On Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ : A Free Reflex of Spirit — part fourteen.
‘My soul feels absolutely’
by Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi, aka Pietro Metastasio, (1698–1782)
My soul feels absolutely
delirious with joy,
and it seems that
my breath is apt to fail me,
for my heart leaps up and down,
yea, even out of my breast.
How much easier it is
for the greatest delight
to strike one dead
than the greatest suffering!
‘Par che di giubilo’
Par che di giubilo
L’alma deliri:
Par che mi manchino
Quasi i respiri;
Che fuor del petto
Mi balzi il cor.
Quanto è più facile
Che un gran diletto
Giunga ad uccidere
Che un gran dolor!
I understand the poet. He put me in mind of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s, (1821–1881), ‘A Faint Heart’, 1848. The story concerns two young men, devoted friends, Vasya Shumkov and Arkady Ivanovich Nefedevich, Vasya falls in love with a beautiful young woman who adores him, but the vision he has of universal happiness is just too much for him and he goes mad and dies and a distraught Arkady is left to wonder about what happened there:
‘When office hours were over, he went to the Artemyevs’. There is no need to describe what happened there! Even Petya, little Petya, though he could not quite understand what had happened to dear Vasya, went into a corner, hid his face in his little hands, and sobbed in the fullness of his childish heart. It was quite dusk when Arkady returned home. When he reached the Neva he stood still for a minute and turned a keen glance up the river into the smoky frozen thickness of the distance, which was suddenly flushed crimson with the last purple and blood-red glow of sunset, still smouldering on the misty horizon…. Night lay over the city, and the wide plain of the Neva, swollen with frozen snow, was shining in the last gleams of the sun with myriads of sparks of gleaming hoar frost. There was a frost of twenty degrees. A cloud of frozen steam hung about the overdriven horses and the hurrying people. The condensed atmosphere quivered at the slightest sound, and from all the roofs on both sides of the river, columns of smoke rose up like giants and floated across the cold sky, intertwining and untwining as they went, so that it seemed new buildings were rising up above the old, a new town was taking shape in the air…. It seemed as if all that world, with all its inhabitants, strong and weak, with all their habitations, the refuges of the poor, or the gilded palaces for the comfort of the powerful of this world was at that twilight hour like a fantastic vision of fairy-land, like a dream which in its turn would vanish and pass away like vapour into the dark blue sky. A strange thought came to poor Vasya’s forlorn friend. He started, and his heart seemed at that instant flooded with a hot rush of blood kindled by a powerful, overwhelming sensation he had never known before. He seemed only now to understand all the trouble, and to know why his poor Vasya had gone out of his mind, unable to bear his happiness. His lips twitched, his eyes lighted up, he turned pale, and as it were had a clear vision into something new’.
- ‘A Faint Heart’
An experience of a kind that James Joyce, (1882–1941), would later call an epiphany.
Anyway, back to business. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831). ‘The Philosophy of Nature’.
Teleology and Modern Science. In proposing to explain natural developments in terms of reasons is not so much bringing back to life the traditional teleological notion of natural forms being purposive as opposed to the contemporary scientific view that such forms are inherently inert therefore in need of explanation through external causes. A distinction is to be made between external from internal types of teleological explanation. External teleology was brought to the fore in the eighteenth century in particular by Christian Wolff, (1679–1754), a form of teleology to explain the character and behaviour of an entity by the fact that it serves the purposes of some other entity as when for instance the fact that sheep grow wool is explained by the fact that this suits the purposes of human beings or God if such a perfect being can have purposes.
‘The teleological interpretation. which was formerly so popular. was certainly based on the relation to spirit; it limited itself to external functionalism however. and so confined the significance of spirit to finite and natural purposes: it has become discredited as a way of indicating the wisdom of God on account of the triviality of the finite purposes cited as evidence of the usefulness of natural objects. The notion of purpose is not merely external to nature. as it is when I say that sheep bear wool only in order that I may clothe myself. Silly remarks of this kind are often made. as for example in the Xenia. where the wisdom of God is admired because He causes cork trees to grow that we might have bottle stoppers. herbs that we might cure disordered stomachs, and cinnabar that we might make ourselves up. To see purpose as inherent within natural objects. is to grasp nature in its simple determinateness. e.g. the seed of a plant. which contains the real potential of everything pertaining to the tree. and which as purposeful activity is therefore orientated solely towards self-preservation. Aristotle had already noticed this notion of purpose in nature. and he called the activity the nature of a thing. This is the true teleological view. for it regards nature in its proper animation as free. and is therefore the highest view of nature’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Hegel rejects external in preference for internal teleology whereby a thing has its characteristics and behaviour in virtue of these serving its own purpose or purposes which constitute or constitutes its essential nature and each natural form is defined by a certain intrinsic purpose or developmental matters on the table so to speak and that organizes its behaviour, for instance seeds have the purpose of becoming trees which is realized in their spontaneous development and growth and such a conception is the true teleological view derives from Aristotle, (384–322 BC). Hegel being rather supportive of Aristotelian internal teleology one might suppose that the originality of the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ rests in its endeavour to synthesize Aristotelian teleology with contemporary scientific theory, so for example Alfredo Ferrarin has contended that Hegel thought that principles of mechanical explanation apply only within the inanimate sphere and need to be supplemented by Aristotelian principles of teleology appropriate to organisms and species and yet in light of the metaphysics underlying Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ the principles of mechanical explanation referring exclusively to efficient causes have no ultimately applicability in any sphere of nature, natural forms are intrinsically rational and if this is a teleological view then a teleological explanation is extended to the natural world in its entirety it does not simply slice out a limited terrain within nature which is impervious to mechanical principles.
