On Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ : A Free Reflex of Spirit — part thirty five.
‘Sensation’
by Arthur Rimbaud, (1854–1891)
On blue summer evenings, I’ll take to the trails,
Tickled by wheat, trampling sparse grass:
Dreamily, I’ll feel the freshness at my feet.
I’ll let the wind wash across my bare head!
I won’t speak, I won’t think about anything:
But an infinite love will rise within my soul,
And I’ll go further, much further, like a bohemian
Into nature — as happy as being with a woman.
‘Sensation’
Par les soirs bleus d’été, j’irai dans les sentiers,
Picoté par les blés, fouler l’herbe menue :
Réveur, j’en sentirai la fraîcheur à mes pieds.
Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tète nue !
Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien :
Mais l’amour infïni me montera dans l’âme,
Et j’irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien
Par la Nature, — heureux comme avec une femme.
====
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831). ‘Philosophy of Nature’. ‘Physics’.
The elements in sensibility. The sensible experience of nature has an inherent structure susceptible of conceptual articulation, a structure that derives from our activity as subjects in organizing our experience according to determinate patterns and this structured sensible experience of nature is described by Hegel under the heading of ‘Sensibility’ (Empfindung), or ‘Sensation’, in the ‘Philosophy of Mind’.
‘Sleep and waking are initially, in fact, not mere alterations, bur alternating states (a progression to infinity) . This is their formal, negative relationship; bur in it the affirmative relationship is also present. Being is contained as an ideal moment in the being-for-self of the waking soul; the determinacies of the content of its sleeping nature, where they are implicitly as in their substance, are thus found by the waking soul within its own self and, indeed, for itself. This particular material, since it is determinacy, is distinct from the self-identity of being-for-self, and at the same time simply contained in its simplicity: sensation’.
– ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Sensibility connects with awareness of nature as is revealed in an analysis of the basic features of sensibility as defined. Sensibility, Empfindung, features in the ‘Philosophy of Mind’ as characteristic of human beings and also in the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ as characteristic of all animals, including humans.
‘The senses and the theoretical processes are therefore: (1) feeling as such, which is the sense of the mechanical sphere-of gravity, of cohesion and its alteration and of heat; (2) smell and taste, which are the senses of opposition, of the particularized principle of air, and of the equally realized neutrality consisting of concrete water and the opposed moments of the dissolution of concrete neutrality. (3) The sense of ideality, which is also duplicated, in so far as the particularization which ideality must contain as abstract self-reference falls apart into two indifferent determinations. It is duplicated (a) into the sense of sight, of ideality as manifestation of external being for external being; this is the sense of light in general, and more precisely of colour, or of light which has become determined within concrete externality; and (b) in to the sense of hearing, of sound, of the manifestations of internal being, which reveals itself as such in its expression’.
‘Remark: We see here how the triad of the Notion’s moments passes over numerically into a quintuplicity. The more general ground for the occurrence of the transition at this juncture, is that the animal organism is the reduction of the separated moments of inorganic nature to the infinite unity of subjectivity, although in this unity, the animal organism is at the same time inorganic nature’s developed totality, the moments of which still exist separately, because the totality is still a natural subjectivity’.
‘Addition: Sense is the immediate unity of being and of that belonging to it. Initially it is feeling, which is the non-objective union with the object, in which however the object is also withdrawn to an equal extent into being-for-self. This unity has two aspects therefore: it is the sense of shape as shape, and the sense of heat. It is only a subdued differentiation which occurs here, because the other is only a generality, and is devoid of any intrinsic difference. The moment of difference-positive and negative-consequently falls apart as figure and heat. Feeling is therefore the sense of the earthy element, of matter, of that which offers resistance, of that in accordance with which I have immediate existence as an individual. The other also communicates with me as an individual material being, the being-for-self of which also corresponds to my awareness of it. Matter aspires towards a centre, and the primary satisfaction of this aspiration is the animal, which has its centre within itself. What I am sensible of is precisely this impulsion of matter which is devoid of self, towards an other. The particular ways of offering resistance, such as softness, hardness, elasticity, and smoothness or roughness of surface, also belong here. Figure and shape are also nothing more than the manner in which this resistance is limited spatially. These determinations, which we dealt with in various spheres, arc bound together in feeling as in a bouquet; for as we saw above (Addition to 20 § 355 III. 128, 8), it is precisely sentient nature which has the power of binding together many widely separated spheres.
- ‘Philosophy of Nature’
This animal Empfindung is not the same as animals’ merely physiological Sensibilität and in the ‘Philosophy of Mind’ Hegel considers sensibility as opening up the way for human beings’ further cognitive capacities including the capacity to articulate sensible awareness conceptually and sensibility features in the first third of the ‘Philosophy of Mind’ on the subject of subjective mind delineating a series of developmental stages through which each individual subject passes, each stage becoming incorporated into its successors to constitute an enduring layer of mental life and all the stages of mind are in essence merely as moments, states, determinations within the higher stages of development:
‘The concrete nature of mind involves for the observer the peculiar difficulty that the particular stages and determinations of the development of its concept do not also remain behind as particular existences in contrast to its deeper formations. It is otherwise in external nature. There, matter and movement have a free existence of their own in the solar system; the determinations of the senses also have a retrospective existence as properties of bodies, and still more freely as the elements, etc. The determinations and stages of the mind, by contrast, are essentially only moments, states, determinations in the higher stages of development. As a consequence of this, a lower and more abstract determination of the mind reveals the presence in it, even empirically, of a higher phase. In sensation, for example, we can find all the higher phases of the mind as its content or determinacy. And so sensation, which is just an abstract form, may to the superficial glance seem to be the essential seat and even the root of that higher content, the religious, the ethical, and so on; and it may seem necessary to consider the determinations of this content as particular species of sensation. But all the same, when lower stages are under consideration, it becomes necessary, in order to draw attention to them in their empirical existence, to refer to higher stages in which they are present only as forms. In this way we need at times to introduce, by anticipation, a content which presents itself only later in the development (e.g. in dealing with natural waking from sleep we speak, by anticipation, of consciousness, in dealing with mental derangement we speak of intellect, etc.)’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Hence sensibility is an ineradicable stratum in the mental life of any subject and thereby defines an initial culturally invariant manner of experiencing nature, and sensible experience of nature will inevitably become infused with divergent cultural interpretations of nature but persist to an extent as an underlying and basic mode of awareness which all subjects share, so the Hegelian developmental approach to subjectivity situates sensibility as the most basic way in which humanity encounters the natural world, sensibility is, Hegel informs us in the ‘Lectures on the Philosophy of History’, the immediate form of my being.
