the mechanism of a process of transformative transaction which is rooted both in the naturalness and in the social shape of our life form.Footnote ¹¹ As the result of both top-down and bottom-up dynamics, habit formation is a transformative process inhabited by an immanent dialectical tension, which distinguishes the Hegelian account from the essentialist classical model of transformative rational activity.

This does not mean that the way habit is described in the ‘Anthropology’ tells us the whole story about what action and freedom are. Minded activities can be deployed at a multiplicity of levels of increasing complexity, which take the shape of different orders of habitual organizations of our minded activities, and have different logical forms. The analysis of habit offered in the ‘Anthropology’ cannot exhaust the description of the logical complexity of higher orders of practical and theoretical habits and of the contents they come to bear. In this sense Hegel's analysis is not a reductionist one. But whatever their content and form is, and whatever are the logical tools needed to make them explicit, even higher-level practical and theoretical minded activities also take the form of habit and actualize its structure. Hence Hegel's theory of action even at this higher level is not merely a matter of attribution and justification of action, but also fundamentally involves habit explanations.

V. Extended habits and the mechanisms of freedom

But what about the transformative dialectics of habit formation? How does it relate to concrete freedom in the social and institutional sense? A possible answer to this question is finally to be found in the same paragraphs on habit. Here habit is described as a liberating process that frees us from certain constraints rather than as an accomplished end state. In other words, freedom is a process rather than a state, and more exactly a process of ‘liberation [Befreiung]’, which is instantiated concretely in bodily, social and historical dialectical processes. Furthermore, habit is constitutive of this process of liberation insofar as it consists in an embodied mechanism of detachment which underpins all these processes. In this sense habit formation is the glue which holds together the multiple dimensions of concrete freedom, that is its natural, intersubjective and socio-institutional aspects.

Hegel's story of habitual agency lets us appreciate freedom as a process that emerges from the growth of complexity, plasticity and unification of an ecology of interrelated habits. Free agency, then, much more than being a matter of deliberate choice, is rather a process or re-inscription, through reiterative practice, of the holistic web of habits whose mechanisms constitute our identity. As such freedom is not presupposed by this process, but is rather its dialectical result. This is one reason why the structure of freedom is not identical to that of habit understood as individual disposition, since whether this process is free also depends on its collective social and historical concretion, and not only on the formal structure of patterned living individuality. Whether a particular individual pattern of action is free, can neither be established abstractly by its form, nor by its content: concrete freedom is rather a mutual interpenetration of form and content. Hence, when Hegel says that habit manifests unfreedom as for its ‘formal’ side (due to its formal universality, see EM: §410R/131), he is speaking of the abstract notion of habit as individual dispositions, independently of its concretion in the natural, social and historical world, and its objectification in a web of collective habits, that is in ethical institutions. Whether or not we are free depends on the concrete way in which our habits in determinate situations interlace their form and content, that is, on whether individuals have either good or bad, living or dead, sane or insane habits, and also on whether between such individual habitual dispositions a relation of either mutual reinforcement or exclusion subsists. The unfreedom of habit as individual disposition is in this sense ‘partly only relative, in so far as it really arises only in the case of bad habits, or in so far as habit is opposed by another purpose’ (EM: §410R/131). This is due to the fact that habit in general is a form which can take any content. Hence habits can instantiate freedom but also unfreedom. Habits can also be realized as bad habits, or be in conflict with each other, and in this case they enslave rather than free us. Their causal structure can implement both bad and good habits. Even when we have good habits, their causal structure and formal side can reify them, make us dependent on them, and lead to their stagnation or even disintegration. And this is finally again because freedom is a process of liberation, and no collection of given individual habits, including good ones, can be fully identical with it.

The process of habit formation is thus the real condition of the possibility of embodied free agency, but such a process depends on whether freedom is actualized in it for the individuals. It is contingent for the single individual whether her habits are instantiated as good ones. This is contingent upon the way our social environment is structured, or to put it another way, upon the way collective ethical habits are socially and historically established. In this sense Hegel's talk about the relative freedom and unfreedom of habit in the ‘Anthropology’ is related to the fact that this is not the full story about habits. Here he considers only habits as individual dispositions, but does not offer a full account of how embodied habits are embedded in our natural and social environment and extended in institutional structures: this is the story he will tell in the Philosophy of Right with his account of ethical life as second nature, that is, as an objectified system of habits which can be understood as an extension of embodied mindedness in an institutional setting (see Testa Reference Testa2009). In other words, what is missing in the understanding of concrete freedom is a more extended account of habits as for the socio-ontological role they play in the constitution of the social world of institutions. In this sense Hegel's understanding of habit formation as an embodied process that arises from the enactive interaction between living individuals and their environment, and is historically embedded in this context, already requires that mindedness can be extended to social and institutional artifacts.