On Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ : A Free Reflex of Spirit — part thirty four.
‘Loud without the wind was roaring’
by Emily Brontë (1818–1848)
Loud without the wind was roaring
Through th’autumnal sky;
Drenching wet, the cold rain pouring,
Spoke of winter nigh.
All too like that dreary eve,
Did my exiled spirit grieve.
Grieved at first, but grieved not long,
Sweet — how softly sweet! — it came;
Wild words of an ancient song,
Undefined, without a name.
“It was spring, and the skylark was singing:”
Those words they awakened a spell;
They unlocked a deep fountain, whose springing,
Nor absence, nor distance can quell.
In the gloom of a cloudy November
They uttered the music of May ;
They kindled the perishing ember
Into fervour that could not decay.
Awaken, o’er all my dear moorland,
West-wind, in thy glory and pride!
Oh! call me from valley and lowland,
To walk by the hill-torrent’s side!
It is swelled with the first snowy weather;
The rocks they are icy and hoar,
And sullenly waves the long heather,
And the fern leaves are sunny no more.
There are no yellow stars on the mountain
The bluebells have long died away
From the brink of the moss-bedded fountain —
From the side of the wintry brae.
But lovelier than corn-fields all waving
In emerald, and vermeil, and gold,
Are the heights where the north-wind is raving,
And the crags where I wandered of old.
It was morning: the bright sun was beaming;
How sweetly it brought back to me
The time when nor labour nor dreaming
Broke the sleep of the happy and free!
But blithely we rose as the dawn-heaven
Was melting to amber and blue,
And swift were the wings to our feet given,
As we traversed the meadows of dew.
For the moors! For the moors, where the short grass
Like velvet beneath us should lie!
For the moors! For the moors, where each high pass
Rose sunny against the clear sky!
For the moors, where the linnet was trilling
Its song on the old granite stone;
Where the lark, the wild sky-lark, was filling
Every breast with delight like its own!
What language can utter the feeling
Which rose, when in exile afar,
On the brow of a lonely hill kneeling,
I saw the brown heath growing there?
It was scattered and stunted, and told me
That soon even that would be gone:
It whispered, “The grim walls enfold me,
I have bloomed in my last summer’s sun.”
But not the loved music, whose waking
Makes the soul of the Swiss die away,
Has a spell more adored and heartbreaking
Than, for me, in that blighted heath lay.
The spirit which bent ‘neath its power,
How it longed — how it burned to be free!
If I could have wept in that hour,
Those tears had been heaven to me.
Well — well; the sad minutes are moving,
Though loaded with trouble and pain;
And some time the loved and the loving
Shall meet on the mountains again!
And some time the loved and the loving
Shall meet on the mountains again!
Genesis — Unquiet Slumbers for the Sleepers…/…In That Quiet Earth:
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831). ‘The Philosophy of Nature’. ‘Physics’.
I have been thinking, well as a philosopher it is part of my remit, it may be worth our while to look into what Alison Stone (1972 — ) refers to as Hegel’s phenomenological argument in his philosophy of nature, especially considering, at least this is my understanding, that it was Hegel’s view that philosophy is not phenomenology.
‘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’.
- Hegel, ‘Phenomenology of Spirit: Preface: On Scientific Cognition’, 1807.
Phenomenology is a study of Schein, appearance, I do love the German language. Although I have a translation of the ‘Science of Logic’ wherein the translator translates appearance as shine which may be a bit misleading.
Philosophy isn’t phenomenology? But, Hegel’s best known work has phenomenology in the title. Well, it is not part of his system proper, the worry is that natural consciousness, that’s consciousness prior to consciousness attaining the speculative standpoint, may try to assume the speculative standpoint immediately resulting in ordinary thinking trying to walk on its head to contort itself to fit the imagined shape of philosophical knowledge by force or violence.
And that is why Hegel does not merely say what philosophy is and then get down to it. First there is to be the phenomenological education of Spirit, Geist before we begin. The Phenomenology is a story of formative education, Bildung, not the education of a single individual but a universal education of human awareness, not a history of the world that begins with the first records of human activity and proceeds to the present but a story that begins with the simplest way of conceptualizing ourselves and our activity and proceeding to progressively richer modes of self-understanding. That is the glory of Hegelian philosophy, understanding who and what we are.