In any case, Hegel’s view that natural forms are intrinsically rational is best seen not as a straightforward breathing some life back into Aristotelian teleology but rather as a far-reaching reformulation of it, for natural forms act from reasons and so carry out developmental plans and yet these plans are ones that natural forms opt for upon the basis of their rationality and the plans are not merely given to forms in virtue of defining their essential natures. Natural forms give themselves the agendas governing their own ongoing development rather than being governed by these agendas as something built into them at their origin and so Aristotelian teleology may e reformulated in a somewhat Kantian way by contending that natural forms set up their own plans for self-transformation upon the basis of their inherent rationality, this is a qualified teleological view of natural forms in that such forms develop in line with plans for action which they select from rational principles and this metaphysics of nature is quite modern in resituating the ancient belief in developmental purposes within a theory upon which natural forms operate according to their intrinsic and procedurally defined rationality and hence the contrast between Hegel’s metaphysical conception of nature and that of empirical science is not to be seen as a direct contrast between a teleological and a mechanistic view for such contrast as there is is simply a consequence of a more fundamental disagreement as to whether natural forms are intrinsically rational or are bare things and it is in terms of this disagreement that the difference between Hegelian and scientific conceptions of nature have to be fundamentally understood.
Hegel’s account of the implicit metaphysics of science is certainly plausible for science can be demonstrated as partaking in a uniform set of metaphysical presuppositions albeit the empirical character of scientific enquiry renders it completely open-ended in content consisting simply of a loose plurality of hypotheses and theories subject to continual change and revision in response to observational findings yet diverse scientific theories and hypotheses all continue to be framed against the backdrop of a common metaphysics. Scientists may for example identify different laws in response to varied experiments but they always conceive these laws in the same way as acting externally upon universals that lack any inherent reason to develop, and further scientists of necessity share this metaphysical conception of natural forms and entities as bare things for without this conception scientists would lack any rationale for conducting their distinctive form of empirical enquiry into explanatory laws and the metaphysical assumption that natural forms are bare things coordinates and harmonizes the scientific enterprise as a whole regardless of the diversity of its hypotheses and theories.
Hegel through foregrounding the overarching metaphysics of science anticipates (is there a philosopher or philosophy he does not anticipate?) later continental philosophical approaches to modern science most notably that of Martin Heidegger, (1889–1976), who maintains that all scientific discoveries and practical procedures of measurement and experimentation presuppose a prior understanding of nature that is specific to modern science and this understanding is not abstracted from observation and experiment but regulates in advance what can be observed and how experiments are set up. Heidegger calls modern, post-Newtonian, science mathematical insofar as it proceeds from this prior understanding of nature which he calls a ground-plan (Grundriß) or projection (Entwurf). (But see my article On Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’: A Free Reflex of Spirit, part twelve).
Hence Heidegger employs the word mathematical in an unusual sense to mean projective, establishing templates, prior to experience, for what can be known, and according to this projection natural things are points of mass that move in a uniform linear way within a uniform spatio-temporal framework. ‘This fundamental design of nature … circumscribes its realm as everywhere uniform. And given this projection experimental scientific practice must centre upon numerical measurement through which portions of nature’s uniformity can be quantified and distinguished. Heidegger denies that any of the upheavals or revolutions that have affected modern science since its inception has altered either its mathematically projective character or the essential content of its projection for after all, as Edmund Husserl, (1859–1938), points out, in the ‘Crisis of the European Sciences’: ‘Physics, whether represented by a Newton or a Planck or an Einstein … was always and remains exact science’. That is to say, in Heideggerian terms, modern science remains across all its revolutionary transformations a projective form of enquiry that conceives nature as homogenous and thereby enables mathematically precise measurements and predictions, and although Hegel shares Heidegger’s view that modern science operates from a fundamental projection or in his terms a metaphysical conception of nature these two philosophers differ on the precise content of this conception, for whereas Hegel regards science as conceiving natural forms and entities merely as bare things Heidegger attributes to science a rather more complex understanding of nature as a homogenous grid incorporating uniformly moving points of mass. Which account to go for? Well Heidegger’s account seemingly captures more of the complexity and the distinctively mathematical orientation of post-Newtonian science but Hegel’s account captures the most important issue here namely that the conception of natural forms and entities as bare things persists in being a central and defining element of science’s basic projection as Heidegger describes it and Heidegger emphasises that this projection includes a new specially modern conception of motion.
And yet of course scientists themselves (and remember that being an expert in a particular field does not necessarily mean that you are good at philosophising about it) are prone to think science is one thing, an objective search for truth based upon observation and experiment, while metaphysics is another, abstract thinking with little grounding in reality. Let us make one thing absolutely clear, Hegel never said, although according to the internet he did, when told that his theory contradicts the facts, so much the worse for the facts! Or rather, I cannot say he never said it, I have no idea what he said in his private conversations but there is no record of him saying it.
‘After Leibniz, a philosopher was a guy too damn lazy to work in a laboratory’, said the poet Ezra Pound, (1885–1972). And exo-biologist (now there’s a job I would rather like to have, studying life on other planets), Carl Sagan, (1934–1996), wrote this:
‘In the 1920s, there was a dinner at which the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to a toast … ‘To physics and metaphysics’. Now by metaphysics was meant something like philosophy — truths that you could get to just by thinking about them. Wood took a second, glanced about him, and answered along these lines: The physicist has an idea, he said. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it makes to him. He goes to the scientific literature, and the more he reads, the more promising the idea seems. Thus prepared, he devises an experiment to test the idea. The experiment is painstaking. Many possibilities are eliminated or taken into account; the accuracy of the measurement is refined. At the end of all this work, the experiment is completed and … the idea is shown to be worthless. The physicist then discards the idea, frees his mind (as I was saying a moment ago) from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else. The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded, is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory’.
