What Hegel means by this, among other things, is that it is a mistake to
regard thinking as primarily and originally a matter of first having an image
or other mental objectinsideone’s individual mind and then introspecting
that image or object. Nor is choosing or willing a matter only of the occur-
rence of an“inner event”of“mental motion”toward an object. It is true that
images and other mental objects may sometimes enter into thinking, and it is
true that moments of choice can sometimes be identified. But thinking and
willing as processes do not take place originally and only by means of the
having of mental images objects and by internal velleity. Thinking and
willing are, rather, interrelated achievements, things we learn to do in a
certain way. For example, tothinkof a wildebeest (as opposed to having what
is in fact a wildebeest within one’s field of sensory awareness–something
that might happen to or in a sensate but not rational-conceptual animal such
as a frog) requires possessing the concept of a wildebeest and applying it. So
does choosing to hunt a wildebeest. The animal in question must be recog-
nized under some relevant concept, if genuine thinking and choosing, as
opposed to merely being aware and moving, are to take place. Achieving this
recognition is something that one learns to do by taking up recognitional
strategies (including possibilities of being mistaken) that one learns from
others. It does not happen as a result only of events in an individual mind or
brain. As Daniel Dennett summarizes this point, “one must be richly
informed about, intimately connected with, the world at large, its occupants
and properties, in order to be said with any propriety to have beliefs”^4 as
opposed to mere sensory awareness.
Recognitional strategies that must be taken up in order for there to be
genuine thinking and willing are necessarily shared. We can see this by
considering what happens when we encounter a human being who“acts”
(as it seems to us) altogether incoherently, without employing any strategy
for action or communication that we or anyone else can discern or make use
of. In such a case, our confidence lapses that that human being is genuinely
an agent who has a point of view on things and who is engaged in genuine
action. We see the human being in question as mad, uninterpretable, not
really a thinker or subject. Perhaps such a human being can become a
thinker or subject. Infants can grow into common thought and language,(^4) Daniel Dennett,“Beyond Belief,”inThought and Object, ed. A. Woodfield (Oxford University
Press, 1982), p. 23.
146 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art