Abstract
Focusing on Hegel's dictum "Spirit is a bone", the paper shows that besides its straightforward reading as a critique scientific physiognomy, it has a broader application to all attempts at reducing complex physical and social phenomena to mere causal explanations. Inferring that you must have such and such character because you have such and such bumps on your skull does not substantially differ from the same inference based on the description of our genes or episodes of our brain centers.
With Hegel, one can argue that what matters here are not some describable episodes of our organism, but human deed as an outer opposition to the inner act of intention. The relation of the inner and outer, though, must be conceived dialectically as mutually conditioned or co-dependent, in the spirit of the later philosophies of Wittgenstein or Merleau-Ponty.