- ‘Wonder and Skepticism’
Philosophy, truths you can get to just by thinking about them he says. Is Sagan totally unaware of the notion of dialectic then? Anyway, enough of that, to continue:
‘Motions themselves are not [any longer] determined according to different natures, capacities, and forces, or the elements of the body, but, in reverse, the essence of force is determined by the fundamental law of motion: every body, left to itself, moves uniformly in a straight line’. So said Heidegger, although my motions are usually determined by how much fibre I have been eating. A central tenet of the scientific projection is that natural things contain no inherent principles propelling them to change and as a consequence their changes has to be explained in terms of external laws and regardless of whether Hegel’s characterization of science’s metaphysics as a metaphysics of bare things not capturing all its complexity his characterization does succeed in capturing one crucial and enduring component of the metaphysics of modern science and the metaphysics of nature can e demarcated from that of science by his rejection of the idea that natural forms are bare things and by his endorsement of the alternative view that those forms are agents initiating their own developments according to the rationality that is inherent within them.
Science, a priori reasoning, and the rationality of nature. Hegel’s rationalist metaphysics of nature thus differs significantly from the scientific metaphysics of nature as a realm of mere things such a distinction bearing upon his robust a priori methodology in particular the practice of re-describing and incorporating scientific descriptions into his basic theory of nature and hence we can see that his metaphysics of nature is more adequate than that of empirical science and directs the manner by which scientific descriptions are re-described, which is to say, by translating them into more metaphysically adequate terms. There is the requirement for such a rationalist view of nature to construct the basic theory of nature through a priori reasoning and taking it that natural forms actually develop in accordance with rational requirements a priori reasoning is uniquely equipped to produce a theory of the activities of these forms which faithfully replicates their real development.
In thinking about nature a priori the philosopher diagnoses the contradiction within each form and then makes the necessary conceptual transition to the thought of whatever resolves this contradiction at the same time the form in question will in the capacity of being rational be advancing in exactly the same way hence the overall theory of nature generated through pure reason will reproduce the actual course of natural development. This is explained generally in the ‘Science of Logic’. See my articles On Hegel’s ‘Science of Logic’: A Realm of Shadows, parts one to sixty. Thinking and its determinations are not something alien to the object but rather are its essence or things and the thinking of them agree in and for themselves, thinking in its immanent determinations and the true nature of things forming one and the same content.
‘The older metaphysics had in this respect a higher concept of thinking than now passes as the accepted opinion. For it presupposed as its principle that only what is known of things and in things by thought is really true in them, that is, what is known in them not in their immediacy but as first elevated to the form of thinking, as things of thought. This metaphysics thus held that thinking and the determination of thinking are not something alien to the subject matters, but are rather their essence, or that the things and the thinking of them agree in and for themselves (also our language expresses a kinship between them); that thinking in its immanent determinations, and the true nature of things, are one and the same content’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Our thinking renders nature’s universality present for us or overgrasps the thinking embedded in it.
‘Just as thinking constitutes the substance of external things, so it is also the universal substance of what is spiritual. In all human intuiting there is thinking; similarly, thinking is what is universal in all representations, recollections, and in every spiritual activity whatsoever, in all willing, wishing, etc. These are all of them just further specifications of thinking. When thinking is interpreted in this way, it appears in quite a different light than when we simply say that, along with and beside other faculties such as intuiting, representing, willing, and the like, we have a faculty of thinking. If we regard thinking as what is genuinely universal in everything natural and everything spiritual, too, then it overgrasps all of them and is the foundation of them all. As the next step, we can add to this interpretation of thinking in its objective meaning (as nous) [our account of) what thinking is in its subjective sense. First of all, we say that man thinks, but, at the same time, we say too that he intuits, wills, etc. Man thinks and is something universal, but he thinks only insofar as the universal is [present) for him. The animal is also in-itself something universal, but the universal as such is not [present) for it; instead only the singular is ever [there) for it. The animal sees something singular, for instance, its food, a man, etc. But all these are only something singular for it. In the same way our sense experience always has to do only with something singular (this pain, this pleasant taste, etc. ) . Nature does not bring the nous to consciousness for itself; only man reduplicates himself in such a way that he is the universal that is [present) for the universal. This is the case for the first time when man knows himself to be an ‘I’. When I say ‘I’, I mean myself as this Singular, quite determinate person. But when I say ‘I’, I do not in fact express anything particular about myself. Anyone else is also ‘I’, and although in calling myself ‘I’, I certainly mean me, this single [person), what I say is still something completely universal’.
