On Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ : A Free Reflex of Spirit — part eight.
‘Hab ich nur geschrieben’
von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, (1749–1832)
Teilen kann ich nicht das Leben,
Nicht das Innen, noch das Außen,
Allen muß das Ganze geben,
Um mit euch und mir zu hausen.
Immer hab ich nur geschrieben,
Wie ichs fühle, wie ichs meine,
Und so spalt ich mich, ihr Lieben,
Und bin immerfort der Eine.
‘I have only written’
I cannot divide life
into an inside and an outside.
In order to live with you and myself,
I must give all of you the whole of me.
Always, I have just written
as I felt, as I thought.
In this way, dear friends, I split myself ;:
and at all times remain one.
=====
Luigi Russolo: ‘Serenata per intonarumori e strumenti’:
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831). ‘The Philosophy of Nature’.
Before diving into ‘Mechanics’ even further it may be a good idea to take some time out to discuss the development of Nature and the overcoming of the division between matter and thought if there is one. (Recall that the brevity of the work arises because Hegel wrote it as an outline for use in lecturing).
‘Philosophical thinking knows that nature is idealised not merely by us, that nature’s externality is not an absolutely insuperable obstacle for nature itself, for its concept; but that the eternal idea dwelling in nature, or, what is the same thing, the implicit mind working within nature, brings about the idealisation, the sublation of the externality, because this form of mind’s existence conflicts with the interiority of its essence. Therefore philosophy has, as it were, simply to watch how nature itself sublates its externality, how it takes back its externality to itself into the centre of the idea, or lets this centre step forth into the external, how it frees the hidden concept from the covering of externality and thereby overcomes external necessity. This transition from necessity to freedom is not a simple transition but a series of stages [Stufengang] consisting of many moments, the presentation of which makes up the philosophy of nature’.
— ‘Philosophy of Mind’
The ‘Philosophy of Nature’ is composed according to a robustly a priori method though the question has to be posed as to whether it can plausibly be construed in such terms. There is a certain opacity to the text that Hegel himself recognises which he puts down to nature’s contingency, caprice, and lack of order, its impotence to hold fast to the realisation of the concept.
‘The infinite wealth and variety of forms, and the utterly irrational contingency which mixes with the external order of natural formations, have been praised as the sublime freedom and divinity of nature , or at least as the divinity within it. It is to be expected that ordinary ways of thinking should mistake contingency, caprice and lack of order, for freedom and rationality. This impotence on the part of nature sets limits to philosophy; and it is the height of pointlessness to demand of the Notion that it should explain, and as it is said, construe or deduce these contingent products of nature, although the more isolated and trifling they are the easier the task appears to be. Traces of Notional determination will certainly survive in the most particularized product, although they will not exhaust its nature. The traces of this transmission and inner connection will often surprise the investigator, but will be particularly astonishing or even incredible to those accustomed only to seeing the same contingency in the history of nature as they see in that of humanity. Here one has to guard against accepting such traces as the determinate totality of formations, for it is this that gives rise to the analogies mentioned above’.
‘The difficulty, and in many cases the impossibility of finding clear distinctions for classes and orders on the basis of empirical observation, has its root in the inability of nature to hold fast to the realization of the Notion. Nature never fails to blur essential limits with intermediate and defective formations, and so to provide instances which qualify every firm distinction. Even within a specific genus such as mankind, monsters occur, which have to be included within the genus, although they lack some of the characteristic determinations which would have been regarded as essential to it. In order to classify such formations as defective, imperfect, or deformed, an invariable prototype has to be assumed, with the help of which we are able to recognize these so-called monsters’ deformities, and borderline cases. This prototype cannot be drawn from experience, but has as its presupposition the independence and worth of Notional determination’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
‘The more immediate reason for the text’s ideal unity is its finding itself and is for itself. Initially, matter is the form in which the self-externality of nature attains its first being-in-self. It is the abstract being-for-self which, in that it is exclusive, is a plurality which has its unity within itself and at the same time outside itself, as the plural being-for-self included within universal being-for-self. It is in fact gravity. In mechanics, being-for-self is still not an individual stable unity having the power to subordinate plurality to itself. Weighted matter does not yet possess the individuality which preserves its determinations, and since the determinations of the Notion in it are still external to one another, difference is indifferent or merely quantitati.ve, not qualitative, and matter as simple mass has no form. It is in physics that the individual bodies acquire form, and at the same time it is there that we see gravity revealed for the first time as the being-for-self which submits multiplicity to its rule, and which is no longer a nisus, but which has at least the superficial appearance of being at rest. Each atom of gold for example contains all the determinations or properties of gold, so that matter is immanently specified and particularized. The second determination is that specification as qualitative determinateness, and being-for-self as the point of individuality, still unite 15 in one and the same term, so that the body is finitely determined. Individuality is still bound to definite, exclusive and specific properties, and is not yet present in its complete and general form. If a body of this kind is brought into the process, it ceases to be what it is if it loses these properties. In this way qualitative determinateness is posited affirmatively, but not at the same time negatively. Organic being, which is an individuality existing for itself and developing itself into its differences within itself, constitutes totality as found in nature. Its determinations are at the same time concrete totalities, not merely specific properties, and remain qualitatively determined with regard to one another. Life expresses itself within the process of these members, and also posits them as finite elements of an ideal nature. We thus have a number of beings-for-self, which are however brought back to the being-for-self which is for itself, and which, as its own end, subjugates the members and reduces them to means. It is unity of qualitative determinedness and of gravity, which produces itself in life’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Generally speaking Hegel portrays nature as progressing or developing from a form of matter that is not conceptually organized, to a form of matter that is only partly and imperfectly conceptually organized, and finally to a form of matter that is fully, manifestly, conceptually organized. Nature progressing or developing needs explaining, Hegel denies that natural development is temporal, natural stages follow one another necessarily and in particular, with rational necessity. In endeavouring to reconstitute his theory of natural development we can compare the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ and the theory of consciousness outlined in the ‘Philosophy of Mind’. Consciousness suffers from an initial opposition that impels it to proceed through various forms, each necessarily succeeding its predecessor and significantly the initial opposition within consciousness has the very same structure as the initial opposition that Hegel detects between conceptual and material elements in nature and as a consequence the entire development of consciousness closely parallels that within nature and given this correspondence between the trajectories of nature and consciousness Hegel’s theory of consciousness to illuminate his theory of natural development. The similarities between consciousness and nature obtain only at the very general level yet the comparison between consciousness and nature provides an overview of the general organization of the stages within nature.
Reconstructing Hegel’s basic theory of natural development via his theory of consciousness is a double achievement in that it confirms that this basic theory of nature is a priori like the theory of consciousness which it parallels and the theory of consciousness is a priori in that it traces a hierarchical series of stages each emerging as the rationally necessary solution to the contradiction within the stage preceding it, with what is mean by a contradiction in need of clarification though it clearly has an extended sense which encompasses not only strict contradictions but also oppositions and tensions of varying degrees. In virtue of the basic theory of nature following a structure parallel to that of the theory of consciousness the theory of nature also must be a priori in the same sense which is to say that it traces how each natural stage arises as the rationally necessary solution to the contradiction in the stage before it and reading the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ together with the theory of consciousness in addition illuminates how the basic theory of nature is sui generis namely in that his theory characterizes nature in non-scientific terms as two basic metaphysical elements matter and thought are woven into it. The natural world progresses through a necessary course of stages from an initial opposition between these two constituent elements to their eventual unification. As Karl-Heinz Ilting, (1925–1984), pointed out: ‘Hegel … wants to show that we can present these shapes [of nature] as a developmental process in the course of which what he calls the ‘idea’ [that is, the unity of matter and concept] or the ‘absolute idea’ increasingly comes forth’. Gilles Marmasse, (1971 — ), characterizes the tension between concept and matter as a tension between nature’s ‘inwardness’ and ‘externality’.
