Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Quotes of Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
When, therefore, a man is told, "You {your inner being} are so and so, because your skull-bone is so constituted," this means nothing else than that we regard a bone as the man's reality. To retort upon such a statement with a box on the ear - in the way mentioned above when dealing with psysiognomy - removes primarily the "soft" parts of his head from their apparent dignity and position, and proves merely that these are no true inherent nature, are not the reality of mind; the retort here would, properly speaking, have to go the length of breaking the skull of the person who makes a statement like that, in order to demonstrate to him in a manner as palpable as his own wisdom that a bone is nothing of an inherent nature at all for a man, still less his true reality. book-quoteretortphysiognomyMan is an animal, but even in his animalfunctions, he is not confined to the implicit, as the animal is; hebecomes conscious of them, recognizes them, and lifts them, as,for instance, the process of digestion, into self-conscious science.In this way man breaks the barrier of his implicit and immediatecharacter, so that precisely because he knows that he is an animal,he ceases to be an animal and attains knowledge of himself asspirit. book-quotemanconsciousness