Phenomenology is not as it became for Edmund Husserl, (1859–1938), and his followers a new and improved way of doing philosophy, the phenomenological approach lacks philosophy’s speculative outlook on difference, it cannot see beyond differences to the common underlying activity that determines them as differences, the phenomenologist, even as he recognizes one set of phenomenal differences for example colours as differences that are not differences still clings to the familiar difference between ego and object as a foundation. To reach philosophy proper we must learn to release our hold on this root distinction that produces the whole field of phenomenal knowing and this is hard work.
Let us look then at the phenomenological argument of Hegel with reference to his thoughts on the elements.
‘According to an ancient and general opinion, each body consists of four elements. In more recent times, Paracelsus has regarded them as being composed of mercury or fluidity, sulphur or oil, and salt, which Jacob Boehme called the great triad. It has of course been very easy to refute these opinions and others of their kind, when these names have been taken to mean the individual empirical substances to which they refer in everyday usage. It should not be overlooked however, that in their essence they contain and express the determinations of the Notion. One ought rather to admire the strength of the yet unliberated thought which, when dealing with such sensuous and particular existences, grasped and held fast to nothing but the universal significance of its own determination. Consequently, it is also quite irrelevant to refute these doctrines in an experimental manner. What is more, as this manner of conceiving and determining draws its strength from the energy of reason, which does not allow itself to be completely forgotten, and is not led astray by the sensuous play and confusion of appearance, it is immensely superior to mere investigation, and to the undigested enumeration of the properties of bodies. The merit and glory of this investigation is thought to be its ceaseless provision of new facts, instead of the bringing of such a plurality of particulars back to the universal through the recognition of the Notion within them.
- ‘Philosophy of Nature’
Hegel offered two arguments to demonstrate that his rationalist metaphysics of nature is more adequate than the scientific view which I have covered in a previous article, I can’t remember which one it was now. It seems such a long time ago. Anyway, I address now two further arguments that Hegel’s system presents to support his metaphysics of nature while opening the door onto fertile novel ways of reconsidering the natural world the first of which Stone calls his phenomenological argument. Basically the argument is this. The rationalist metaphysics of nature is most adequate because somewhat uniquely it opens up the possibility of elaborating a theory of the natural world that remains continuous with the basic way in which we experience nature. According to Stone Hegel espouses a general principle that theories are adequate to the extent that they retain continuity with sensible experience which is to say experience which is not yet conceptual and Hegel’s commitment to this principle is entailed by his ideal of theoretical Bildung, cultivation or education, according to which theory should neither abandon nor immediately express sensible experience but articulate it in conceptual form. The ideal of theoretical Bildung is not fully formulated but is implied by the more fully developed ideal of practical Bildung which is structured parallel to theoretical Bildung and according to Hegel’s ideal of theoretical Bildung a theory of nature is adequate insofar as it articulates sensible experience of nature and he analyzes the basic form that experience of nature takes under the heading of sensation or sensibility (Empfindung) in the ‘Anthropology’ section of the ‘Philosophy of Mind’.
Empfindung might be rendered also as sensation though sensibility brings out the structured character of the experience in question whereas sensation suggests a completely structureless receiving of impressions as in the theory of David Hume’s theory of impressions and ideas, and of course translating Empfindung as sensibility recalls Hegel himself using Sensibilität to designate animals’ simply physiological capacity to sense, which does not as yet qualify as full sensible experience:
‘These three moments of the Notion are (b) not merely implicitly concrete elements, for they have their reality in three systems, i.e. the nervous system, the system of the blood, and the digestive system. As totality, each of these systems differentiates itself internally in accordance with the same Notional determinations. (i) Thus the system of sensibility determines itself into: (a) The extreme of abstract self-relation, which is at the same time a transition into immediacy, into inorganic being and absence of sensation. This remains an incomplete transition however, and it constitutes the osseous system, which encloses the entrails. Outwardly this system is the firmness protecting the entrails from without. (b) The moment of irritability, i.e. the cerebral system and its further diffusion in the nerves, which also have an inner and outer reference as nerves of sensation and motion. © The system pertaining to reproduction, which contains the sympathetic nerves together with the ganglia, and in which there is merely a subdued, indeterminate and involuntary sentience. (ii) Irritability is stimulation by an other, and the reaction of self-preservation in the face of this; conversely and to an equal extent, it is active self-preservation, and in this it submits itself to another. Its system consists of: (a) Muscle in general, which is abstract (sensible) irritability, and the simple conversion of receptivity into reaction. As a division of immediate self-relatedness, the muscle finds an outer hold on the skeleton, differentiating itself initially into extensor and flexor, and subsequently into the further special systems of the extremities. (b) Pulsation, which is inward activity, or irritability differentiated for itself in the face of another, and concretely self-related and contained. Pulsation is living self-movement, the material of which can only be a fluid, or living blood. This movement can only be circulatory, and initially specified into particularity in accordance with origin, it is in itself a circulation which is duplicated and at the same time orientated outwards. As such, it constitutes the pulmonary and portal systems, in the first of which the blood animates itself within itself, and in the second of which it kindles itself against another. © The irritable self-coalescing totality, by which puIsation constitutes the circulation which returns into itself from its centre in the heart, through the differentiation of arteries and veins. It is precisely as such that this circulation is an immanent process, in which there is a general supply of blood for the reproduction of the other members, and from which these members draw their nourishment. (iii) As a system of glands, together with skin and cellular tissue, the digestive system is immediate and vegetative reproduction. In the intestinal system proper however, it is a mediating reproduction’.
