The Phenomenology of Spirit was written hastily. It is notorious that one outcome of this is that arguments are compressed, that the relation of one argument to another is often unclear, and that paragraphs of almost impenetrable obscurity recur. The commentator is therefore liable to feel a certain liberty in reconstructing Hegel's intentions; and the exercise of this liberty may always be a source of misrepresentation, perhaps especially when Hegel's arguments are relevant to present-day controversies. Nonetheless, the risk is sometimes worth taking, for although it is true that to be ignorant of the history of philosophy is to be doomed to repeat it, the joke is that we are doomed to repeat it in some measure anyway, if only because the sources of so many philosophical problems lie so close to permanent characteristics of human nature and human language. It is in this light that I want to consider Hegel's arguments about two bad sciences – physiognomy and phrenology – and their claims to lay bare and to explain human character and behavior, and the relevance of those arguments to certain contemporary issues.

Physiognomy was an ancient science that in the eighteenth century enjoyed a mild revival, especially in the writings of Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801). The central claim of physiognomy was that character was systematically revealed in the features of the face. Character consists of a set of determinate traits, and the face of a set of determinate features.