‘In the history of the World, only those peoples can come under our notice which form a state. For it must be understood that this latter is the realization of Freedom, i.e., of the absolute final aim, and that it exists for its own sake. It must further be understood that all the worth which the human being possesses — all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State. For his spiritual reality consists in this, that his own essence — Reason — is objectively present to him, that it possesses objective immediate existence for him. Thus only is he fully conscious; thus only is he a partaker of morality — of a just and moral social and political life. For Truth is the Unity of the universal and subjective Will; and the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth’.
- ‘Lectures on the Philosophy of History’
Sensibility constitutes one phase within the existence of the soul and the soul is a form of subjectivity that remains embroiled with corporeality, emotions, and sensible affections. Sensibility is a somewhat primitive phase in the life of the soul in which the subject acquires an awakening awareness of the external objects affecting its body and the subject does not categorize any of these objects in general terms, each object of awareness persists for the sensible subject entirely individual and unique and the sensation is something singularised, contingent and everything sensed has the form of an isolated individual.
‘Although the peculiarly human content belonging to free mind also assumes the form of sensibility, yet this form as such is a form common to the animal soul and the human soul and not, therefore, appropriate to that content. The contradiction between mental content and sentiment consists in the fact that the content is a universal in and for itself, necessary, genuinely objective, whereas sentiment is individualized, contingent, one-sidedly subjective. We propose to explain briefly here to what extent the above-mentioned determinations must be predicated of sentiment. As we have already remarked, what is sensed has essentially the form of immediacy, of a mere being, no matter whether it stems from the free mind or from the sensory world. The idealization that the things of external nature undergo in being sensed is a still entirely superficial idealization, far removed from the complete sublation of the immediacy of this content. But the mental material, in itself opposed to this content that just is, becomes in the sentient soul an existent in the mode of immediacy. Now since what is unmediated is an individualized item, everything sensed has the form of individualization. This is readily admitted of sensations of the external, but it must also be asserted of the sensations of the internal. When the spiritual, the rational, the lawful, ethical, and religious assume the form of sentiment, it gets the shape of a sensory item, of something disconnected, lying asunder, and thus acquires a similarity to what is externally sensed, which, though of course sensed only in individualities, e.g. in individual colours, yet, like the spiritual, in itself involves a universal, e.g. colour in general. The more comprehensive, higher nature of the spiritual does not therefore emerge in sentiment, only in conceptual thinking. But in the individualization of the sensed content, its contingency and its one-sided subjective form are also grounded’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Not being aware of any of these objects as objects of a given type or for that matter as objects at all the sensible subject cannot identify itself in contradistinction to those objects and hence becomes completely submerged in the procession of moments of awareness arising from its body. Murray Greene observes that the sentient soul has no ‘awareness of an objective outer world as source or locus of the content found’. Through sensing man and woman posits something in himself or in herself he or she posits something in his or her natural, immediate, singular subjectivity, not in his or her free, mental, universal, subjectivity.
‘The subjectivity of sentiment must not be sought in an indeterminate way in the fact that by sentiment man posits something within himself-for in thinking, too, he posits something within himself-but more determinately in the fact that he posits something in his natural, immediate, individual subjectivity, not in his free, spiritual, universal subjectivity. This natural subjectivity is not yet a self-determining subjectivity following its own law and acting in a necessary manner, but a subjectivity determined from outside, tied to this space and to this time, dependent on contingent circumstances. Therefore, by transposition into this subjectivity every content becomes a contingent content and acquires determinations belonging only to this individual subject. It is thus quite inadmissible to appeal to one’s mere sentiments. Whoever does this withdraws from the realm, common to all, of grounds, of thinking, and of objectivity, into his individual subjectivity, into which, since it is essentially passive, the most unintelligent and bad content can work its way, as well as the intelligent and the good. It is evident from all this that sentiment is the worst form for the mental and that it can spoil the best content.-At the same time, it is already implied in the above that the opposition between a senser and a sensed, a subjective and an objective, still remains foreign to mere sensation. The subjectivity of the sentient soul is such an immediate subjectivity, so undeveloped, so little self-determining and self-differentiating, that the soul, in so far as it only senses, does not yet apprehend itself as a subjective confronting an objective. This distinction belongs only to consciousness, only emerges when the soul has attained to the abstract thought of its I, of its infinite being-for-self’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
This becomes clearer through a contrast between sensibility with consciousness as Hegel reads it, the conscious subject has a concept of objectivity in general and, correlatively, an at least tacit understanding of its own status as a subject, and yet the sentient subject does not yet have concepts and so all the contents of its sensations are encountered as unique and since this form of subjectivity is preconceptual Hegel designates it sensibility. In experiencing the sensible subject does not apply any concepts in a strict manner of speaking nonetheless it does organize its experience in accordance with certain distinctive patterns and Greene explains that, ‘although the sentient soul obtains its first filling through a ‘finding,’ nevertheless Hegel desires it to be understood that there is an essential moment of activity in sentience that is not the faculty of pure receptivity and passivity in the way Sinnlichkeit is for Immanuel Kant’.