- ‘Philosophy of Nature’
Hegel juxtaposes Sensibilität with Irritabilität and Reproduktion as the three aspects of physiological shape a taxonomy widely accepted in his time, instituted by Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777) but such a notion of Sensibilität has no part to play in Hegel’s discussion of Empfindung.
According to Hegel’s analysis sensibility presents all objects as permeated by several fundamental natural elements, light, air, and earth, that are implicitly understood to comprise an indeterminate and volatile background against which those objects emerge and into which they perpetually dissolve hence sensibility embodies an experience of nature as this indeterminate milieu composed of the interacting and fluctuating elements, and against the backdrop of this analysis Hegel’s theory of nature can be observed to articulate the sensible experience of nature as elemental, for his theory characterizes natural forms as composed of light, air, and earth, and further Hegel contends that merely his rationalist metaphysics allows for the development of this theory of natural forms given that somewhat uniquely it opens the door to a conceptualization of the dynamism and fluidity of both the elements themselves and the various natural forms that the elements compose.
Hegelian rationalist metaphysics is uniquely adequate to the task it sets itself in virtue of its capability to construct a theory of nature that echoes our foundational sense of the elemental character of nature, indeed such interest in the theme of elemental nature is in particular manifested through Hegelian understanding of sensibility and nature featuring in a unified argument that an adequate theory has to characterize natural forms as both rational and as composed of the elements. An Hegelian conception of the elements plays its part in contributing to the argument for a rationalist understanding of nature that contrasts with contemporary science though also addressed are the elements outside the context of a defence of the rationalist conception of nature which is not relevant here. For instance there is a discussion of earth as the universal individual in the Phenomenology:
‘Now, since the universal life, qua the simple essence of the genus, develops from its side the differences of the Notion, and must exhibit them as a series of simple determinatnesses, this series is a system of differences posited as [mutually] indifferent, or is a numerical series. Whereas previously the organism in the form of a single individual was set over against this essenceless difference, which neither expresses nor contains its living nature; and whereas just the same — must be said in respect of the inorganic, taking it as an existence in which the whole of its properties are developed: it is now the universal individual we have to consider, and not merely as free from any systematization of the genus, but also as the power controlling the genus. The genus, which divides itself into species on the basis of the general determinateness of number, or which may adopt as its principle of division particular features of its existence, ·.g. shape, colour, etc. while peacefully engaged in this activity, suffers violence from the universal individual, the Earth, which as the universal negativity preserves the differences as they exist within itself-their nature, on account of the substance to which they belong, being different from the nature of those of the genus-and in face of the systematization of the genus. This action of the genus comes to he a quite restricted affair which it is permitted to carryon only inside those powerful elements, and which is interrupted, incomplete and curtailed on all sides by their unchecked violence’.
- ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’
Discussions of the elements appear and re-appear throughout Hegel’s later writings:
‘Just as the earth, the firm and solid ground, is a precondition of the principle of family life, so is the sea the natural element for industry, whose relations ,with the external world it enlivens. By exposing the pursuit of gain to danger, industry simultaneously rises above it; and for the ties of the soil and the limited circles of civil life with its pleasures and desires, it substitutes the element of fluidity, danger, and destruction. Through this supreme medium of communication, it also creates trading links between distant countries, a legal [rechtlichen] relationship which gives rise to contracts; and at the same time, such trade [Verkehr] is the greatest educational asset [Bildungsmittel] and the source from which commerce derives its world-historical significance’.