- ‘The Encyclopaedia Logic’
Thus, the rationalist view of nature implies that a priori reasoning is the uniquely appropriate method for constructing a basic theory of nature. Strong a priorism, then, is required and justified by Hegel’s rationalist conception of nature. However, essential to strong a priorism is its assessment of how far natural forms that have been philosophically derived can be interpreted as identical to forms described by science. Ultimately, here, the philosopher is assessing how far forms that have been philosophically described in terms of their intrinsic rationality can be interpreted as identical to forms that empirical scientists have described as bare things. The philosopher must ascertain when scientific and philosophical descriptions refer to the same items underneath their metaphysical differences. This formulation, though, misleadingly implies that scientific and philosophical descriptions provide equally partial perspectives upon items whose intrinsic nature exceeds the grasp of either perspective. This is not Hegel’s position: he maintains that the philosophical perspective generates better characterizations of natural forms. The philosophical manner of presentation is not arbitrary, it does not stand on its head for a while because it has got tired of using its legs the way of physics is not adequate to theconcept [den Begriff nicht befriedigt], and for that reason we must go further.
‘The material prepared out of experience by physics, is taken by the philosophy of nature at the point to which physics has brought it, and reconstituted without any further reference to experience as the basis of verification. Physics must therefore work together with philosophy so that the universalized understanding which it provides may be translated into the Notion by showing how this universal, as an intrinsically necessary whole, proceeds out of the Notion. The philosophic manner of presentation is not arbitrary, it does not stand on its head for a while because it has got tired of using its legs, nor does it paint up its every-day face just for a change; the ways of physics are not adequate to the Notion, and for that reason advances have to be made’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
The metaphysical categories employed in empirical science are inadequate (Das Ungenügende) and so have to be replaced with the categories proper to philosophy and a reference to categories does not imply that we must simply change how we think about nature (non-metaphysically) or to re-describe nature’s real structure for we are all metaphysical thinkers whether we realise it or not ut here we have systematic metaphysical thinking and the phrase philosophical categories is best understood as referring to the metaphysical conceptions of nature that will inform our descriptions of it, conceptions that centre upon the idea of nature’s intrinsic rationality.
‘The philosophy of nature distinguishes itself from physics on account of the metaphysical procedure it employs, for metaphysics is nothing but the range of universal thought-determinations, and is as it were the diamond-net into which we bring everything in order to make it intelligible. Every cultured consciousness has its metaphysics, its instinctive way of thinking. This is the absolute power within us, and we shall only master it if we make it the object of our knowledge. Philosophy in general, as philosophy, has different categories from those of ordinary consciousness. All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner. The inadequacy of the thought determinations used in physics may be traced to two very closely connected points. (a) The universal of physics is abstract or simply formal; its determination is not immanent within it, and does not pass over into particularity. (b) This is precisely the reason why its determinate content is external to the universal, and is therefore split up, dismembered, particularized, separated and lacking in any necessary connection within itself; why it is in fact merely finite. Take a flower for example. The understanding can note its particular qualities, and chemistry can break it down and analyse it. Its colour, the shape of its leaves, citric acid, volatile oil, carbon, hydrogen etc., can be distinguished; and we then say that the flower is made up of all these parts.
Encheiresin naturæ chemistry calls it,
Mocks itself, knows not what befalls it,
Holds the parts within its hand,
But lacks, alas, the spiritual band,
as Goethe says. Spirit cannot be confined to this procedure of the reflective understanding. There are two possible ways out. (a) When nature is viewed by an alive and open mind, as it is in the apt and effectual manner we find so often in Goethe, this mind feels the life and the universal relatedness within nature; it has a presentiment of the universe as an organic whole, a rational totality, just as it experiences an inner unity with itself through the living individual. We can assemble all the separate constituents of the flower, but this will not make the flower. Intuition has therefore been reinstated in the philosophy of nature, and set above reflection, but this gets us nowhere, because one cannot philosophize on the basis of intuition. (b) Intuition has to be submitted to thought, so that what has been dismembered may be restored to simple universality through thought. This contemplated unity is the Notion, which contains the determinate differences simply as an immanent and self-moving unity. Philosophic universality is not indifferent to the determinations; it is the self-fulfilling universality, the diamantine identity, which at the same time holds difference within itself’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Philosophical categories or more exactly the conception of nature as intrinsically rational can engender true descriptions of nature’s component forms whereas empirical science can merely generate descriptions of them which imperfectly capture their real character inadequately approximating to the accuracy of philosophical accounts and lest one thinks we can disagree with the metaphysics of science without disputing the truth of any particular scientific claims remember that the metaphysics thoroughly informs and infiltrates those particular claims and disagreement with the metaphysics puts us under an obligation to judge particular scientific claims inadequate in addition.
Fragments from ‘Faust’
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749–22 March 1832)
I.
MEPHISTOPHELES ON LOGIC (PART I.)
Meph.
Be careful of your time, so swiftly flies it,
But Order teaches how to utilise it.
And first, by my advice, dear friend,
Collegium logicum attend.
For there your mind is drilled and graced,
In Spanish boots ’tis tightly laced,
That now, with warier step, it may
Go plodding on in Thought’s highway,
And not, mayhap, with zigzag light,
Go will-o’-the-wisping left and right,
And there they’ll teach you, many a day,
That what you once did free and gay,
At one stroke, easy as eating and drinking,
Needs One! Two! Three! — the right way of thinking.
In the manufactory of Thought,
Like a weaver’s masterpiece ’tis wrought,
Where one jerk moves a thousand threads,
The shuttles go shooting over and under,
The threads flow unseen, entwined and asunder,
One stroke a thousand filaments weds.
Then the Philosopher, in comes he,
And clearly proves, so must it be;
The First was so, the Second so,
Therefore the Third and Fourth were so;
And had the First and Second not been,
The Third and Fourth you ne’er had seen.
The students on all sides call him clever,
But not a student becomes a weaver.
To know and describe a living whole
One first of all drives out the soul,
Handles the parts and loses none,
Save, alas! the soul that made them one.