These patterns correspond to the traditional five senses analysis of which takes up much of Hegel’s consideration of sensibility an analysis largely confined to the addition but that’s ok for it augments the central body the text and he defines the senses as ways of sensing (Weisen or Arten des Empfindens), ways of being non-conceptually aware of external entities, hence it is in his analysis of the five senses that we see his account of the distinctive structure of sensibility the manner by which it is proto-conceptual and evinces inchoate rational organization and the senses are sorted into three groups.
‘Now why we have just the familiar five senses-no more and no fewer, and differing in the way they do — , the rational necessity of this must, in a philosophical treatment, be demonstrated. This happens when we conceive the senses as presentations of the concept’s moments. These moments are, as we know, only three. But the quintet of senses reduces quite naturally to three classes of senses. The first is formed by the senses of physical ideality, the second by those of real difference; in the third class falls the sense of earthly totality’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
The first group embraces sight and hearing which are ‘the senses of physical ideality’ meaning that in seeing and hearing the subject encounters external items as fully and transparently available or accessible to it and what this means is that the subject encounters these items as ideal (ideell), it takes items to exist only insofar as they stand in relationship to that subject being available to its inspection. The adjective ideell is multifaceted, as Michael Inwood elucidates a thing can be ideell for Hegel in any of four senses: (1) it exists only through itself, (2) it exists in unrealized form, (3) it exists only through something else, upon which it depends, (4) it exists only as part of a greater whole, upon the existence of which it depends. Hegel’s use of ideell in the ‘Philosophy of Mind’ applies sense (4): qua visible and audible, items are held to exist only insofar as they belong within an overarching relationship of availability to the perceiving subject.
In support of such an interpretation of sight and hearing Hegel suggests that in seeing we encounter objects as pure surfaces with no depth: ‘In seeing we have only a surface before us’, (‘Lectures on the Philosophy of History’), while hearing annuls any sense of distance between perceiving subject and perceived object. The second group of senses embraces taste and smell, the senses of real difference, which are in relation to real corporeality only insofar as it that is to say real corporeality is in dissolution, entering into its process.
‘Just as we accepted the content of outer sensations from the philosophy of nature now behind us, where the rational necessity of that content had been demonstrated, so here we must anticipate as far as it is necessary the content of inner sensations, which finds its pm per place only in the third pan of the theory of subjective mind. Our object for now is only the embodiment of inner sensations, and more specifically only the embodiment occurring involuntarily, not the will-dependent embodiment of my sensations by means of gesture. This second kind of embodiment does not yet belong here because it presupposes that mind has already become master of its bodiliness, has consciously made it into an expression of its internal sensations- something which has here not yet taken place. At this point, as we have said, we have only to consider the immediate transition of internal sensation into the bodily mode of reality, an embodiment that can indeed also become visible to others, can develop into a sign of the inner sensation, but does not necessarily become such a sign -and does so, at any rate, without the will of the senser’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Generally speaking in smell and taste the subject encounters external items as becoming available to it through a process by which they give up their previous self-containment and this process is ‘the silent, imperceptible process of the spontaneous dissipation of all bodies, the volatilization of all vegetable and animal forms’. The third group of senses comprises only touch, the most concrete sense, thereby reversing the Platonic valuation of sight over touch whereby touch introduces a proximity and indeterminacy between subject and object which diminishes objectivity, a reversal of the traditional hierarchy that nonetheless remains within its terms of evaluation because sight misleadingly reduces the distance between subject and object by depicting objects as fully accessible. Touch is the sense of the solid reality of bodies, of the other subsisting for itself, through touch the subject encounters items as resistant entities with an independent existence such that after all they can never become fully accessible to it but will always retain some residual self-containment.
‘Feeling is the most concrete of all the senses. For its distinctive essentiality consists in its relation, not to the physical as abstractly universal or ideal, nor to the determinacies of the corporeal as they separate out from it, but to the solid reality of the corporeal. Only for feeling, therefore, is there strictly an Other subsisting for itself, an individual entity for itself, confronting the senser as a similarly individual entity for itself. Hence feeling includes the impression of heaviness, i.e. of the unity sought by bodies as they persist for themselves-and do not enter into the process of dissolution but offer resistance. In general, it is material being-for-self that is for feeling. But to the various modes of this being-for-self belong not only weight but also the type of cohesion: the hard, the soft, the rigid, the brittle, the rough, the smooth. However, along with persisting, firm corporeality, the negativity of the material as subsisting for itself-namely, heat-is also for feeling. By heat, the specific gravity and the cohesion of bodies are altered. Hence, this alteration affects that by which the body is essentially a body. To that extent we can therefore say that even in the impression of heat, solid corporeality is for feeling. Finally, shape in its three dimensions falls in the province of feeling; for the mechanical determinacy in general pertains entirely to feeling’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
In touch we find the being as an achieved contradiction hence a being for itself against us’ (‘Lectures on the Philosophy of History’). Albeit the several senses disclose objects in opposed ways they cooperate in most instances of sensation infusing sensible experience with internal tensions.