Each stage in this series represents a specific constellation of relationships between matter and thought and each such constellation arises to resolve the contradiction within the previous one and subsequently Hegel equates these various stages with regions of nature as described by and theorized in empirical science. Focusing upon Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ at this general level leaves to one side the depth of his exposition of any individual natural stages which I will get to later yet interpreting Hegel’s general theory of natural progression provides an overall perspective that makes possible the development of more consistent and reliable interpretations of individual natural stages so through standing back from the specifics of the stages the wider progression in which they are located can be observed.
In reconstructing the general theory of natural progression first for consideration are the general similarities between consciousness and nature then a comparative study of a form of consciousness and a corresponding stage in natural development from which it can be seen that natural development passes through four fundamental stages that are defined by the emergence of sheer materiality, bodies, physical qualities, and life following upon is the fecundity if I may use such an appropriate word in this context of the theory of nature and explanation of how the theory reflects the distinctive set of metaphysical assumptions from which he is operating. Comparisons can e made between individual forms of consciousness and stages of natural development by identifying some general affinities between the trajectories of consciousness and nature such affinities brought to the fore through an explication of the general theory of consciousness and outline of how this parallels the general conception of natural development as indicated in his introductions to the tomes of the Encyclopaedia.
Hegel’s theory of consciousness is outlined in the ‘Philosophy of Mind’ though he had previously given an earlier of consciousness in the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’. The ‘Philosophy of Mind’ account was written and revised in conjunction with his ‘Philosophy of Nature’ both belonging within the Encyclopaedia and so he in all likelihood deliberately and systematically integrated the two accounts and that their parallels are no coincidence and his account of consciousness in the Phenomenology is more complicated than that in his ‘Philosophy of Mind’ in several ways which does not assist in endeavouring to ascertain the general and basic parallels between forms of consciousness and stages of nature and the account in the Phenomenology incorporates Hegel’s study of various historically existing epistemological theories whereby it intertwines the development of consciousness with the historical development of epistemological theory and it plays a propaedeutic role towards the absolute idealist stance. Suc complications are absent from the account in the ‘Philosophy of Mind’ which merely describes consciousness as a stage in the development of mind thus making the ‘Philosophy of Mind’ more useful for cross-referencing developments within consciousness against developments within nature.
In the ‘Philosophy of Mind’ consciousness is portrayed as necessarily superseding the previous stage of the subject’s existence in which the subject had assumed the form of the soul (Seele) and the soul is a form of subjectivity that remains embroiled in the individual’s corporeality, sensations, and emotions and by the end of its development the soul has become a form of subjectivity that attempts to express itself within its body, moulding and habituating the body so that it expresses rational patterns and principles and yet the subject’s body continues to express it inadequately because shape [Gestalt] in its externality is something immediate and natural, and can therefore be only an indefinite and wholly incomplete sign for the mind, unable to represent it as it is for itself, as universal.
‘The soul, when its bodiliness has been thoroughly trained and made its own, becomes an individual subject for itself; and bodiliness is thus the externality as a predicate, in which the subject is related only to itself. This externality represents not itself, but the soul, of which it is the sign. As this identity of the inner with the outer, the outer being subjugated to the inner, the soul is actual; in its bodiliness it has its free shape, in which it feels Itself and makes itself felt, and which, as the soul’s work of an, has human, pathognomic and physiognomic, expression’.
‘[Remark] Human expression includes, e.g., the upright figure in general, the formation especially of the hand, as the absolute tool, of the mouth, laughter, weeping, etc., and the spiritual tone diffused over the whole, which at once announces the physical body as the externality of a higher nature. This tone is such a slight, indeterminate, and indescribable modification, because the figure in its externality is something immediate and natural, and can therefore only be an indeterminate and quite imperfect sign for the mind, unable to represent it in its universality for itself. For the animal, the human figure is the highest form in which the mind appears to it. Bur for the mind it is only its first appearance, and speech is straight away its more perfect expression. The figure is indeed the mind’s proximate existence, but in its physiognomic and pathognomic determinacy it is at the same time a contingency for the mind. To want to raise physiognomy and especially cranioscopy to the rank of sciences, was therefore one of the most vacuous notions, even more vacuous than a signatura rerum, which supposed that we could recognize the healing power of a plant from its shape’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Mind’
This instils in the soul a need to make explicit the body’s resilience which the soul does by in some way separating its body from itself and the soul projects its corporeal reality outside of itself as it excludes from itself the natural totality of its determinations as an object, a world external to it.
‘In itself matter has no truth within the soul; the soul, since it is for itself, cuts itself off from its immediate being, and places this being over against itself as bodiliness, which can offer no resistance to the soul’s incorporation into it. The soul, which has set its being in opposition to itself, sublated it and determined it as its own, has lost the meaning of soul, of the immediacy of mind. The actual soul in the habit of sensation and of its concrete self-feeling is in itself the ideality of its determinacies, an ideality that is for itself; in its externality it is recollected into itself, and is infinite relation to itself. This being-for-self of free universality is the soul’s higher awakening to the I, to abstract universality in so far as it is for abstract universality, which is thus thinking and subject for itself, and in fact determinately subject of its judgement in which the I excludes from itself the natural totality of its determinations as an object, as a world externaL to it, and relates itself to that world so that in it it is immediately reflected into itself: conciousness’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Mind’
The soul’s body becomes an external world and the content is the infinite judgement of the subject through which it posits what it is at first as the negative of itself, throws its determinations of feeling out of itself, and has them as an object, as a world before it and what is in consciousness is in feeling, it being readily admitted that everything must be sensed, I sense hardness, I am myself the one who has the hardness, and I then distinguish the two, myself and the hardness, the object.
‘Kantian philosophy may be most determinately considered as having conceived the mind as consciousness, and as involving determinations only of phenomenology, not of philosophy of mind. It considers I as relation to something lying beyond, which in its abstract determination is called the thing-in-itself; and it conceives both the intelligence and the will solely according to this finitude. If, in the concept of the faculty of reflective judgement, it does get to the Idea of mind, subjectivity-objectivity, an intuitive intellect, etc., and even the Idea of nature, still this Idea itself is again demoted to an appearance, namely to a subjective maxim (see §58, lntro.). Therefore Reinhold had what is to be regarded as a correct sense of this philosophy when he conceived it as a theory of conciousness, under the name faculty of representation. Fichte’ s philosophy takes the same standpoint, and Non-I is determined only as object of the I, only in consciousness; it remains an infinite impetus, i.e. a thing-in-itself Both philosophies therefore show that they have not reached the concept and not reached the mind as it is in and for itself, but only as it is in relation to an Other’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Mind’
Note what he calls consciousness as such is located within a wider category of consciousness that also includes self-consciousness. The problem tfor the soul is that it has been trying to express itself within its inherently unsuitable body and the soul must make explicit its body’s inherent unsuitability by expelling its corporeal side which is not to say that the soul literally casts its body aside and spreads it out to constitute an exterior world for at this juncture in the Encyclopaedia the existence and structure of the natural world has been explained rather mind comes to think that physical matter is external to it and it adopts the belief that corporeality constitutes a world opposed and exterior to itself so the mind does not dispense with its body in any literal sense. Later he addresses the soul’s act of expelling its corporeality and in particular he stresses that the subject now starts to oppose the external realm by knowing or being aware of it as external, the subject knows (weiß) this object as external to it.
‘Consciousness constitutes the stage of the mind’s reflexion or relationship, of mind as appearance. I is the infinite relation of mind to itself, but as subjective relation, as certainty of itself, the immediate identity of the natural soul has been raised to this pure ideal self-identity; the content of the natural soul is object for this reflection that is for itself. Pure abstract freedom for itself discharges from itself its determinacy, the soul’s natural life, to an equal freedom as an independent object. It is of this object, as external to it, that I is initially aware, and is thus consciousness. I, as this absolute negativity, is implicitly identity in otherness; I is itself and extends over the object as an object implicitly sublated, I is one side of the relationship and the whole relationship- the light, that manifests itself and an Other too’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Mind’
The soul by its act of expelling its corporeality redefines itself as an I or subject, an Ich. In coming to think of an external world, the subject implicitly understands itself as contrasted to this external realm of materiality, as a subject or I. I am I, thinking activity, I relate myself thinkingly. I is each of us, i.e. as I each is thinking, and in so far as the I relates itself, it relates thinkingly.