Encheiresin naturæ, Chemistry calls it,
Mocks itself, and knows not what befalls it.
Student.
I don’t seem quite to comprehend.
Meph.
‘Twill all go better soon, my friend,
When you can qualify and quantify,
And properly can classify.
Student.
I feel so stupid after all you’ve said,
As though a mill-wheel went round in my head.
II.
THE BACCALAUREUS. (PART II.)
I TELL you this is Youth’s supreme vocation!
Before me was no World — ’tis my creation:
’Twas I who raised the Sun from out the sea;
The Moon began her changeful course with me;
Day decked herself in dazzling robes to meet me;
Earth budded forth with leaves and flowers to greet me;
I gave the signal on that primal night
When all the host of heaven burst forth in light.
Who but myself saves man from the dominion
Of dogmas cramping, crushing, Philistinian?
So, free and gay, my spirit’s voice I heed,
And follow where the inner light may lead,
Still hasting onward with a gladsome mind,
The Bright before me, and the Dark behind.
Natural forms are really as philosophy describes them and they only partially resemble the pictures of them painted by empirical science that are distorted by their reliance upon an inadequate metaphysics that takes natural forms for mere things, and to the extent with which scientific materials are incorporated into the overall vision of nature the goal is to ascertain how far the features that scientists have ascribed to natural forms can be re-described within the framework of a rationalist metaphysics so that those forms will prove identical to the ones derived within the own theory thereby translating scientific accounts into the terms of rationalist metaphysics and where fitting to reformulate scientific accounts so that they can be so translated and so physics must work into the hands of philosophy so that philosophy can translate [übersetze] the universalised understanding which it provides into the concept.
‘In order to determine what the philosophy of nature is, it is convenient that we should separate it from that which determines it; for all determining requires two terms. In the first place we find it standing in a peculiar relationship to natural science in general, that is to say, to physics, natural history, and physiology. It is indeed physics, but rational physics, and it is at this point of rationality that we have to grasp it, and in particular to determine its relationship to physics. This procedure might appear to rest upon a novel distinction. At first the philosophy of nature will tend to be regarded as new science, and there is no doubt that in one sense it is. In another sense it is not, for it is as old as all observation of nature. It does not differ from this observation, and thus has traditions more ancient than those of physics, which in Aristotle for example, is much closer to a philosophy of nature than it is today. It is only in recent times that the two have become separated. The separation is already apparent in Wolff’s philosophy, where the science of cosmology, which is supposed to be a metaphysic of the world or nature, but which confines itself to completely abstract determinations of the understanding, is distinguished from physics. This metaphysics was certainly further removed from physics than what we now know as the philosophy of nature. The first thing to be noticed about this distinction between physics and the philosophy of nature and the mutual determination which exists between them, is that they are not so widely separated as they might seem to be at first. Physics and natural history are regarded as eminently empirical sciences, as belonging exclusively to observation and experience, and as therefore opposed to the philosophy of nature, the cognition of nature by means of thought. It has in the first instance to be pointed out however, that empirical physics contains much more thought than it will either realize or admit; that it is in fact better than it supposes, or if thought is considered to be a bad thing for it, that it is worse than it supposes. Physics and the philosophy of nature are therefore to be distinguished, not as perception and thought, but merely by the nature and manner of their thought. Both are a thinking cognition of nature’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Translating scientific materials into philosophical terms in the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ might suggests that scientific materials cannot add anything to the basic theory of nature in virtue of their being allowed into that theory merely to demonstrate that they are reducible to his own terms. Why take the trouble to append scientific approximations to an already complete philosophical theory? For teaching purposes? Through a discussion upon scientific material scientifically literate people can be educated up to a metaphysically accurate view of scientifically described items. Rather hopeful I would have thought, it wouldn’t work with Richard Dawkins, (1941 — ), who is certainly in need of such an education. Hegel does stress that philosophy should retain contact with ordinary thinking.
‘The thinking view of nature must note the implicit process by which nature sublates its otherness to become spirit, and the way in which the Idea is present in each stage of nature itself Estranged from the Idea, nature is merely the corpse of the understanding. Nature is the Idea, but only implicitly. That was why Schelling called it a petrified intelligence, which others have even said is frozen. God does not remain petrified and moribund however, the stones cry out and lift themselves up to spirit. God is subjectivity, activity, infinite actuosity, within which the other is only momentary, and remains implicit within the unity of the Idea, because it is itself this totality of the Idea. Since nature is the Idea in the form of otherness, according to the Notion of the Idea, the Idea is not within it as it is in and for itself, although nature is nevertheless one of the modes in which the Idea manifests itself, and in which it must come forth. Secondly, it has to be established and demonstrated that this mode of the Idea is nature. In order to do this, a comparison will subsequently have to be made, to see if the definition corresponds to ordinary thinking about nature. In other respects however, philosophy need not concern itself with ordinary thinking, nor undertake the tasks it carries out with respect to nature; although such thinking is conformable however, there must, in general, be an agreement between these two aspects’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Although the idea that scientific materials functioning merely for educational purposes does insufficient justice to the way they permeate the substantive vision of nature an offer here, for example in the discussion on the idea of space it is not said that this gives an inadequate description of externality which nedds to be left behind rather space and externality is interpreted as identical to one another and continual reference is made to externality as space albeit one presumes the name encapsulates scientists’ inadequate understanding of externality and furthermore reference is made to several empirically identified features of space for instance its geometrical structure to put flesh on the bones of the theory of externality for scientific accounts certainly enrich the basic conceptions of natural forms and the detailed understandings of their features.