Hegel’s chief objective s to provide an analysis of what subjects are in fact doing when they see, hear, smell, taste, or touch and it is not self-evident what is going on when for instance somebody sees, seeing demands further analysis that reveals it to consist in non-conceptual awareness of things as fully and transparently accessible, an analysis that raises the question as to in what sense may a subject be said to be aware of something as transparently accessible in the absence of any concept of transparent accessibility, an issue not addressed directly as Hegel takes it to be the case that in seeing an object or sensing it in any other way the subject does not categorize that object in general terms but has a sense, a Sinn, of that object as present in a certain mode, a sense which is not equivalent to conceptual awareness and the sentient subject in fact organizes its experience according to certain characteristic pattern guaranteeing that objects present themselves to it in determinate modes yet these patterns are not yet categorial or conceptual while these patterns, embedded in the senses, are to be understood as approximating imperfectly to categorial structures, unless the senses were proto-conceptual their translation into conceptual terms could not count as an articulation of their inchoate contours and this proto-conceptuality of sensibility comes forth in Hegel’s ‘Aesthetics’:
‘‘Sense’ [Sinn] is this wonderful word which is used in two opposite meanings. On the one hand it means the organs of immediate apprehension, but on the other hand we mean by sense: the meaning, the thought, the universality of the thing. And so sense relates on the one hand to the immediate externality of existence, on the other to its inner essence’.
- ‘Aesthetics’
This understanding of the senses as proto-conceptual produces a pressure to view them as fully conceptual but yet Hegel’s account of sensibility encourages a resistance to such pressure and to hang on to an idea of the senses as exactly senses of objects as present in certain modes, the senses embody particular basic, non-conceptual, patterns structuring our awareness of the world. So why is sensible experience specifically of nature? Is there a special link between sensibility and the natural world.? The sentient subject is just aware of whatever it encounters in the world surrounding it, only some of these items being natural, while many are artifacts, yet sensible experience furnishes our most basic experience of nature rather than our most basic mode of experience of any external entities whatever. Sensibility may be linked to nature for instance via the idealisation that the things of external nature undergo in being sensed.
‘Although the peculiarly human content belonging to free mind also assumes the form of sensibility, yet this form as such is a form common to the animal soul and the human soul and not, therefore, appropriate to that content. The contradiction between mental content and sentiment consists in the fact that the content is a universal in and for itself, necessary, genuinely objective, whereas sentiment is individualized, contingent, one-sidedly subjective. We propose to explain briefly here to what extent the above-mentioned determinations must be predicated of sentiment. As we have already remarked, what is sensed has essentially the form of immediacy, of a mere being, no matter whether it stems from the free mind or from the sensory world. The idealization that the things of external nature undergo in being sensed is a still entirely superficial idealization, far removed from the complete sublation of the immediacy of this content. But the mental material, in itself opposed to this content that just is, becomes in the sentient soul an existent in the mode of immediacy. Now since what is unmediated is an individualized item, everything sensed has the form of individualization. This is readily admitted of sensations of the external, but it must also be asserted of the sensations of the internal’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
And furthermore the general modes of sentience are related to the physical and chemical determinacies of the natural, the necessity of which is demonstrated in the ‘Philosophy of Nature’.
‘The general modes of sensing are related to the various physical and chemical determinacies of the natural, the necessity of which is to be demonstrated in philosophy of nature, and these modes are mediated by the various sense organs. The fact that in general sensation of the external divides up into such diverse, mutually indifferent modes of sensing, lies in the nature of its content, since this is a sensory content, and the sensory is so closely synonymous with the self-external that even internal sensations by their mutual externality become something sensory’. — ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Why is such an intimate connection between sensibility and natural forms or qualities postulated? The assertion is not that sensibility involves experience of nature in the sense of involving awareness of exclusively those items in the outer world which are natural that is to say non-artifactual, the assertion is rather that the way in which the subject is sensibly aware of things by way of the five senses is a way of being aware of things as natural which is to say in being aware of things according to the senses the subject is aware of those things according to a determinate sense of nature a specific proto-conceptual understanding of nature and what this means may be cleared up through an Hegelian analysis of sensibility and the assertion that experience structured by the five senses inherently embodies a sense of the natural elements, light, air, and earth.
The argument is applied with regard to sight the suggestion being that in being aware of something through sight and therefore in being aware of that object as fully accessible,the subject is casting that object in a certain light is imposing upon the object as it presents itself a texture of accessibility and transparency that pervades and suffuses how it appears, so consider an analogy to conceptually structured awareness of objects, in being aware of something as an instance of some general type one applies a concept that shapes the whole way that the object presents itself, conceptual awareness entirely organizes how things present themselves to us, and by analogy in sensing the subject invests the objects of its experience with a pervasive texture or quality. In seeing the subject invests the object with a texture of transparent openness or full availability to inspection and this quality is equivalent to light, defined as ‘the pure being-manifested of objects for us’ (‘Lectures in the Philosophy of History’). Sight is the sense of that physical ideality that we call light and it is only with this ideal element [ideellen Elemente] that sight is concerned with.