‘Rivers are not natural boundaries, which they have been taken to represent in modem times. On the contrary, both they and the oceans link human beings together. It is also inaccurate on Horace’s part to say:
deus abscidit
Prudens Oceano dissociabili
Terras·
This can be seen not only from the fact that river basins are inhabited by a single tribe or people, but also, for example, from the relations which existed in former times between Greece, Ionia, and Magna Graecia, between Brittany and Britain, between Denmark and Norway, Sweden, Finland, Livonia, etc.; it is also particularly clear when we contrast this with the lesser degree of contact between the inhabitants of coastal territories and those of the interior. — But in order to appreciate what an educational asset is present in the link with the sea, one should compare the relationship to the sea of those nations in which creativity has flourished with those which have shunned navigation and which, like the Egyptians and Indians, have stagnated internally and sunk into the most appalling and miserable superstition; one should likewise note how all great and enterprising nations push their way to the sea’.
- ‘Philosophy of Right’
[Note: ‘A prudent god separated the lands by the dividing ocean’]
In the ‘Aesthetics’ he relates the elements to the individual arts.
‘Sight, on the other hand, has a purely theoretical relation to objects by means of light, this as it were non-material matter. This for its part lets objects persist freely and independently; it makes them shine and appear but, unlike air and fire, it does not consume them in practice whether unnoticeably or openly. To vision, void of desire, everything is presented which exists materially in space as something outside everything else, but which, because it remains undisturbed in its integrity, is manifest only in its shape and colour’.
- Aesthetics’
Such passages can be better understood in the context of Hegel’s discussions of the elements in the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ and ‘Philosophy of Mind’. There is also a cultural background to Hegel’s discussion of the elements perhaps excluding Goethe’s doctrine of color and light which shows, according to Stone, a particular kinship with Hegel’s phenomenological approach and her reading of Hegel as defending his metaphysics of nature partly on phenomenological grounds raises a number of exegetical and philosophical questions, the former in that exegetically Hegel does not presents a phenomenological defense of his metaphysics of nature as a complete, interconnected, argument instead treating particular aspects of his thought that are usually considered separately this phenomenological argument is discovered implicit within them or more exactly the commitment to articulating sensibility is entailed by his ideal of theoretical Bildung while the closeness of his actual theory of nature to his analysis of sensible experience suggests that the formation of that theory is directed at some level by a commitment to articulating sensibility and there are textual grounds to suppose that Hegel at some level considered his theory of nature as well as the metaphysical assumptions underpinning it to suffice given their phenomenological character as can be seen in his conceptions of Bildung, sensibility, and elemental nature, all of which interconnect.
From a philosophical point of view the presence in the system of this phenomenological argument sheds light upon an aspect of his thought that is generally overlooked according to Stone, whereby on one standard reading, Hegel believes that philosophical thinking requires a purely rational and impersonal standpoint which breaks with sensibility but his attention to the elements demonstrates that this standard view oversimplifies his attitude toward sensible experience, and in actual fact his philosophy incorporates features supporting the view that philosophical thought has to stay consonant with sensibility and establish a theory of elemental nature which retains an experiential character absent from the disenchanted account of nature generated by modern science, (this disenchantment I discuss in an article some while back) but proponents of the more standard, intellectualist, reading of Hegel will not be persuaded prior to an analysis of Hegel’s substantive discussions of sensibility and elemental nature.
Bildung and the articulation of sensibility. Hegel defends his theory of nature on the grounds that it successfully articulates the sensible way we experience nature. How so? Would this make him an empiricist that is to say believing that theoretical claims are only justified insofar as they are derived from sense experience, through analysis, abstraction, or induction, as he says elsewhere:
‘Empiricism was the initial result of a double need: there was the need first for a concrete content, as opposed to the abstract theories of the understanding that cannot advance from its universal generalisations to particularisation and determination on its own, and secondly for a firm hold against the possibility of proving any claim at all in the field, and with the method, of the finite determinations. Instead of seeking what is true in thought itself, Empiricism proceeds to draw it from experience, from what is outwardly or inwardly present’.