‘(1 ) Although the progressive determination of consciousness proceeds from its own interior and is also directed towards the object in a negative way, and the object is thus altered by consciousness, yet this alteration appears to consciousness as an alteration that comes about without its subjective activity, and the determinations that it posits in the object count for it as belonging only to the — object, as determinations that just are. (2) With Fichte there is always the difficulty of how the I is to cope with the Non-I. He does not get to any genuine unity of these two sides; this unity always remains only a unity that ought to be, because at the outset the false presupposition is made that I and Non-I in their separateness, in their Jinitude, are something absolute’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Mind’
This clarifies that the subject’s relation to external reality consists in its forming the conception of external reality. Hegel concludes that the subject is consciousness insofar as it thinks of this external realm: the subject knows this object as external to it, and “as such it is consciousness [Bewußtsein]. Hegel calls the subject as consciousness because it is or has being (Sein) insofar as it is aware or knowing (bewußt) and so in his theory of consciousness his aim is to describe the subject’s consciousness of external reality outlining the different stages of consciousness through which the subject passes.
He then identifies a crucial contradiction within consciousness whereby on the one hand the subject thinks about the material corporeality which is inherently unsuitable for expressing it conceiving of that materiality as an antithetical external, realm and yet, on the other hand the immediate implication of the other’s being posited as independent, is that the other is also posited as ideal [ideell], it is ideal for and in the I, which is the subject. Furthermore consciousness is both, we have a world outside us, it is firmly for itself, and at the same time, insofar as I am consciousness, I know of this object [Gegenstand], it is posited as of an ideal nature, it is therefore not independent but sublated.
‘Accordingly, the I certain of itself is, initially, still wholly simple subjectivity, the quite abstractly free, the completely indeterminate ideality or negativity of all limitation. Repelling itself from itself, the I attains, therefore, at first only to something that is formally, not actually, distinct from it. But as is shown in Logic, the difference that is in itself must also be posited, must be developed into an actual difference. This development regarding the I proceeds in this way: the I does not fall to the anthropological level, to the unconscious unity of the mental and the natural, but remains certain of itself and maintains itself in its freedom; it lets its Other unfold into a totality like the totality of the I, and just in this way makes it change from something bodily belonging to the soul into something independently confronting it, into an object in the strict sense of this word. The I is at first only wholly abstract subjectivity, the merely formal, contentless distinguishing-itself from itself, and so the actual difference, the determinate content, is found outside the I and belongs to objects alone. But since in itself the I already has difference within itself or, in other words, since it is in itself the unity of itself and its Other, it is necessarily related to the difference existing in the object and immediately reflected out of this its Other into itself The I thus overarches what is actually distinguished from it, is together with itself in this its Other, and remains, in all intuition, certain of itself. Only when I come to apprehend myself as I, does the Other become an object to me, confront me, and at the same time get posited ideally in me, and hence brought back to unity with me. That is why in the above Paragraph the I was compared to light. Just as light is the manifestation of itself and its Other, darkness, and can reveal itself only by revealing that Other, so too the I is revealed to itself only in so far as its Other becomes revealed to it in the shape of something independent of it’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Mind’
The subject thinks of materiality as having a character quite antithetical to it but just in conceiving of materiality the subject presupposes that materiality is intelligible to it and so has, at least in part, the same rational intelligibility that characterizes the subject. There is a contradiction between first the content of the subject’s conception of material reality, as wholly opposed to it in character, and second the fact that this conception inherently presupposes that material reality is intelligible and hence not wholly antithetical to the subject in character. Ultimately the subject must remove this contradiction by straightforwardly viewing materiality as intelligibly structured, and, in this respect, as resembling the subject hence the telos of consciousness is therefore self-consciousness for which my object is no longer an other, but myself.
‘The three stages of the rise of consciousness to reason … are determined by the power of the concept, active in the subject and in the object alike, and can therefore be considered as three judgements. But as we already remarked earlier, the abstract I, mere consciousness, as yet knows nothing of this. Consequently when the non-I, which initially counts for consciousness as independent, is sublated by the power of the concept at work in it, when the object is given the form of a universal, of an internality, instead of the form of immediacy, externality, and individuality, and when consciousness receives this recollection into itself, then the I’s own internalization, which comes about in just this way, appears to it as an internalization of the object. Only when the object has been internalized into the I and when consciousness has in this way developed into self-consciousness, does mind know the power of its own internality as a power present and active in the object. Thus what in the sphere of mere consciousness is only for us, the onlookers, in the sphere of self-consciousness becomes for the mind itself. Self-consciousness has consciousness for its object, hence confronts it. But at the same time consciousness is also preserved as a moment in self-consciousness itself. Self-consciousness necessarily goes on, therefore, to confront itself with another self-consciousness by repulsion of itself from itself and in this to give itself an object which is identical with it and yet at the same time independent. This object is initially an immediate, individual I. But when it is freed from the form of one-sided subjectivity still clinging to it and conceived as a reality pervaded by the subjectivity of the concept, consequently as Idea, then self consciousness abandons its opposition to consciousness and advances to a mediated unity with it and thereby becomes the concrete being-for-self of the I, the absolutely free reason that recognizes in the objective world its own self’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Mind’
The initial opposition within consciousness has the same essential structure as the opposition which initially exists within nature and the basic contradiction in consciousness is between the supposedly complete non-rationality of matter and its implicit intelligibility.
By analogy an initial contradiction obtains in nature between its pure materiality and the fact that this pure materiality is, in some sense, already conceptual albeit a crucial disparity between consciousness and nature is that consciousness suffers from a contradiction within its conception of matter whereas in nature the contradiction holds within actual, objectively existing, matter and this does not prevent the initial contradictions and the ensuing developmental courses of consciousness and nature from being structured in a fundamentally identical way for just as the conscious subject begins by conceiving of an entirely non-rational materiality so nature first exists purely as a realm of matter and externality constitutes the determination in which the idea exists as nature.
‘Nature has yielded itself as the Idea in the form of otherness. Since the Idea is therefore the negative of itself, or external to itself, nature is not merely external relative to this Idea (and to the subjective existence of the same, spirit), but is embodied as nature is the determination of externality’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Hegel’s claim that nature is originally wholly external is elaborated further in his concrete study of nature’s first form, externality, which he equates with empirical space. Nature is what is external generally, in saying that nature is initially defined by externality (Äußerlichkeit), Hegel means that it is wholly material. This becomes explicit in the introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, in which he offers a helpful retrospective of his foregoing account of natural progression. He explains that in nature t]he idea appears in the element of mutual externality [Außereinander] in nature this subsists near this, this follows that, — in brief, everything natural is mutually external, ad infinitum; furthermore, matter, this universal basis of all the formations that are there in nature holds itself external to its own self.
‘So much for the distinctive determinacies of external nature and of mind in general. The development of the difference has at the same time indicated the relation in which nature and mind stand to each other. Since this relation is often misunderstood, this is the appropriate place for an elucidation of it. We have said that mind negates the externality of nature, assimilates nature to itself and thereby idealizes it. In finite mind, which posits nature outside itself, this idealization has a one-sided form; here the activity of our willing, as of our thinking, is confronted by an external material which is indifferent to the alteration we carry out on it and undergoes the idealization conferred on it with complete passivity. But a different relationship obtains in the case of the mind that produces world history. Here, there no longer stands, on the one side, an activity external to the object, and on the other side, a merely passive object; the spiritual activity is directed towards an object which is active within itself, an object that has itself worked its way up to the result to be brought about by that activity, so that in the activity and in the object one and the same content is present. Thus, for example, the people and the time on which the activity of Alexander and Caesar operated as their object, had by their own efforts become capable of the work to be accomplished by those individuals; the time created these men for itself just as much as it was created by them; they were as much the instruments of the spirit of their time and their people, as conversely their people served these heroes as an instrument for the accomplishment of their deeds. — Similar to the relationship just outlined is the way in which the philosophizing mind approaches external nature. That is to say, philosophical thinking knows that nature is idealized not merely by us, that nature’s asunderness is not an entirely insuperable limitation for nature itself, for its concept, but that the eternal Idea immanent in nature or, what is the same thing, the implicit mind at work in the interior of nature itself effects the idealization, the sublation of asunderness, because this form of mind’s realization stands in contradiction with the inwardness of its essence. Therefore philosophy has, as it were, only to watch and see how nature itself sublates its externality, how it takes back what is self-external into the centre of the Idea, or lets this centre emerge in the external, how it liberates the concept concealed in nature from the covering of externality and thereby overcomes external necessity. This transition from necessity to freedom is not a simple transition but a gradual progression of many moments, whose exposition constitutes the philosophy of nature. At the highest stage of this sublation of asunderness, in sensation, the implicit mind held captive in nature reaches the beginning of being-for-self and and thus of freedom. By this being-for-self which is itself still burdened with the form of individuality and externality, consequently also with unfreedom, nature is driven onwards beyond itself to mind as such, that is, to the mind which, by thinking, is for itself in the form of universality and actually free’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Mind’
Hegel makes explicit that he understands matter fundamentally as partes extra partes hence equating it with externality consequently he regularly uses the terms externality and matter interchangeably. However just as the supposedly pure materiality of which the conscious subject thinks is already implicitly understood as rationally intelligible, so the externality or matter that originally constitutes nature is in fact already conceptual. When the determinations of singularity and of mutual externality have been earmarked for the sensuous [Sinnliche], we can add that these determinations themselves are again thoughts and universals.