‘Sight is the sense of the physical ideal that we call light. We can say of light that it is, as it were, space become physical. For light, like space, is indivisible, a limpid ideality, absolutely determinationless extension, without any reflection into-self, and consequently without inwardness. Light manifests its Other and this manifesting constitutes its essence; bur within itself it is abstract self-identity, the opposite of nature’s asunderness emerging within nature itself, and therefore immaterial matter. Hence light offers no resistance, has no limitation within itself, expands on all sides into the immeasureable distance, is absolutely weightless, imponderable. Sight has to do only with this ideal element and with its obscuration by the dark, i.e. with colour. Colour is what is seen, light is the medium of seeing. The strictly material aspect of corporeality, by contrast, does not yet concern us in seeing. Therefore the objects we see can be far from us. In seeing we have, as it were, a merely theoretical, not yet a practical, relationship to things; for in seeing we let things subsist calmly as beings and relate ourselves only to their ideal side. Owing to this independence of sight of corporeality proper, it can be called the noblest sense. On the other hand, sight is a very imperfect sense because by it a body does not come to us immediately as a spatial totality, as body, always only as surface, only according to the two dimensions of width and height, and we only get to see a body successively in all its dimensions, in its total shape by adopting various points of view towards it. The most distant objects originally appear to sight, as we can observe in children, on one and the same surface as those nearest to us, just because sight does not immediately see depth. Only when we notice that to the depth perceived by feeling there corresponds something dark, a shadow, do we come to believe that where a shadow becomes visible to us we see a depth. Connected with this is the fact that we do not immediately perceive by sight the measure of the distance of bodies but can only infer it from the smaller or greater appearance of objects’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
To see objects is to be aware of them as illuminated pervaded with a quality or texture of light, the phrase texture of light from taken from Cathryn Vasseleu albeit she employs it to indicate that light is material and tactile rendering things visible by physically touching the eyes, so that touch is always ‘implicate[d] . . . in vision’. Although Hegel construes light as non-material texture still captures how light thoroughly pervades and suffuses objects of visual sensibility for him and this quality of light is referred to as the medium or element of seeing, hence to say that light is the element of seeing is to say that it is a kind of glow or aura in which seeing constitutively bathes its objects of awareness. And the other senses also invest the objects of experience with elemental qualities. Hearing infuses objects with sound or sonority, defined as the quality of pure self-revelation active self-revelation as distinct from the passive transparency of light. Smell and taste are related to air, to be aware of bodies as self-dissipating is to be aware of them as located within the air pervaded by air that passes through them provoking their gradual dissolution, which is explained by air being the unnoticed but insidious and consuming power over the individual the destruction slinks in everywhere just as reason insinuates itself into the individual and dissolves it.
‘The element of undifferentiated simplicity is no longer the positive identity with self and self-manifestation of light as such; it is mere negative universality reduced to the selfless moment of an other, and consequently it also has weight. As negative universality, this identity is the unnoticed but insidious and consuming power to which individual and organic nature are subject. It is in fact air, a fluidity which is transparent and passive with regard to light, but which sublimates all individuality within itself, and which by its mechanical elasticity, pervades everything’.
- ‘Philosophy of Nature’
Consequently air gives rise to odours for odour is only this invisible ceaseless process of what is individual with air. Taste and smell therefore sense objects as porous and aerated surrounded and pervaded by the corrosive air that percolates through them, and finally touch is the sense of earthy totality, the sense of objects as belonging to the earth. Tactile awareness of things as resistant and independent involves a sense of them as part of the earth, the objects of touch are perhaps here understood to drink their self-contained resilience from out of the earth hence it is the resilient quality that Hegel designates as earthiness, Erdigkeit, a quality that pervades all objects of touch.
‘Primarily, the element of developed difference, and its individual determination, is terrestrialness as such. In its distinctness from the other moments, this element is as yet indeterminate; as the totality which holds together the variety of these moments in individual unity however, it is the power which kindles and sustains their process’.
- ‘ ‘Philosophy of Nature’
This understanding of earthiness as self-contained turned in on itself is supported elsewhere in the system for instance when the power of self-possession and of the universal, or of theoretical or moral principles, is relaxed then the earthy elements are set free for this evil is directly present in the heart since this as immediate is natural and selfish.
‘This earthly throng gets free, when self-possession and the universal, theoretical or moral principles, lose their power over the natural forces that they usually suppress and keep concealed; for this evil is implicitly present within the heart, because the heart, being immediate, is natural and selfish. It is the evil genius of man that becomes dominant in derangement, but in opposition and in contradiction to the better and more intellectual side, which is also in man. Hence this state is a breakdown and distress within the mind itself.-’
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Such earthy elements are the self-centered aspects of individual personality, subjects are generally aware of objects through several senses at once and the interplay between their elements generates further qualities in experience, most saliently colour. The sense of colour arises through the interplay of the quality of earthiness that involves darkness with the quality of transparent illumination and here the approach may be compared with the first part of Goethe’s ‘Farbenlehre’, that elucidates how colour appears in visual perception, among the ‘innate conditions for sight’. Similarly Hegel endeavours to elicit how the sense of colour necessarily arises within subjective experience. In a letter of 1890, impressionist artist Claude Monet, (1840–1926), stated his objective to ‘make the enveloppe above all, the same light spread over everything’, we may regard the sentient subject as locating the objects of its awareness within a kind of elemental milieu arising through the confluence of the several elements.
‘The further I go’, wrote Monet, ‘the better I see that it takes a great deal of work to succeed in rendering what I want to render: ‘instantaneity,’ above all the enveloppe, the same light spread over everything, and I’m more than ever disgusted at things that come easily, at the first attempt’. By enveloppe Monet was referring to the air itself, the unifying atmosphere that lay between him and his subject. As a younger man he had sought to capture the visual effects of light and weather by painting quickly and directly out of doors but now he chased after the most ephemeral effects slowly and with deliberation. Colour, texture, and the moods they could create assumed as great an importance in his work as the paintings’ subject, be it cathedral, river, or his garden, and in addition he sought to unify works in his multi-canvas series bringing them into a whole an objective very important to him in his late water lily pictures.
This idea of an elemental milieu may be compared with the Gestalt psychological concept of the dispositional field, analyzed by Richard Boothby who refers to Monet’s quest to paint what he called the enveloppe suffusing individual objects, an enveloppe composed of elements of light and air that surround and pervade these objects, Boothby defines this enveloppe as an ‘encompassing field of illumination that conditions all appearance’ of objects and he draws out two features of this dispositional field that are relevant to Hegel’s analysis of sensibility. First the field is not itself directly perceptible, individuals do not see light, but only what light renders visible, if light is the element of seeing, this light is never the direct object of attention but a background presence colouring and qualifying what is seen. Similarly Hegel denies that the elements are direct objects of sensible awareness, sight is the sense of light but the one who is seeing does not see light as such, light manifests something else and this manifesting constitutes its essence.