So scientific descriptions reflect an inadequate metaphysics and must be reduced to rationalist terms and scientific descriptions are on their own terms informative and capable of enhancing rationalist accounts of nature. Do these two views grate against each other? Well, recall the ineliminable contingency (Zufälligkeit) of nature, such an understanding of contingency in nature belongs within a broader account of the metaphysical status of contingency elaborated in the Logic wherein the metaphysical necessity of contingency is affirmed in a manner that eliminates contingency by reducing it to the status of a necessity. That is one reading of it anyway. Or perhaps Hegelian metaphysics successfully accommodates the reality of contingency as evidenced in particular in his treatment of the contingency that is ubiquitous in nature.
Nature’s all-pervasive contingency arises from the protracted antagonism between its material and conceptual elements, the contradiction of the idea, insofar as it is outside itself as nature, is more precisely the contradiction between on the one hand the necessity of its forms generated through the concept and on the other hand their indifferent contingency and indeterminable irregularity. In the sphere of nature contingency and determinability from without come into their own. It is the impotence of nature, that it maintains the determinations of the concept only abstractly and exposes the detailed expression of the particular to external determinability.
‘In so far as the contradiction of the Idea is external to itself as nature, one side of it is formed by the Notionally generated necessity of its formations and their rational determination within the organic totality, and the other by their indifferent contingency and indeterminable irregularity. In the sphere of nature, contingency and determinability from without come into their own. This contingency is particularly prevalent in the realm of concrete individual formations, which are at the same time only immediately concrete as things of nature. That which is immediately concrete is in fact an ensemble of juxtaposed properties, external and more or less indifferent to one another, to which simple subjective being-for-self is therefore equally indifferent, and which it consequently abandons to external contingent determination. The impotence of nature is to be attributed to its only being able to maintain the determinations of the Notion in an abstract manner, and to its exposing the foundation of the particular to determination from without’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Natural forms retain contingent properties to the extent that their matter remains opposed to their conceptual side and the conceptual dimension of any form always acts with rational necessity hence its development and any alterations it makes to its material side are necessary too and yet matter is inherently non- rational and so its initially given characteristics must be merely contingent. Ans so insofar as matter has initially given characteristics not deriving from its relation to nature’s rational element the content of these characteristics cannot be deduced a priori. 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 impotence of nature 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…’
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Philosophy has to acknowledge that natural forms have contingent features inaccessible to a priori deduction albeit evidently they can know a priori that such contingent features are invariably present and that there are contingent features can be established a priori but just because they are contingent what those features are cannot be deduced. Each case of the impotence of nature sets limits [Grenzen] to philosophy, and it is the height of pointlessness to demand of the concept that it should grasp and, as it is said, construct or deduce these same contingencies.
‘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’
Enter empirical science, for unlike a priori philosophy science can provide information about natural forms’ contingent features, in virtue of science beginning with observation it takes natural forms up just as they are given and so develops descriptions of them that accommodate their contingent features.
‘In Empiricism there lies this great principle, that what is true must be in actuality and must be there for our perception. This principle is opposed to the ‘ought’ through which reflection inflates itself, and looks down upon what is actual and present in the name of a Beyond that can only have its place and thereness in the subjective understanding. Philosophy, like Empiricism, is cognizant (§ 7) only of what is; it does not know that which only ought to be, and for that reason is not there.-On the subjective side we must recognise also the important principle of freedom that lies in Empiricism; namely, that what ought to count in our human knowing, we ought to see for ourselves, and to know ourselves as present in it. But inasmuch as, so far as content is concerned, Empiricism restricts itself to what is finite, the consistent carrying through of its programme denies the supersensible altogether or at least its cognition and determinacy, and it leaves thinking with abstraction only, [L e., ] with formal universality and identity.-The fundamental illusion in scientific empiricism is always that it uses the metaphysical categories of matter, force, as well as those of one, many, universality, and the infinite, etc., and it goes on to draw conclusions, guided by categories of this sort, presupposing and applying the forms of syllogising in the process. It does all this without knowing that it thereby itself contains a metaphysics and is engaged in it, and that it is using those categories and their connections in a totally uncritical and unconscious manner’.
- ‘The Encyclopaedia Logic’
And yet those aspects of scientific accounts which pertain to contingencies cannot be translated into any corresponding philosophical accounts since philosophy as such cannot access the contingent, only those aspects of scientific accounts which pertain to natural forms’ essential features can be translated into philosophical terms, for instance Hegel contends that scientists identify it as essential to birds that they inhabit the air.
‘Birds are distinguished by the positive nature of their relation to the air, evidence of which is to be found in their lungs, the reservoirs of air contained by their skin, and the large marrow- less cavities of their bones. They do not suckle their young, so they have no breasts. They are bipeds, and their two arms or forefeet are converted into wings. As animal life is in this instance committed to the air, it is in the Birds that the animation of the abstract element comes into being; Birds consequently pass over from animal life, and revert to the preponderance of vegetative nature, which forms on their skin as plumage. The particular formation of their thoracic system is also due to their belonging to the air. That is why many Birds not only have a voice, as Mammals do, but also sing, the inner vibration forming in the air, as in its element. The Horse neighs and the Ox bellows, but the Bird’s cry is trilled forth as the ideal nature of self-enjoyment. On the other hand, the bird does not roll about on the ground in crude contentment, but abandons itself solely to the air, in which it becomes aware of itself’.