‘Moreover, when the determinations of singularity and of mutual externality have been earmarked for the sensible, we can add that these determinations themselves are again thoughts and universals. It will be seen in the Logic that this is just what thought and the universal are : that thought is itself and its other, that it overgrasps its other and that nothing escapes it. And because language is the work of thought, nothing can be said in language that is not universal. What I only mean is mine; it belongs to me as this particular individual. But if language expresses only what is universal, then I cannot say what I only mean . And what cannot be said -feeling, sensation-is not what is most important, most true, but what is most insignificant, most untrue. When I say ‘the singular’, ‘this singular’, ‘here’, ‘now’, all of these expressions are universalities; each and every thing is a singular, a this, even when it is sensible-here, now. Similarly when I say ‘I’, I mean me as this one excluding all others; but what I say (‘I’) is precisely everyone, an ‘I’ that excludes all others from itself.- Kant employed the awkward expression, that I ‘accompany’ all my representations — -and my sensations, desires, actions, etc., too. ‘I’ is the universal in and for itself, and communality is one more form-although an external one-of universality. All other humans have this in common with me, to be ‘I’, just as all my sensations, representations, etc., have in common that they are mine. But, taken abstractly as such, ‘I’ is pure relation to itself, in which abstraction is made from representation and sensation, from every state as well as from every peculiarity of nature, of talent, of experience, and so on. To this extent, ‘I’ is the existence of the entirely abstract universality, the abstractly free. Therefore ‘I’ is thinking as the subject, and since I am at the same time in all my sensations, notions, states, etc., thought is present everywhere and pervades all these determinations as [their] category’.
- ‘The Encyclopaedia Logic’
Here the subjective concept of externality rather than nature is addressed and given that thought exists both subjectively and objectively this applies also to externality as an objective determination of items in nature and this will be borne out by the detailed account of nature’s first form, externality and moreover the above Encyclopaedia passage criticizes the concept of externality as it figures in sensuous consciousness which Hegel explicitly treats as the subjective correlate of objective externality in nature and so the critical point of the passage can e taken as applying to the objective externality of nature as well.
And so, with respect to nature the point is that its initial state of externality is contradictory because externality is in some sense conceptual just insofar as it is entirely material and antithetical to conceptuality and nature’s initial contradiction like that of consciousness must ultimately be resolved through the emergence of a form of matter which makes manifest its conceptual or intelligible character so the telos of nature is the emergence of a thoroughly conceptually structured or permeated form of matter and the similarity between the underlying requirements propelling the developments of consciousness and nature means that each passes through a parallel series of stages and in virtue of this parallelism the comparison between consciousness and nature can helpfully illuminate the general trajectory that the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ chases after and the more directly and boldly presented trajectory that unfolds within consciousness runs alongside that in nature.
Such are the general affinities between the initial contradictions and developmental trajectories of consciousness and nature now there is the issue of the individual stages within these trajectories and the theory of consciousness starts off by analysing more precisely the contradiction within consciousness as it initially exists, at which point it takes the form of sensuous consciousness sinnliche Bewußtsein, and with this notion of sensuous consciousnessthere is a reworking of the earlier notion of sense-certainty which he introduces as the first form of consciousness in the Phenomenology. In the ‘Philosophy of Mind’ he argues that the sensuously conscious subject is simply aware of material items as singular external objects and this recasts the Phenomenology’s idea that the subject of sense-certainty conceives of each entity simply as a bare individual this. Hegel emphasises that sensuous consciousness is also aware of these singular entities as external and as such this form of consciousness arises directly out of the soul’s initial act of coming to think of its corporeal content as external.
Sensuous Consciousness/Material Externality. In sensuous consciousness the subject thinks of matter as simply external to it and the subject also thinks of matter as being the object is determined as being [als seiender].
‘Consciousness is initially immediate consciousness, its relation to the object accordingly the simple, unmediated certainty of it; the object itself is therefore similarly determined as immediate, as being and reflected into itself, further as immediately individual;-sensory consciousness. [Remark] Consciousness as relationship involves only the categories belonging to the abstract I or to formal thinking; and these are, for it, determinations of the object (§415). Sensory consciousness is therefore aware of the object only as a being, a something, an existing thing, an individual, and so on. It appears as the richest in content, but it is the poorest in thoughts. That wealth of filling is constituted by determinations of feeling; they are the material of consciousness (§414), the substantial and qualitative element, that the soul, in the anthropological sphere, is and finds within itself The reflection of the soul into itself, I, separates this material from itself, and gives it initially the determination of being. -Spatial and temporal individuality, the here and the now, as I have determined the object of sensory consciousness in the Phenomenology of Mind, pp. 25 ff., strictly belongs to intuition. Here the object is initially to be taken only in accordance with the relationship which it has to consciousness, namely something external to consciousness, and is not yet to be determined as external within itself, or as being outside itself’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Mind’
And finally the subject attributes to the objects of its awareness a third feature, singularity (Einzelheit). Although it [the object] is in relation to me, it is however an other to itself, this is also what it is, it is therefore the self-external, the other of itself. This makes it immediately singular.
‘[sensory consciousness]… differs from the other modes of consciousness, not by the fact that in it alone the object comes to me through the senses, but rather by the fact that at the standpoint of sensory consciousness the object, whether it be an interior or an outer object, has no other thought-determination than firstly, that of being in general, and secondly, of being an independent Other confronting me, something reflected into itself, an individual confronting me as an individual, an immediate individual. The particular content of the sensory, for example, smell, taste, colour, etc., belongs, as we saw in §40, to sensation. But the form peculiar to the sensory, being-external-to-its-ownself, dispersion into space and time, is (as we shall see in §448) the determination of the object apprehended by intuition, in such a way that for sensory consciousness as such there remains only the above-mentioned thought-determination, in virtue of which the manifold particular content of sensations concentrates itself into a unit that is outside me, a unit that, at this standpoint, is known by me in an immediate, individualized manner, contingently now enters my consciousness and then disappears from it again; in general a unit that is, both in its existence and in its constitution, a given for me, something, therefore, of which I know neither why it is nor why it has this determinate nature, nor whether it is something true’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Mind’
The object (that is, matter) is seen as entirely antithetical to the subject and hence as lacking any intelligible structure so that its corporeal complexity can only be understood as a bundle of entirely disconnected elements each of which is external to the others and exists as a singularity and in saying that the subject possesses sensuous consciousness what is meant is that it is conscious of matter as a mass of external singular, beings.