‘Sight is the sense of the physical ideal that we call light. We can say of light that it is, as it were, space become physical. For light, like space, is indivisible, a limpid ideality, absolutely determinationless extension, without any reflection into-self, and consequently without inwardness. Light manifests its Other and this manifesting constitutes its essence; bur within itself it is abstract self-identity, the opposite of nature’s asunderness emerging within nature itself, and therefore immaterial matter. Hence light offers no resistance, has no limitation within itself, expands on all sides into the immeasureable distance, is absolutely weightless, imponderable. Sight has to do only with this ideal element and with its obscuration by the dark, i.e. with colour. Colour is what is seen, light is the medium of seeing. The strictly material aspect of corporeality, by contrast, does not yet concern us in seeing. Therefore the objects we see can be far from us. In seeing we have, as it were, a merely theoretical, not yet a practical, relationship to things; for in seeing we let things subsist calmly as beings and relate ourselves only to their ideal side. Owing to this independence of sight of corporeality proper, it can be called the noblest sense. On the other hand, sight is a very imperfect sense because by it a body does not come to us immediately as a spatial totality, as body, always only as surface, only according to the two dimensions of width and height, and we only get to see a body successively in all its dimensions, in its total shape by adopting various points of view towards it. The most distant objects originally appear to sight, as we can observe in children, on one and the same surface as those nearest to us, just because sight does not immediately see depth. Only when we notice that to the depth perceived by feeling there corresponds something dark, a shadow, do we come to believe that where a shadow becomes visible to us we see a depth. Connected with this is the fact that we do not immediately perceive by sight the measure of the distance of bodies but can only infer it from the smaller or greater appearance of objects’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Therefore light is, precisely, the medium or element of seeing, not its object. Similarly, Hegel remarks we cannot hear sound as such, but only ever a determinate, higher or lower tone.
‘It is in so far as the self-centredness of light animates and individualizes the things of nature so as to heighten and give coherence to their exclusiveness, that it makes its appearance in the individualization of matter, for its primarily abstract identity is merely the sublation and return into self of the particularity of the negative unity of individuality. Gravity, acidity, and sound, are also manifestations of matter, but they do not have the purity of light, and they are not manifested without inherent and determinate modification. We can not hear sound as such, we merely hear a determinate sound, a certain pitch; it is always a determinate acid that we taste, never acidity as such. Only light exists as this pure manifestation, this abstract and unindividualized universality. Light is incorporeal, it is in fact immaterial matter; although this appears to be a contradiction, it is an appearance which cannot depend upon us. Physicists used to say that light might be weighed. Large lenses were used in order to concentrate it into focus, which was then directed onto the scale pan of a pair of extremely sensitive balances. The balances were usually unmoved, and when they were, it was discovered that this was brought about solely by the heat that was concentrated within the focus. Matter is weighted in so far as it still seeks its unity as place, but light is matter which has found itself’.
- ‘Philosophy of Nature’
Generally, he stresses how the elements only ever manifest themselves in relation to particular objects and cannot be directly grasped themselves.
‘The physical process is determined by the transmutation of the elements into one another. This transmutation is quite unknown to finite physics, in which the understanding always holds fast to the persistence of abstract identity, whereby the elements, being composite, are merely dispersed and separated, not really transmuted. Water, air, fire, and earth, are in conflict within this elementary process. Water is the existent material of the process, and as it is neutral, mutable, and determinable, it plays the principle role. Air, as the unobstrusive destructive principle positing that which is of an ideal nature, is the activity which sublates determinate being. Fire is the appearance of being-for-self, the ideality which attains the moment of appearance in which destruction becomes evident. The simplicity of the relationship is therefore that water is transformed into air and vanishes; conversely, air becomes water, and breaks out of being-for-self into the inert neutrality of its opposite, which for its part tenses itself to become being-for-self. The ancients, one might mention Heraclitus and Aristotle, regarded the process of the elements in this way. There is no difficulty in acquainting ourselves with this process, for it is evident in experience and observation. The formation of rain is the main point. Physics itself admits that rain has not been satisfactorily explained. The difficulty originates solely in the physics of reflection however, which despite all observation, holds fast to its double assumption that (a) ‘That which takes place within free connections, must also be possible within conditioned and external circumstances.’ (b) ‘That which takes place within conditioned connections, also takes place within free connections; consequently that which maintains its self-identity in the former case, is also a merely implicit identity.’ We maintain on the contrary, that once water has evaporated, the form of the vapour vanishes completely’.
- ‘Philosophy of Nature’
Second, Boothby contends that because perception works by locating objects in a dispositional field objects are never perceived as entirely discrete, not being a direct object of perception itself, the dispositional field has no determinate boundaries so that in pervading perceived objects it muddies their boundaries, interconnecting them. Hegel agrees that insofar as the sentient subject bathes its objects in a common elemental milieu it blurs the boundaries between those objects, light, for instance, is abstract identity with self, the opposite of nature’s externality emerging within nature itself so its presence introduces unity into the objects it suffuses, so the Hegelian perspective is that sensibility involves awareness of objects as pervaded by elemental qualities which together compose an indeterminate and volatile background against which those objects appear. Hegel believes sensibility to involve a sense of nature, since sensibility involves the sense of the natural elements of light, air, and earth, it necessarily embodies a sense of nature as a whole as the milieu constituted of the interplay between these several elements and sensible awareness is defined as awareness of nature not because he thinks that the sentient subject encounters only those external entities which are natural but because he thinks that it encounters all entities as located within nature belonging to the terrain of the natural elements. The most basic way in which we experience things is by experiencing them as natural, according to a pre-conceptual sense of nature as an elemental background to experience and whatever additional cultural interpretations of nature and for that matter of artifice individuals may lap up they begin from an inveterate sense of nature as elemental, as a complex and fluctuating interplay between accessibility and self-containment which suffuses objects and blurs their boundaries.