-’The Philosophy of Nature’
This refers to the view that species should be classified ecologically promoted especially by the biologist G. E. Trevinarus, (1776–1837), a contention that Hegel interprets as corresponding to his a priori thesis that different genera are defined by their relationship to different elements, yet scientists also describe many contingent features of birds, for instance the number and variety of their species and such descriptions seemingly have no correspondence in Hegel’s a priori theory and in respect of such contingencies science provides vital information that is otherwise unavailable to philosophy and hence philosophers have to supplement their accounts of the essential features of forms with scientific information regarding their contingencies and as with all scientific material such information will be couched in metaphysically inadequate terms and so distorts the reality of the contingent features it describes yet in this field nothing better is available and hence philosophers have to incorporate the information as it is. Scientific materials are included in the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ in virtue of their providing information regarding contingent features of nature, and what this means is that one must in addition retain scientists’ inadequate conceptions of those forms as a whole for such conceptions coordinate and harmonize the detailed information about contingencies, for instance upon arguing that the scientific conception of space should be interpreted as referring to externality this conception can e retained alongside the philosophical description so as to provide access to the information about contingent features of space which this conception organizes.
Only by incorporating scientific conceptions into the theory despite their inadequacy can the natural forms that the basic theory abstractly describes e characterised properly. The metaphysics requires the construction of a basic theory of nature through a priori reasoning and the metaphysics leads to a substantive theory of nature as divided between conceptual and material elements that entails that all natural forms possess irreducibly contingent features, hence scientific accounts have to be incorporated into the theory of nature wherever possible because these accounts enable us to learn about contingencies and in this manner an adherence to robust a priorism is a necessary consequence of the fundamental metaphysical belief in natural forms that actively develop according to rational requirements.
Nature as petrified intelligence. Nature is best viewed in light of this metaphysics for it permits of a more adequate (befriedigend, genügend) grasp of nature’s forms and yet the thought arises that any theory cast in terms of rationalist metaphysics rather than being more adequate than scientific accounts is rather merely chimerical after all one might suppose that natural forms can only act rationally if they consciously entertain rational thoughts or plans in which Hegelian metaphysics would entail that all natural forms are conscious and anthropomorphism rears its ugly head so mayhap it is not scientific metaphysics that distorts nature’s being but Hegelian metaphysics. Collingwood has concerns regarding anthropomorphism with respect to a hypothetical metaphysical position resembling Hegel’s rationalist view of nature for if we consider whether interpretation can rightly be extended to nature, Collingwood contends that natural developments would have to be processes of action determined by a thought which is their own inner side. This would imply that ‘natural events are expressions of thoughts … of minds somewhat like our own inhabiting the organic and inorganic bodies of nature as our minds inhabit our bodies. Setting aside mere flights of metaphysical fancy, such an hypothesis could claim our serious attention only if it led to a better understanding of the natural world. In fact, however, the scientist can reasonably say of it ‘je n’ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse’.’ So Collingwood believes that natural forms could only act rationally if they acted from conscious rational thoughts a metaphysical assumption that he rejects as unacceptably anthropomorphic and capable of generating only uninformatively fanciful accounts of nature. This is missing the point. We can believe natural forms to e act according to rational requirements while denying that they are conscious of the rational requirements from which they act, rather, natural forms act from rationality without consciously entertaining any rational thoughts something he clarifies during a discussion of nature elsewhere:
‘[T]he world is governed by nous … or reason — [but] not [by] an intelligence in the sense of self-conscious reason, not a mind as such; we must distinguish these two from one another. The movement of the solar system follows unchangeable laws, these laws are its [inherent] reason; but neither the sun nor the planets which circle around it in accordance with these laws have consciousness of them’.
- ‘Lectures on World History’
Planets revolve around the sun because this behaviour is the rationally necessary expression of the fact that the planets are partially identical with one another and partially different yet the planets are not conscious of their partial identity and do not intend to give it expression in their behaviour nor can it even be said that the planets unconsciously follow rational requirements of which they have some kind of structurally inaccessible mental awareness, the planets, like all other natural forms animals excepted, are simply not conscious at all. Natural rationality is non-conscious, nature is petrified intelligence (versteinerte Intelligenz) and discussing this metaphysical conception of nature in the ‘Encyclopaedia Logic’ he observes that the view that natural forms are conscious arouses our rightful repugnance because we say that humanity is distinguished from what is merely natural by virtue of thinking.
‘If we say that thought, qua objective, is the inwardness of the world, it may seem as if consciousness is being ascribed to natural things. But we feel a repugnance against conceiving the inner activity of things to be thinking, since we say that man is distinguished from what is merely natural by virtue of thinking. In this view we would have to talk about nature as a system of thought without consciousness, or an intelligence which, as Schelling says, is petrified. In order to avoid misunderstanding, it is better to speak of ‘thought-determinations’ instead of using the expression ‘thoughts’.’
- The Encyclopaedia Logic’ .
Intelligence is present in natural forms in only petrified form which indicates that the intelligence of natural forms is evinced directly in their behaviour and their rationality has no interior, intentional, dimension but is immediately embodied in their self-transformations and petrified rationality conveys this idea that nature’s rationality is poured out completely into its external behaviour. Hegel also refers to nature as containing objective rather than subjective thought and it might be less misleading to say that nature exhibits thought-determinations rather than thought in the sense of intentionality. And in nature the idea is outside itself estranged from itself (sich entfremdet).