For clarification what is sensuous is not to be presented as being in the senses [in den Sinnen], for its thought-determinations are as of the self-external. In describing this first form of consciousness as sensuous consciousness, Hegel does not mean that the subject is passively receiving sensory impressions as we might imagine à la David Hume (1711–1776) rather sensuous consciousness is a mode of thinking, the subject consciously conceptualizes its object in a definite way, as singular, external, beings and consciousness does not think of its object as possessing a profusion of sensible qualities (colours, sounds, etc.), consciousness thinks of the object as having only the three features of externality and being for sensuous consciousness as such only the said thought-determination [that is, external, singular, being] remains. In addition the rich filling of the object is made out of the determinations of feeling; they are the material of consciousness what the soul in the anthropological sphere is and finds in itself. The content which the subject is conceptualizing as external, singular, beings dates from its preceding anthropological phase when it existed as the soul and the content, now conceptualized under the categories of singularity, externality, and being, is the same content that the subject, as soul, previously contained as corporeal feelings and sensations.
‘Since I is for itself only as formal identity, the dialectical movement of the concept, the progressive determination of consciousness, does not look to it like its own activity, but is in itself and for the I an alteration of the object. Consciousness therefore appears differently determined according to the difference of the object given, and its progressive formation appears as an alteration of the determinations of its object. I, the subject of consciousness, is thinking; the progressive logical determination of the object is what is identical in subject and object, their absolute interconnexion, that in virtue of which the object is the subject’s own’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Mind’
[How the internal critique of perception in the Phenomenology is remoulded: There perception is defined as the awareness of individual things through their universal properties. By implication, though, the perceiving subject is aware of a thing only as the collection or amalgamation of its properties — as a mere also or medium. Yet if the perceiving subject insists that it is aware of the thing as something substantive underlying its properties, then the subject has relapsed into sense-certainty’s unsatisfactory view of the object as a bare this a simple singularity or one (Eins)].
Sensuous consciousness comes particularly close to this corporeal content, because the concepts through which it approaches that content are so impoverished hence this form of consciousness is designated sensuous consciousness because its concepts are so minimal, it gives the subject particularly great access to the content in question which recalls Hegel’s dictum in the Phenomenology that sense-certainty appears as the richest kind of knowledge even though it proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth albeit the Phenomenology starts at once with sense-certainty, which does not arise from any pre-existing soul, consequently, the subject of sense-certainty has no inherited corporeal content to access. In the Phenomenology, therefore, sense-certainty’s vaunted richness proves entirely illusory, whereas in the Philosophy of Mind Hegel does think that a certain rich corporeal content is available to sensuous consciousness.The problem with sensuous consciousness is that it does not permit the subject to differentiate between singular, external, beings and all items have exactly the same features: external, singular, being. The subject therefore cannot actually pick out one such item in contrast to any others, as soon as the subject identifies an item, that item merges into undifferentiation with all other supposedly distinct items. “The content of sensuous consciousness is supposed to be the singular; but just this makes it not a singular but all singularity.
‘The content of sensory consciousness is in its own self dialectical. The content is supposed to be the individual; but by this very fact it is not an individual but every individual, and just by excluding from itself the Other, the individual content relates to another, shows that it goes beyond itself, that it is dependent on another, is mediated by it and has another within itself. The proximate truth of the immediately individual is therefore its relatedness to another. The determinations of this relation are what are called determinations of reflection, and the consciousness apprehending these determinations is perception’.
- ‘The Philosophy of mind’
Charles Taylor contends that Hegel makes a similar case apropos of sense-certainty in the Phenomenology and here once more consciousness is attempting to know purely singular objects but Taylor claims a subject of knowledge must be able to say what it knows: sayability is a criterial property of knowing and the position of sense-certainty is that one can merely say ‘this’ and point to what one means by ‘this’. But Taylor claims if I am to point to anything, that thing must have a definite scope, and I therefore have to use general terms to approach it and the problem with Taylor’s reading is that he imports into Hegel the assumption that knowledge must be sayable. Hegel in the ‘Philosophy of Mind’ and the Phenomenology is merely arguing that knowledge must be able to pick out the object it claims to know. Robert Buford Pippin (1948-) reads Hegel as advancing this weaker argument in the Phenomenology.
Hegel’s re-interpretation of this deficiency arises from the way that sensuous consciousness has conceptualized matter in the first place and the subject has left itself no room to conceive material items as, for instance, qualified by properties, items for it are just simple singularities lacking differentiated content and the contradiction of sensuous consciousness is that the subject has defined singular material entities in such a narrow way that it cannot differentiate any of these putative entities from one another. This problem of sensuous consciousness reappears in very similar form at the commencement of the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ and at this point nature is entirely material. The first or immediate determination of nature is the abstract universality of its self-externality.
‘Nature is implicitly a living whole; more closely considered, the movement through its series of stages consists of the Idea positing itself as what it is implicitly, i.e. the Idea passes into itself by proceeding out of its immediacy and externality, which is death. It does this primarily in order to take on living being, but also in order to transcend this determinateness, in which it is merely life, and to bring itself forth into the existence of spirit, which constitutes the truth and ultimate purpose of nature, and the true actuality of the Idea’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Hegel describes this universal self-externality as consisting in a set of entities which differ from one another, possessing Außereinandersein (mutual externality) and Nebeneinander (juxtaposition) and further this universal self-externality is empirically described as space or spatial extension and upon examining more closely the material units which initially make up nature possess the same three basic properties as the singular beings of which the subject is sensuously conscious. First these units are external to thought in that they exist entirely independently of any conceptual dimension: they have immediate externality (Äußerlichkeit).
‘The primary or immediate determination of nature is the abstract universality of its self-externality, its unmediated indifference, i.e. space. It is on account of its being selfexternality, that space constitutes collaterality of a completely ideal nature; as this extrinsicality is still completely abstract, space is simply continuous, and is devoid of any determinate difference’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
And further these extended units just are: they are the abstract immediacy of being at the start of nature.
‘The idea, namely, in positing itself as the absolute unity of the pure concept and its reality and thus collecting itself in the immediacy of being, is in this form as totality — nature. –’
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Third, they are immediately singular they make up the sphere of singularisation (Vereinzelung).
‘The Idea, as nature, has: I. the determination of extrinsicality and of infinite individuation. Unity of form, as it is external to this, is of an ideal nature, and as it is simply implicit, is merely sought after. This constitutes matter and the ideal nature of the system of matter, i.e. mechanics. II. the determination of particularity , in which reality is posited with an immanent determinateness of form and its own existent differentiation. This is a relationship of reflection, the being-inself of which constitutes natural individuality, i.e. physics. III. the determination of subjectivity, in which the real differences of form are also brought back into a unity of an ideal nature, + which has found itself and has being for itself, i.e. organics’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
These units are singular in that they are entirely discrete, not unified or organized through any conceptual dimension and the units of externality have no individuating characteristics through which they can be separate or external to one another, they all share the same qualities of externality, being, and singularity and nature at this point is it turns out not partes extra partes but completely undifferentiated on account of its being self-externality space is juxtaposition of a wholly ideal sort, as this mutual externality is still completely abstract, space is simply continuous, and is devoid of any determinate difference on account of its lack of difference, space is merely the possibility, not the positedness of mutual externality and is therefore simply continuous.
‘The primary or immediate determination of nature is the abstract universality of its self-externality, its unmediated indifference, i.e. space. It is on account of its being self-externality, that space constitutes collaterality of a completely ideal nature; as this extrinsicality is still completely abstract, space is simply continuous, and is devoid of any determinate difference’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
The subject could identify no differences within the objects of its sensuous consciousness having defined them all as possessing the same three characteristics of singularity, externality, and being and likewise it proves impossible for nature in its original form to contain any internal differentiation, since all its parts possess the same three characteristics as well. Furthermore, in that nature as externality proves completely self-identical, Hegel claims that it is an abstract universality. As something universal, though, externality proves to be a form of thought and within the perspective of Hegelian metaphysics forms of thought exist objectively within the world as universal patterns or structures that organize the world and give it rational intelligibility. In its lack of differentiation, externality has proven to be a universal, intelligible, structure of just this sort and far from simply being entirely material, nature as it originally exists turns out to be entirely conceptual at the same time yet Hegel does not think that this satisfactorily ends the natural opposition of matter to thought on the contrary the fact that matter proves to be entirely conceptual at the same time means that matter is internally contradictory which is to say Space [that is, externality] is a contradiction, for the negation [that is, difference] within it disintegrates into indifferent subsistence.