- ‘Encyclopaedia Logic’
Empiricism recognizes that experience is an indispensable element in knowledge, the initial result of a double need, first for a concrete content and secondly for a firm hold against the possibility of proving any claim at all in the field [of traditional speculative metaphysics, but empiricism in the end is self-defeating, insofar as he agrees with Hume that general claims cannot legitimately be derived from merely particular sense experiences. Hegel’s limited support for empiricism leads to an accommodation of empirical findings by incorporating them into his basically a priori theory of nature therefore acknowledging that experience is essential to knowledge without making experience the grounds of theory and albeit experience is accommodated within his theory of nature there is no endorsement of the empiricist view that theories of nature must needs be justified by derivation from sense experience. Robert Stern contends that Hegel frequently treats it as axiomatic that our original access to the world is experiential but never translates this into an endorsement of empiricism as an epistemological position.
‘The principle of experience contains the infinitely important determination that, for a content to be accepted and held to be true, man must himself be actively involved with it,b more precisely, that he must find any such content to be at one and in unity with the certainty of his own self. He must himself be involved with it, whether only with his external senses, or with his deeper spirit, with his essential consciousness of self as well.-This is the same principle that is today called faith, immediate knowing, revelation in the outer [world] , and above all in one’s own inner [world] . We call the sciences that have the name ‘philosophy’ empirical sciences, because of their point of departure. But their essential purpose and results are laws, universal principles, a theory; i. e., the thoughts of what is present’.
- ‘Encyclopaedia Logic’
The phenomenological argument for the theory of nature therefore is to be distinguished from any empiricist approach to its justification, the phenomenological argument turns upon the notion not that a theory of nature is justified insofar as it is derived from sensible experience but that a theory is adequate insofar as it articulates sensible experience’s inchoate structure, hence the phenomenological argument differs from empiricism in two ways. First, it presupposes that sensible experience of nature has inchoate structure. It does not consist of a disconnected multitude of sensory impressions, but of impressions given internal shape and structure through principles imposed by the subject of experience. Hegel follows Kant in maintaining that experience (Erfahrung) is only possible through the subject’s imposition of structure onto its sensory impressions but whereas for Kant the subject imposes forms of intuition and categories of the understanding upon the givens of sensibility for Hegel the subject also more basically imposes patterns upon its impressions at the purely sensible level, therefore sensibility, the reception of sensory impressions, already evinces internal structure prior to any further imposition of forms of intuition or categories. .
Secondly the fact that sensible experience of nature is internally structured in this way makes it possible to provide a theory of nature which articulates this elementary structure restating the structure in conceptual form and only a theory of nature that so articulates sensible experience will count as adequate and derivatively only that metaphysics of nature that makes it possible to produce such a theory will count as adequate. John Compton argues for Hegel’s commitment to a phenomenological justification for his theory of nature and situates Hegel in a tradition of philosophers who take a broadly similar approach to nature, including Aristotle, Schelling, Husserl, and Whitehead. Compton asserts that despite the existence of this tradition we today ‘do not understand by ‘philosophy of nature’ any inclusive, continuing or compelling philosophical agenda’.
Compton solution is an overarching re-reading of this tradition of philosophy of nature according to which it proceeds by evoking our basic prescientific understanding of nature and then reinterpreting scientific hypotheses and theories as emerging from and remaining continuous with this prescientific sense of nature for instance according to the later Husserl, our basic understanding of nature is practical and rooted in the everyday life-world with which scientific theories must be reintegrated. Undergirding such a project of reinterpreting science is an assumption that scientific claims are only valid insofar as they ‘cohere with and extend, but [do] not negate’ humanity’s pre-intellectual understanding of nature and scientific claims that cannot be reinterpreted to cohere with this understanding have to be revised and maybe even rejected and Compton’s analysis of the philosophy of nature highlights Hegel’s principle view that we have a basic sensible experience of nature that an adequate account of nature has to enlarge upon.
But whereas Compton supposes that phenomenological philosophers of nature aspire to reinterpret existing science so that it coheres with prescientific experience Hegel contends that we require a basically unique one of a kind theory of nature that coheres with sensibility. Hegel’s variation upon phenomenological philosophy of nature brings him close to the natural scientific approach of Goethe whose doctrine of colour and light as presented in his 1810 ‘Theory of Colours’ (Farbenlehre) is premised upon the belief that adequate scientific theories have to remain grounded in our experience of phenomena. Goethe’s Farbenlehre was well-known in Hegel’s time, and Hegel was sympathetic to it, he reformulates and defends at length Goethe’s account of colour:
‘When metals are heated so that a change of specific gravity takes place, ‘their surfaces exhibit a succession of fleeting colours, which can even be fixed there at will’. (Goethe ‘Theory of Colours’ pt. i + p. 191.) An entirely different principle occurs in the chemical determination of colour by acid however; in this case a lightening of darkness, a more immanent self-manifestation, a fiery activity is involved. In considering colours as such, we should in the first instance exclude any hindering, darkening or brightening brought about by chemical action; for the chemical substance, like the eye in the case of the subjective physiological phenomena of colour, is a concrete entity containing many further determinations, and those connected with colour cannot therefore be identified and isolated with any degree of certainty. The identification of anything in the concrete object relating to colour in the abstract, will in fact presuppose a knowledge of abstract colour’.