Such an account of sensibility generally speaking captures particular features of our experience that are deep-lying and inveterate and pre-theoretical and in particular it captures the sense of things as enfolded within what Monet referred to as the enveloppe, an enveloppe composed of light, air, and earth. These elemental qualities are bound up with complex patterns of accessibility and hiddenness in things and we are basically aware of things as natural hence we can understand the individuals’ frequently attested feeling of retaining or being brought back into contact with some deep-seated part of themselves through prolonged or intense contact with nature.This is an intriguing account of the basic form of human experience of the world however we might judge the details of the analysis, a theory of the natural world has to articulates how we are sensibly aware of it. Upon looking into such an analysis of sensibility in the ‘Philosophy of Mind’ one can discern that it is this sensible experience of nature as elemental that is to be regarded as an articulation of an adequate theory of the natural world and what follows is looking into how his theory of nature taking account of this constraint endeavours to articulate an idea of the natural world as an essentially elemental terrain.
Divertimento 2: What is thinking?
An occasional diversion upon some central features of Hegelian philosophy that makes it distinctive and that must continually be borne in mind if we are to properly understand what is going on.
What is thinking? Not: what am I thinking? Who knows? But I press on.
‘The fact that the object represented becomes the property of pure self-consciousness, its elevation to universality in general, is only one aspect of formative education, not its fulfilment — The manner of study in ancient times differed from that of the modern age in that the former was the proper and complete formation of the natural consciousness. Putting itself to the test at every point of its existence, and philosophizing about everything it came across, it made itself into a universality that was active through and through. In modern times, however, the individual finds the abstract form ready-made; the effort to grasp and appropriate it is more the direct driving-forth of what is within and the truncated generation of the universal than it is the emergence of the latter from the concrete variety of existence. Hence the task nowadays consists not so much in purging the individual of an immediate, sensuous mode of apprehension, and making him into a substance that is an object of thought and that thinks, but rather in just the opposite, in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity so as to give actuality to the universal, and impart to it spiritual life. But it is far harder to bring fixed thoughts into a fluid state than to do so with sensuous existence. The reason for this was given above: fixed thoughts have the ‘I’, the power of the negative, or pure actuality, for the substance and element of their existence, whereas sensuous determinations have only powerless, abstract immediacy, or being as such. Thoughts become fluid when pure thinking, this inner immediacy, recognizes itself as a moment, or when the pure certainty of self abstracts from itself — not by leaving itself out, or setting itself aside, but by giving up. the fixity of its self-positing, by giving up not only the fixity of the pure concrete, which the ‘I’ itself is, in contrast with its differentiated content, but also the fixity of the differentiated moments which, posited in the element of pure thinking, share the unconditioned nature of the ‘P. Through this movement the pure thoughts become Notions, and are only now what they are in truth, self-movements, circles, spiritual essences, which is what their substance is’.
– ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’
Ancient and Modern Study. Hegel’s preface contends that we have a mistaken idea concerning thinking hence we confuse various forms of sophistry with philosophy, we confuse prejudices with the concept, we confuse obstacles to truth with the truth itself, and the problem with the current attitude toward thinking is summed up in the above paragraph wherein Hegel contrasts the ancient task of study with the modern task. The ancients had to transform the sensory world into something thinkable which amounted to seeing individual, sensed things as expressions of universal kinds, forms, powers, activities, or purposes. But the modern individual ‘finds the abstract form already prepared’, the modern person encounters the world not as a collection of sensory things in need of consistent laws and principles but as already grouped and arranged by inherited thoughts and failing to recognize this difference between ancient study and modern study the modern thinker does not grapple with thinking’s past as a condition of thinking’s present.
This means we moderns are constantly in danger of misrepresenting our own thinking to ourselves. René Descartes’ opening meditation manifests this tendency as he is aware that his schooling has given him an already interpreted world but he presumes that he can simply set this interpretation aside and start afresh from his experiences and as the meditations proceeds Descartes brings in countless thoughts as if they were natural to him while we can easily demonstrate these very thoughts to belong to his cultural inheritance and education, his Bildung. For instance the distinction between objective reality and formal reality is by no means a basic intuition rather it belongs to the scholastic academic and cultural environment that Descartes is struggling to escape from and such purblind inheritance hence forms a fixed stopping point for thinking, keeping it from fully reckoning with itself while the ancient task was to produce the content of philosophy by having consciousness ‘examine itself explicitly in every aspect of its existence’.
In Plato’s ‘Meno’, Meno puts forward various social prejudices as though they could serve as definitions of virtue, and Socrates endeavours to assist him in examining these aspects of particular existence to look for an abstract form. Aristotle too examines plants, animals, weather, stars, and every other aspect of consciousness’ particular existence, looking for the purposes that govern and arrange them as they are. For note that ancient Greeks inherited thoughts as much as we, but Hegel highlights a difference concerning the kinds of thoughts. Cultural inheritance before classical philosophy, before science, is more loosely arranged and more imagistic, that is, Vorstellung, and from Homer one can learn a certain kind of behaviour and and name it virtue and one may settle upon this behaviour as a community and re-enforce it through praise and blame. And yet upon being challenged, the evidence one appeals to, Homer’s poem, proves indefinite, it fails to satisfy the thoroughgoing investigation of thinking. Socrates demonstrates how easily Homer can be turned around and made to say something quite different. Ancient philosophers inherited locally valid images and turned them into universally valid thoughts taking their community’s peculiar cultural inheritance and analyzing it for forms that retain meaning across cultural boundaries. With mathematics and music leading the way the earliest phase of philosophy uncovered living universals and for we moderns these hard-won universals are a thoughtless inheritance.