‘Space is the immediate determinate being of quantity, in which everything remains subsistent, and even limit has the form of a subistence. This is its deficiency. Space is a contradiction, for the negation within it disintegrates into indifferent subsistence. As space is merely this inner negation of itself, its truth is the self-transcendence of its moments. It is precisely the existence of this perpetual self-transcendence which constitutes time. In time therefore the point has actuality. Through the generation of difference within it, space ceases to be mere indifference, and through all its changes, is no longer paralysed, but is for itself. This pure quantity, as: difference existing for itself, is that which is implicitly negative, i.e. time; it is the negation of the negation, or self-relating negation. Negation in space is negation relative to another; in space therefore the negative does not yet come into its own. In space the plane is certainly negation of the negation, but in its truth it is different from space. The truth of space is time, so that space becomes time; our transition to time is not subjective, space itself makes the transition. Space and time are generally taken to be poles apart: space is there, and then we also have time. Philosophy calls this ‘also’ in question’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Externality is defined by two antithetical characteristics for it is entirely conceptual just in its sheer materiality and what this means is that externality nature’s initial state is self-contradictory and unsatisfactory and from the unsatisfactory character of externality can be deduced the necessary emergence of a better natural form, which he calls negativity equating this negativity with empirical time for the truth of space is time, so that space becomes time. Negativity is divided into a plurality of units — empirical moments or nows.
‘Time, as the negative unity of self-externality, is also purely abstract and of an ideal nature. It is the being which, in that it is, is not, and in that it is not, is. It is intuited becoming; admittedly, its differences are therefore determined as being simply momentary; in that they immediately sublate themselves in their externality however, they are self-external’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
These units attempt to establish individual differentiation by negating all the other units as it were asserting their difference from those others and accordingly, each such unit or moment is a being which, in that it is, is not, and in that it is not, is and yet negative units still fail to differ genuinely from one another, they all share the same defining characteristic of negativity, and so prove identical to one another just like units of externality, time is as continuous as space is, for it is abstract negativity and in this abstraction there is still no real difference.
‘Time, like space, is a pure form of sensibility or intuition; it is the insensible factor in sensibility. Like space however, time does not involve the difference between objectivity and a distinct subjective consciousness. If these determinations were to be applied to space and time, the first would be abstract objectivity, and the second abstract subjectivity. Time is the same principle as the ego=ego of pure self-consciousness, but as time, this principle, or the simple Notion, is still completely external and abstract as mere intuited becoming; it is pure being-in-self, as a plain self-production. Time is as continuous as space is, for it is abstract negativity relating itself to itself, and in this abstraction there is as yet no difference of a real nature’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Negativity remains subject to the same difficulty that beset externality: it is simultaneously both entirely material (in that it is internally differentiated) and entirely conceptual (in that it is completely self-identical). Hegel’s reinterpretation of space and time contrasts with Kant’s view of them and unlike Kant Hegel sees space and time as objective features of the world, not merely forms of intuition. Hegel also considers space and time to be (in part) forms of thought or universals. Kant, on the other hand, thinks of space as a whole the constituent units of which are parts and not instances of a universal. The comparison between sensuous consciousness and nature’s first, entirely material, stage reveals that Hegel envisages both stages as afflicted by the same basic problem. Hegel’s earlier association of sense-certainty with space and time in the Phenomenology reinforces the connection between sensuous consciousness and nature’s first stage and in the Phenomenology Hegel defines the object of sense-certainty — the ‘this’ — as possessing the joint aspects of ‘here’ and ‘now’. Although in the ‘Philosophy of Mind’ he criticizes his earlier association of sense-certainty with space and time, he simultaneously continues, obscurely, to connect them.
Consciousness at this juncture identifies objects as entirely non-conceptual but it cannot coherently sustain this identification nor can nature coherently sustain an exclusively material mode of existence and the subject’s conception of pure, structureless, reality proves unsustainable because it does not permit the subject to differentiate between entities, similarly, nature’s entirely non-conceptual matter proves self-contradictory and unsustainable because it lacks any internal differentiation. Thus the first step is taken toward depicting how nature overcomes its original division of matter from thought by demonstrating that even when matter exists without any conceptual structure it proves fully conceptual at the same time and because this means that nature’s initial material form is internally contradictory it calls for the development of further natural forms to supersede the contradiction.
Perception/Bodies. The subject cannot sustain its belief in singular, external, entities unless it comes to regard those entities as having specifying properties that differentiate them and here the transition is made to the next stage of consciousness, perception (Wahrnehmung) and the account of conscious development here in the ‘Philosophy of Mind’ follows the earlier narrative in the Phenomenology in which sense-certainty is necessarily succeeded by perception which is conscious of individual items only insofar as they have universal properties and likewise in the ‘Philosophy of Mind’ the contention is forwarded that the perceiving subject forms a conception of differentiated entities only by conceptualizing them as distinguished by different properties and the subject henceforth conceptualizes every entity as a thing which has many properties.
‘The sensory as something becomes an other, the reflection of the something into itself, the thing, has many properties, and as an individual in its immediacy has various predicates. The multiple individual of sensoriness thus acquires breadth-a variery of relations, determinations of reflexion, and universalities. 1 -These are logical determinations posited by the thinker, i.e. here by the I. But for the I, as appearing, the object has undergone this change. 2 When the object is determined in this way sensory consciousness is perception’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Mind
In so conceiving of entities as things the subject retains its original conception of entities as singular and external. Hegel clarifies that the thing remains a singular, external, being, referring to it as that which “as a singular in its immediacy has multiple predicates but the subject now becomes capable of individuating those entities, by conceiving them as possessing distinguishing properties. The properties that the subject now conceptualizes as attached to things are universal: they are relations, determinations of reflection, and universalities hence Hegel states that perceiving consists in the conjunction of singular and universal the single things of sensuous apperception and the universality the multiple properties.
‘This connection of the individual and universal is a mixture, since the individual remains the being that lies at the foundation and remains firm in the face of the universal, to which it is nevertheless related. The connection is therefore a many-sided contradiction — in general berween the individual things of sensory apperception, which are supposed to constitute the foundation of universal experience, and the universality which is supposed rather to be the essence and the foundation,-between individuality, which constitutes independence, taken in its concrete content, and the various properties which are on the contrary free from this negative bond and from one another, and are independent universal matters (see §§ 1 23 ff.), and so on. This really comprises the contradiction of the finite running through all forms of the logical spheres, most concretely in so far as the something is determined as object (§§ 1 94 ff.).
- ‘The Philosophy of Mind’
Presumably the subject generates conceptions of these universal properties by reflecting on the given corporeal content which it is conceiving as external. If consciousness takes this content into account, by conceptualizing it as a range of universal properties, then this content can provide the basis for differentiating between singular entities. The perception raises issues for it simply mixes properties with singular entities. This conjunction of singular and universal is a mixture, because the singular remains the basic being and firmly opposed to the universal, to which, however, it is related. In some manner the subject regards the sheer singularity of each entity as more fundamental than its possession of properties believing that entities can persist in their singularity whether they possess properties or not albeit the subject postulated these properties precisely to confer on entities the individuation they lacked. The subject assigns properties to entities in response to the problem of their lack of differentiation but without explicitly realizing that without those properties the entities cannot endure and the subject therefore continues to uphold its outmoded belief in entities as bare singularities even as it also responds to the failure of this belief by affixing individuating properties to those entities. As a consequence the subject thinks of these properties erroneously as merely contingent to the things that possess them therefore a contradiction obtains between the subject’s explicit view that properties are inessential to things and its tacit presupposition that these properties are essential, a contradiction designated as the many-sided contradiction — between the single things and the universality.
