Citation: Maddalena, G.; Bernardi della Rosa, S. Habit, Gesture and the History of Ideas. Philosophies 2023, 8, 40. https://doi.org/10.3390/ philosophies8020040 Academic Editor: Vincent Colapietro Received: 6 March 2023 Revised: 11 April 2023 Accepted: 15 April 2023 Published: 18 April 2023 Copyright: © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). philosophies Article Habit, Gesture and the History of Ideas Giovanni Maddalena * and Simone Bernardi della Rosa * Law Department, University of Molise, 86100 Campobasso, Italy * Correspondence: maddalena@unimol.it (G.M.); simone.bernardidellarosa@unimol.it (S.B.d.R.) Abstract: This paper explores the intertwinement of ontology and history that happened after the idealist turn of Kantian transcendentalism, particularly in classic German idealism and later in American pragmatism. The paper focuses on the less remarked-upon consequence of this inter- twinement, namely the possibility of a new reading of history based on changes in concepts and habitual mentality. The paper proposes a new take on historiography that vindicates Hegel’s insight but changes his approach to a pragmatist one, more apt to face historical changes in a technical way and less easily twistable into ideological frameworks. The paper argues that the notion of habit, as phenomenologically and semiotically described by Peirce, is the fundamental cellule of the pragmatist take on the entanglement of history and ontology. The paper elaborates on the notion of habit, singling out a special form of it called “gesture” that can be a useful tool for reading the history of the human spirit without incorporating Hegel’s dialectic and Absolute. The paper compares the notion of gesture as it originated in the pragmatist tradition with the parallel use of the term in the early studies of Michel Foucault and argues that the notion of gesture is better equipped to tackle a theoretical reading of history. Keywords: habit; gesture; Peirce; history; ontology; pragmatism 1. Introduction The intertwinement of ontology and history is possibly one of the most striking features of the idealist turn of Kantian transcendentalism. In classic German idealism, this approach takes different shapes that range from Schelling’s early philosophy of nature to Hegel’s dialectic of the Spirit. It is not surprising that American philosophy, which originated with the Hegelian studies connected to the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in St. Louis, embodied this intertwinement in its various currents of thoughts. In particular, all of the leading figures of American pragmatism combined an idealist sense of history with the developing studies of evolution, inspired by Darwin’s The Origin of Species. It has now been convincingly shown that Charles S. Peirce, often mistaken for a neo-Kantian author, moved from an early idiosyncratic take on Kant to an increasingly objective idealist turn in his mature research (Colapietro 2004, Maddalena 2019) [1,2]. The idealist turn of ontology and history has given birth to many well-known conse- quences in a number of fields of knowledge and, even more strikingly, in political theory and practice. Here we will concentrate only on one of the less remarked-upon of these consequences: the possibility of a new reading of history based on changes in concepts and in a habitual mentality. This novelty appears with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. As Hegel maintains in the introduction to this work, the kernel of this phenomenology is the dialectic movement of the experience of conscience. The account of history of the Phenomenology is different from both the liberal account based on personalities and events and what will later become the Marxist tradition, grounded in economic structures. Exactly because of the powerful transformation effected by Marx, the approach of the Phenomenology remains a ‘unicum’ that may have been revived later on in studies of the history of ideas, such as those proposed by Robert G. Collingwood; with fewer references to Hegel, by Owen Barfield (1928) [3]; and more recently, by Alasdair MacIntyre (1988, 1990) [4,5]. Couched in Philosophies 2023, 8, 40. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8020040 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/philosophies