‘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’
The opposite of being outside of oneself or self-estranged is being bei sich selbst, at home with oneself and the idea, the rationality of natural forms taken collectively, is not at home with itself because it is completely poured out in its behaviour retaining no interiority for It is completely dispersed across the series of happenings through which natural forms continuously metamorphose into one another while at the same time Hegel’s locution that the idea is outside itself in nature draws attention to the fact that rationality still is present throughout nature, albeit non-consciously. Does nature’s rationality as petrified really address the anthropomorphism concern? Is it not only possible to act rationally if one entertains rational thoughts or plans? Does the view that natural forms act rationally commits one to seeing them as conscious? He explicitly repudiates anthropomorphism but is not anthropomorphism entailed by rationalist metaphysics? Pas du tout, natural forms can act rationally without entertaining conscious plans, consider an analogy with living beings acting purposively without consciously upholding any purposes, for living beings pursue purposes, self-preservation, growth, and reproduction, that they do not consciously entertain, and this purposiveness of living beings is directly evidenced in their behaviour and formation, without these beings experiencing their purposes consciously. The idea that living beings follow purposes blindly, non-consciously, is articulated in Arthur Schopenhauer’s, (1788–1860), philosophy although for Schopenhauer unlike Hegel the blindness of life’s purposiveness makes it non-rational.
It might be objected that we cannot coherently attribute purposiveness to beings which do not and cannot consciously entertain any purposes just as we cannot validly attribute interests to beings that are not conscious and hence are not interested in anything that happens to them and yet, as environmental philosophers (if that isn’t an oxymoron) have contended argued, something can be in the interests of a living being if it promotes that being’s good, even if the being takes no interest in this thing. See Paul W. Taylor, ‘Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics’, 1986. Hence living beings can have interests without consciously entertaining them and as a result they can be said to act purposively insofar as they act systematically in ways that further their interests without it being necessary that they consciously recognize those interests as purposes., and by analogy it is equally intelligible to say that natural forms act rationally insofar as they act systematically in ways that rational requirements dictate without it being necessary that these forms recognize those requirements at a conscious level.
According to the rationalist conception of nature rationality can only meaningfully be predicated of natural forms if they are also identified as conscious which is not an anthropomorphic delusion for natural developments are impelled by a rationality of a specially nonconscious sort, the rationality driving natural development is immediately manifested in the structure of the natural world, in the progressive sequence of its forms hence this rationalism about nature is compatible with the denial that natural forms have consciousness or intentionality hence in the Encyclopaedia nature is demarcated from mind. Nature’s conceptual structures lack consciousness precisely because they are not fully manifest in their material parts, consciousness is the concept’s self-rediscovery within material parts that it completely pervades. .
Such a metaphysics of nature is not a form of pan-psychism, ‘the view that the basic physical constituents of the universe have mental properties’ as Thomas Nagel, (1947 -). puts it. Pan-rationalism perhaps, rationality permeates all natural and human things without having to exist as conscious intentionality. And having dispensed with the anthropomorphism charge levelled against this metaphysics of nature we are not obliged to assess this metaphysics as more adequate”(befriedigend or genügend) than science’s metaphysical belief in bare things.
Yet this metaphysics is still truer to the real being of nature and the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ has to be read in conjunction with the rest of his system can we identify his positive arguments to this effect. And remember that the issue with which we are here concerned, the possibility of a viable philosophical alternative to the scientific view of nature, was new in his time and remains little explored today. Nature is theorised on the basis of a novel metaphysics according to which all natural forms are intrinsically rational, a metaphysics which contrasts to the scientific metaphysics upon which natural forms and entities are seen as bare things, the distinction between philosophical and scientific conceptions of nature is significant, integrating the possibility of a form of specifically philosophical inquiry into nature with the potential to ground a more sustainable way of inhabiting the natural environment (yes as I said a while back environmentalists rather than throwing soup at paintings can turn to Hegel for support for how we need a radical re-thinking of nature and our relationship to it, I will explore that more fully in articles to come). This rationalist metaphysics of nature is more adequate than its scientific counterpart and Hegel’s mature system is replete with various kinds of arguments demonstrating that this is indeed the case.
Dedicated to my lovely One, my Sun ☀️
‘O Sole Mio’
Che bella cosa ‘na jurnata ‘e sole
L’aria serena doppo ‘na tempesta
Pe’ ll’aria fresca pare già ‘na festa
Che bella cosa ‘na jurnata ‘e sole
Ma n’atu sole cchiù bello, oi ne’
‘O sole mio sta in fronte a te
‘O sole, ‘o sole mio, sta in fronte a te
Sta in fronte a te
Quanno fa notte ‘o sole se ne scenne
Me viene quase ‘na malincunia
Sotta fenesta toia restarria
Quanno fa notte, e ‘o sole se ne scenne
Ma n’atu sole cchiù bello, oi ne’
‘O sole mio sta in fronte a te
‘O sole, ‘o sole mio, sta in fronte a te
Sta in fronte a te!
What a wonderful thing a sunny day
The serene air after a thunderstorm
The fresh air, and a party is already going on…
What a wonderful thing a sunny day.
But another sun,
that’s brighter still
It’s my own sun
that’s in your face!
The sun, my own sun
It’s in your face!
It’s in your face!
When night comes and the sun has gone down,
I start feeling blue;
I’d stay below your window
When night comes and the sun has gone down.
But another sun,
that’s brighter still
It’s my own sun
that’s in your face!
The sun, my own sun
It’s in your face!
It’s in your face!
‘O Sole Mio’, Enrico Caruso, (1873–1921):
Coming up next:
Nature re-enchanted.
To be continued…