There can be discerned a structurally parallel stage within the ‘Philosophy of Nature’, composed of the two phases of the ‘Mechanics’ which follow the domain of externality and negativity and these are called ‘Finite Mechanics’ and ‘Absolute Mechanics’. Within ‘Finite Mechanics’ there is described the emergence of a new natural form, the material body sometimes designated simply matter (Materie) and sometimes the body (Körper). Material bodies are not the same as matter in general, that is, the fundamental element that threads through all of nature. However, Hegel designates material bodies material because these bodies are the form that matter assumes when it maximally differentiates itself from thought: material bodies are the purest form of matter. Material bodies emerge in response to the difficulties facing externality and negativity, which remember were simultaneously wholly material and wholly conceptual.
Material bodies unlike negative moments succeed in achieving individuation by negating a differentiated quantity of the surrounding units of externality and this feature of material bodies is related to the empirical view that bodies are individuated in terms of their mass, matter has a quantitative difference, and is particularized into different quanta, — masses
‘Initially, in its mere universality and immediacy, matter has only a quantitative difference, and is particularized into different quanta or masses, which in the superficial determination of a whole or unit, are bodies. The body is also immediately distinguished from its ideality; it is however within space and time that it is essentially spatial and temporal, and it appears as their content, indifferent to this form. Addition. Matter fills space merely because it is exclusive in its beingfor-self, and so posits a real limit in space. Space as such lacks this exclusiveness. The determination of plurality necessarily accompanies being-for-self, but is as yet completely indeterminate difference, and not yet a difference implicit within matter itself; matters are mutually exclusive’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Mind’
Hegel relates his view of material bodies to that of Isaac Newton, (1642–1726/27), for whom material bodies possess impenetrability and mass. Hegel reinterprets these characteristics, respectively, as the body’s negativity and the quantity of material units that it negates. Hegel’s often hostile relationship to Newton is a matter of controversy and behind much of this controversy lurks the question of whether Hegel attempted to prove a priori that there can be only seven planets in his ‘Philosophical Dissertation on the Orbits of the Planets’ which he didn’t but I will get to that later. Whereas negative moments simply negated all other units and so remained ultimately identical, material bodies negate varying quantities of those other units and so achieve differentiation and Hegel designates these bodies material precisely because they retain individual identity and hence do not directly prove to be equally as conceptual as they are material.
‘Just as time is the simply formal soul of nature, and according to Newton, space is the sensorium of God, so motion is the Notion of the true soul of the world. We habitually regard it as a predicate or state, but it is in fact the self, the subject as subject, and the persistence, even of disappearance. It is precisely because of its immediate necessity to dissolve itself that it appears as predicate. Rectilinear motion is not motion in and for itself, but motion subordinated to another term, of which, in that it has become a predicate, or sublated, it is a moment. The re-establishment of the duration of the point in opposition to its motion, is the re-establishment of the immobility of place. This re-established place is not immediate, but the return from alteration, and is the result and ground of motion. In that it is dimension, and so opposed to the other moments, it is the centre. This return as line is the circular line; it is the now, before, and after, joining itself with itself; it is the indifference of these dimensions, in which the before is just as much an after as the after is a before. This is the first necessary paralysis of these dimensions posited in space. Circular motion is the spatial or subsistent unity of the dimensions of time. The point tends towards a place which is its future, and vacates one which is the past; but that which it has behind it, is at the same time that at which it will arrive; and it has already been at the after towards which it tends. Its goal is the point which is its past. The truth of time is that its goal is the past and not the future. The motion which relates itself to the centre is itself the plane, that is to say the motion which, in that it forms a synthetic whole, itself contains its moments or its dissolution in the centre, as well as the radii of the circle, which relate it to the dissolution. This plane itself moves however, and so becomes its otherness, an entirety of space, i.e. the motion returns into itself, and the immobile centre becomes a universal point, in which the whole sinks into quiescence. It is in fact the essence of motion which has here sublated the now, the past, and the future, or the different dimensions which constitute its Notion. In the circle these dimensions are precisely one, and constitute the re-established Notion of duration, or of motion extinguishing itself within itself This is posited mass, durability, that which has condensed itself through itself, and displays motion as its possibility’.
‘We have now reached the following position: Where there is motion, there is something which moves, and this durable something is matter. Space and time are filled with matter’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Material bodies are then analysed into two aspects, first, they exist as discrete, individual, items, and in this respect each is a singularity which is for itself.
‘The transition from ideality to reality, from abstraction to concrete existence, in this case from space and time to the reality which makes its appearance as matter, is incomprehensible to the understanding, for which it therefore always remains as something externally presented. Space and time are usually imagined as being empty and indifferent to that which fills them, and yet as always to be regarded as full. They are thought to be empty until they have been filled with matter from without. On the one hand material things are therefore taken to be indifferent to space and time, and yet at the same time they are accepted as essentially spatial and temporal’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
And is a body strictly speaking: masses, as a whole or unit, are bodies.
‘Initially, in its mere universality and immediacy, matter has only a quantitative difference, and is particularized into different quanta or masses, which in the superficial determination of a whole or unit, are bodies. The body is also immediately distinguished from its ideality; it is however within space and time that it is essentially spatial and temporal, and it appears as their content, indifferent to this form. Addition. Matter fills space merely because it is exclusive in its beingfor-self, and so posits a real limit in space. Space as such lacks this exclusiveness. The determination of plurality necessarily accompanies being-for-self, but is as yet completely indeterminate difference, and not yet a difference implicit within matter itself; matters are mutually exclusive’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Mind’
Second, each body’s quantity of units (empirically, its mass) constitutes its specifying particularity and plainly enough bodies are structurally similar to the things conceived by the conscious subject while the material parts that pick out each body are structurally similar to the properties that the conscious subject assigns to things. Differentiating units perform the same individuating function for bodies in nature that differentiating properties perform for things in consciousness. Again, however, Hegel regards material bodies are defective in merely combining corporeal singularity with differentiating units just as perception generated a mere “mixture” of things and properties. Each body remains external to its mass which is to say in the first sphere the determinations [the quantitative units] are still distinguished from the substance, substance as such is still shut up within itself and unmanifest.
‘The determinations of the Notion now take on materiality; the being-for-self of matter finds its point of unity, and as it is therefore the being-for-self of being-for-self, and the transition of the determinations, the disappearance of these determinations into one another has itself disappeared, and we enter logically into the sphere of essence. This is a return into self in its other; its determinations appear within each other, and intro-reflected in this way, now develop as forms. These forms are identity, variety, opposition, and ground. This is therefore an advance upon the primary immediacy of matter, in which space and time, motion and matter, passed over into one another, until in free mechanics matter finally appropriated the determinations as its own, and so revealed itself as self-mediated and determined. Impact is no longer external to matter, which is now differentiated as internal and immanent impact. It differentiates and determines itself by itself, and is intro-reflected. Its determinations are material, and express the nature of being material, and as it only consists of these determinations, it manifests itself within them. There are material qualities which belong to the substance of matter, and matter is whatever it is only through its qualities. In the first sphere the determinations are still distinguished from the substance, they are not material determinations; substance as such is still shut up within itself and unmanifest; and it was this which resulted in its merely seeking for its unity’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
In mechanics, being-for-self is still not an individual stable unity having the power to subordinate plurality to itself matter does not yet possess the individuality which preserves its determinations, and the determinations of the concept in it are still external to one another. Bodies fail to manifest themselves in their parts meaning the various units of externality have now come to exist as properties of bodies so that their possession by those bodies is essential to what they are and hence these units ought to have a character such that they manifest or express their essential status as properties of bodies yet, instead, these units continue to exist as bare material units, with exactly the same character they had prior to the emergence of bodies and these units thereby fail to express that they are essentially properties.
Which is a problem in virtue of the units of matter lacking the character appropriate to their status as properties, they do not fully exist as properties after all and material units remain only incompletely, or ambiguously, the properties of bodies yet because those bodies attain individuation only by possessing properties their individuation remains incomplete or ambiguous in turn and insofar as their specifying units do not fully belong to them bodies cannot be fully individuated either. This problem besetting material bodies parallels the problem of perception, perceptive consciousness allocates properties to things but does not explicitly conceive of those things as existing only through their possession of properties and for their part, bodies individuate themselves by seizing hold of units, but still do not fully possess these units, since the units themselves do not yet fully exist as properties, just as consciousness fails to grasp things as entirely dependent upon their properties, so bodies objectively fail to possess their properties fully.