This answers David Stove’s display of ignorance!:
‘Plato’s discovery went as follows.
It is possible for something to be a certain way and for something else to be the same way.
So
There are universals.
(Tumultuous applause, which lasts, despite occasional subsidences, 2,400 years.)[…]
‘Universals’ is simply the name philosophers give to the ways in which two or more things can be the same’.
- ‘Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution’, 1995
The understanding’s thoughts are already embedded in complex relationships of opposition and distinction that we take for granted and would struggle to recollect or uncover. Hegel gives some examples of such thoughts in the Preface: subject, object, God, nature, understanding, sensibility.
‘Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way in which we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account; with all its pros and cons, such knowing never gets anywhere, and it knows not why. Subject and object, God, Nature, Understanding, sensibility, and so on, are uncritically taken for granted as familiar,/established as valid, and made into fixed points for starting and stopping. While these remain unmoved, the knowing activity goes back and forth between them, thus moving only on their surface. Apprehending and testing likewise consist in seeing whether everybody’s impression of the matter coincides with what is· asserted about these fixed points, whether it seems that way to him or not’.
- ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’
There are entire treatises behind the distinctions and principles that we find familiar and ready for use. With Descartes we may try to set a thought content aside merely to discover it is already part of how we conduct our thinking, and working with undergraduates in philosophy classrooms can instruct us in how just hard it may be to call the inheritances of the understanding into question. In the absence of the ancient, first stage of Bildung, human beings would not have codified their images and sensations into thoughts that could transfer beyond cultural boundaries and consciousness would remain a reaction to particular conditions and would not become an active universality.
This was extremely significant, but for Hegel it is an error to assume that modern philosophy has this same task for our task is not to push local images toward universal thoughts but to take the fixed universal thoughts and render them fluid one again. The modern age is frequently characterised as one of novelty, innovation, construction, not to mention the supposed domination of nature by human ingenuity albeit nature bites back, and this is a risible misreading of the actual situation of modernity with its complex history and reliance upon traditions and cultural inheritances, and on Hegel’s account, modernity is not actually about originality, individuality, and trailblazing new ideas, modernity were it to acquire some self-awareness is about patient recollection, about making sense of thousands of years of human endeavour, discovering the patterns and rhythms of sense-making that can offer a path through the labyrinth of overwhelming inheritances.
‘The task of leading the individual from his uneducated standpoint to knowledge had to be seen in its universal sense, just as it was the universal individual, self-conscious Spirit, whose formative education had to be studied. As regards the relation between them, every moment, as it gains concrete form and a shape of its own, dispIays itself in the universal individual. The single individual is incomplete Spirit, a concrete shape in whose whole existence one determinateness predominates, the others being present only in blurred outline. In a Spirit that is more advanced than another, the lower concrete existence has been reduced to an inconspicuous moment; what used to be the important thing is now but a trace; its pattern is shrouded to become a mere shadowy outline. The individual whose substance is the more advanced Spirit runs through this past just as one who takes up a higher science goes through the preparatory studies he has long since absorbed, in order to bring their content to mind: he recalls them to the inward eye, but has no lasting interest in them. The single individual must also pass through the formative stages of universal Spirit so far as their content is concerned, but as shapes which Spirit has already left behind, as stages on a way that has been made level with toil. Thus, as far as factual information is concerned) we find that what in former ages engaged the attention of men of mature mind, has been reduced to the level of facts, exercises, and even games for. children; and in the child’s progress through school, we shall recognize the history of the cultural development of the world traced, as it were, in a silhouette. This past existence is the already acquired property of universal Spirit which constitutes the Substance of the individual and hence appears externally to him as his inorganic nature. In this respect formative education, regarded from the side of the individual consists in his acquiring what thus lies at hand, devouring his inorganic nature, and taking possession of it for himself. But, regarded from the side of universal Spirit as substance, this is nothing but its own acquisition of self-consciousness, the bringing-about of its own becoming and reflection into itself’.
- ‘Phenomenology of Mind’
What was once the life’s work of a mature, adult intelligence is now a lesson for schoolchildren, what was once at the forefront of mathematical investigation later becomes material for ten-year-olds a somewhat astonishing fact that needs facing up to, the work of countless generations is with us already concealing itself in our most familiar words, images, and thoughts and were we not to learn how to think through it it will use us giving rise to perpetually familiar forms of thinking which is to say pseudo-philosophical formalisms rather than genuine inquiry.
Dedicated with love to the One. In a world devasted by ignorance hatred and war love carries on. I love you until I die. ❤️🌹
It’s pretty nice
Pretty nice
When I’m overwhelmed
The bitter taste
Bitter taste
Mixed with our chemicals
I kinda like, kinda like
How it gives me chills, me chills
I kinda like, kinda like
How it gives you chills, you chills
We get sensations on the carpet
In the middle of your apartment
And there’s no reason for me to hide it
I wanna love you until we die, until we…
(Yeah, these sensations are so sensational)
You’re under me
Under me
And I’m sinking in
Never leave
Never leave
I don’t want this to end
Coming up next:
The Physical Elements in Nature.
It may stop but it never ends.