Material bodies must manifest their imperfect level of individuation by colliding and co-constituting a single body and this process of fusion is equated with empirical attraction, the singularised entities are all merely units [Eins], many units [Eins]; they are one [eins]. The unit only repels itself from itself; that is the sublation of the separation of the beings which are for themselves, or attraction.
‘Matter is spatial separation. By offering resistance it repels itself from itself, and so constitutes repulsion, through which it posits its reality and fills space. The singularities, which are repelled from another, all merely constitute a unit of many units; they are identical with each other. The unit only repels itself from itself, and it is this which constitutes the sublation of the separation of being-for-self, or attraction. Together, attraction and repulsion constitute gravity, which is the Notion of matter. Gravity is the predicate of matter, which constitutes the substance of this subject. Its unity is a mere should, a yearning; this is the most afflicted of efforts, and matter is damned to it eternally, for the unity does not fulfil itself, and is never reached. If matter reached what it aspires to in gravity, it would fuse together into a single point. It is because repulsion is as essential a moment as attraction, that unity is not attained here. This subdued, crepuscular unity does not become free; yet since matter has as its determination the positing of the many within a unit, it is not so thick as those would-be philosophers who separate the one from the many, and are therefore refuted by matter. Although the two unities of repulsion and attraction are the inseparable moments of gravity, they do not unite themselves in a single unity of an ideal nature. As we shall see later, this unity reaches the first being-for-self of its existence in light. Matter searches for a place outside the many, and since there is no difference between the factors which do this, there is no reason for regarding one as nearer than the other. They are at the same distance on the periphery, and the point sought is the centre; this extends to all dimensions, so that the next determination we reach is the sphere. Gravity is not the dead externality of matter, but a mode of its inwardness. At this juncture, this inwardness has no place here however, for matter, as the Notion of that which is Notionless, is still lacking in inwardness. The second sphere which we now have to consider is therefore finite mechanics, in which matter is not yet adequate to its Notion. This finitude of matter is the differentiated being of motion and of matter as such; matter is therefore finite in so far as the motion which is its life, is external to it. Either the body is at rest, or motion is imparted to it from without. This is the primary difference within matter as such, which is subsequently sublated through its nature, or gravity. Here therefore we have the three determinations of finite mechanics: firstly inert matter, secondly impact, and thirdly fall; this constitutes the transition to absolute mechanics, in which the existence of matter is also adequate to its Notion. Gravity does not occur within matter in a merely implicit manner, but in so far as the implicitness already makes its appearance; in that it does this it constitutes fall, which is therefore the first occurrence of gravity’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Yet the attractive unity cannot persist without differences to absorb, so bodies differentiate themselves again in a complementary process, equated with empirical repulsion and we can conclude that bodies are necessarily subject to tendencies both to fuse and to divide and this dual subjection is identified with empirical gravity (die Schwere) and in philosophical terms, gravity means that material bodies move to unite but without ever actually coinciding, reflecting their inability either to fully individuate themselves or to finally converge. On the one hand, gravity is the acknowledgement of the nullity of the self-externality of matter, its lack of independence, its contradiction. On the other hand, the gravitational unity is a mere ought [Sollen], a yearning never reached. As he says elsewhere:
‘[G]ravity is the substance of matter … Matter possesses gravity in so far as it drives towards a middle point; it is essentially composite, … it seeks its unity and therefore seeks to sublate itself, it seeks its opposite. If it were to reach this, it would no longer be matter, but would have ceased to exist as such; it strives for ideality [Idealität], for in its unity it is ideal’.
- ‘Lectures on the Philosophy of World History’
Such a philosophical re-description of gravity permits Hegel in addition to re-describe the solar system, as he does in the ‘Absolute Mechanics’. Schematically, he re-describes the sun as the central point of identity toward which bodies are drawn and from which they are simultaneously repelled. He now identifies these bodies with the planets as they circle around the sun: held apart from it, yet straining to fuse into it.
‘Universal gravitation must be recognized as a profound thought in its own right. It has already attracted attention and inspired confidence, particularly through the quantitative determination bound up within it, and its verification has been pursued from the experience of the solar system down to that of the phenomenon of the miniature capillary tube. When it is seized upon in this way in the sphere of reflection however, it has a merely general abstract significance, which in its more concrete form is merely gravity in the quantitative determination of fall, and it therefore lacks the significance of the Idea developed into its reality, which is given to it in this paragraph. Gravitation is the immediate contradiction of the law of inertia, and it is because of this that matter strives out of itself towards another. As has already been shown, the Notion of gravity contains not only the moments of being-for-self, but also that of the continuity which sublates being-for-self. These moments of the Notion suffer the fate of being grasped as distinct forces corresponding to the forces of attraction and repulsion. They are defined more closely as the centripetal and centrifugal forces which, being mutually independent and brought to bear upon one another contingently in the body as a third element, are supposed to work upon bodies as gravity does. Whatever profundity there might be in the s thought of universal gravity is annulled by this, and as long as this vaunted purveying of forces prevails, the Notion and reason can never penetrate into the science of absolute motion. In the syllogism which contains the Idea of gravity, this Idea is the Notion disclosing itself in external reality in the particularity of bodies, and at the same time, in the ideality and intro-reflection of these bodies, displaying its integration into itself in motion. This contains the rational identity and inseparability of the moments which are otherwise taken to be independent. In general, motion as such only has significance and existence where there is a system of several bodies, which are variously determined, and so stand in a certain relationship to one another. The closer determination of this syllogism of totality, which is in itself a system of three syllogisms, is given in the Notion of objectivity (see § 198)’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Significantly for the overall trajectory of the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ bodies gain individuation by taking on specific quantities of parts thereby becoming material in a more full-blooded way than external units or bits of negativity and material bodies strive to exist as something purely discrete and singular, not organized into any conceptual unity yet even these apparently robustly material entities cannot entirely distinguish themselves from one another, and their partial identity with one another is exhibited in their propensity to fuse. Insofar as they remain partly identical with one another, however, bodies continue, after all, to exist as a conceptual unity that is, as a form of thought. Gravitating bodies are expressing their ideality and that the centre for which they strive should not be thought of as material [materiell].
‘Matter is spatial separation. By offering resistance it repels itself from itself, and so constitutes repulsion, through which it posits its reality and fills space. The singularities, which are repelled from another, all merely constitute a unit of many units; they are identical with each other. The unit only repels itself from itself, and it is this which constitutes the sublation of the separation of being-for-self, or attraction. Together, attraction and repulsion constitute gravity, which is the Notion of matter. Gravity is the predicate of matter, which constitutes the substance of this subject. Its unity is a mere should, a yearning; this is the most afflicted of efforts, and matter is damned to it eternally, for the unity does not fulfil itself, and is never reached. If matter reached what it aspires to in gravity, it would fuse together into a single point. It is because repulsion is as essential a moment as attraction, that unity is not attained here’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
By straining to unite bodies are expressing the fact that they are partly identical and that in this respect they comprise an abstract universal hence bodies remain partly material and partly conceptual and the theory of material bodies continues its task of depicting how nature overcomes its primal division by restaging in a more complicated context the earlier argument that purely material entities cannot really be exclusively material after all.
Dedicated to my lovely One, a birthday present to Kira Fulks 28th May 2023. Happy birthday babe! 🥳 🙌 🎂 🍰 🎈🎉 🎁
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Happy, happy birthday in a hot bath
To those nice, nice nights
I remember always, always I got such a fright
Seeing them in my dark cupboard with my great big cake
If they were me, if they were me
And I was you and I was you -
If they were me, if they were me
And I was you and I was you -
If they were me and I was you
Would you have liked a present too?
Happy, happy birthday in a hot bath
To those nice, nice nights
I remember always, always I got such a fright
Seeing them in my dark cupboard with my great big cake
If they were me, if they were me
And I was you and I was you -
If they were me, if they were me
And I was you and I was you -
If they were me and I was you
Would you have liked a present too?
Happy birthday
Happy birthday
Happy birthday
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Altered Images, ‘Happy Birthday’
Coming up next:
The Physical and the Understanding:
To be continued ….