- ‘Philosophy of Nature’
Goethe’s phenomenological approach to colour supposedly formed a significant background influence upon Hegel’s what Stone calls his phenomenological argument for his theory of nature. In the Farbenlehre, Goethe analyzes colour as arising when light which in itself is pure unitary and white interacts with darkness. Goethe therefore opposes Newton’s view that white light is composed of all the primary colours, more precisely of rays of light that can be differently refracted to produce these colours. Goethe’s principle gripe is that Newton’s theory breaks with experience, portraying colours as simply epiphenomena of a reality that must fundamentally be characterized in abstract geometrical terms. Goethe maintains that an adequate theory of colour as of any natural form must, instead grow out of the phenomena of colour as perceived.
Goethe proceeds in line with such a view to look over the multiplicity of experienced colour phenomena and then trace their interrelations attempting to pare down his dependence upon pre-established hypotheses or theories with the objective according to Dennis Sepper to ‘work through the empirical givens towards the discovery of a unifying appearance or event that can be recognized in all the individual instances’ while he looks to elicit from experienced phenomena their unifying principles in this instance that colour arises through the darkening of white light where these principles can be discovered manifest within the phenomena as their inner organization. And just as so far as these principles are manifest in phenomena they can themselves be perceived, and so Goethe designates them archetypal phenomena (or Urphenomena). Rather than taking Newton’s lead in constructing a theory that describes light and colour as essentially different from how we experience them Goethe is after a different sort of theory one which articulates unifying principles that remain concretely contained within our experience of colour and light.
Theory of this kind Goethe contends remains congruent with experience rather than breaking with it. In his classic statement: ‘
‘The ultimate goal would be: to grasp that everything in the realm of fact is already theory. The blue of the sky shows us the basic law of chromatics. Let us not seek for something behind the phenomena — they themselves are the theory’.
- ‘Maxims and Reflections’
Like all those working in the tradition of phenomenological philosophy of nature as Compton has described it Goethe thought that we have a basic sensible experience of nature with which an adequate account of nature must remain integrated, but whereas according to Compton philosophers of nature re-interpret existing science to integrate it with phenomenal experience Goethe believes that we need to work toward a new kind of science, a qualitative, concrete science that is properly phenomenologically grounded from the off, arising out of rigorous attentiveness to perception and experience. Hegel’s position is somewhat different in that he agrees with Goethe that we need a basically new, one of a kind theory of nature to cohere with sensibility but that such a theory has to be a priori and philosophical and not empirical and scientific.
From an Hegelian perspective empirical science must insofar as it remains authentically empirical be necessarily committed to the metaphysics of bare things and I don’t mean Florence Pugh (I slip these jokes in to see if you are paying attention) and hence it is unable to side step deviating from sensibility. Hence while Hegel endorses Goethe’s program of developing a new and phenomenologically resonant account of nature he diverges from Goethe in believing that this program can be fulfilled only at a philosophical level. Despite his familiarity with and concurrence with Goethe’s program for a phenomenologically integrated account of nature Hegel himself never explicitly or directly presents his phenomenological argument as an integrated whole but rather his commitment to the phenomenological argument for his theory of nature forms a principle part of his ideal of theoretical Bildung.
Alas such an ideal remained underdeveloped lost in the shades of the more developed ideal of practical Bildung whereby Bildung, culture, is conceived of as the outcome of a process of education (Erziehung or Pädagogik) and in the footsteps of prior Enlightenment thinkers in particular Moses Mendelssohn he considers Bildung to divide between theoretische Bildung and praktische Bildung.
‘The variety of determinations and objects [Gegenstande] which are worthy of interest is the basis from which theoretical education develops. This involves not only a variety of representations [VorstelIungen] and items of knowledge [Kentnissen], but also an ability to form such representations [des Vorstellens] and pass from one to the other in a rapid and versatile manner, to grasp complex and general relations lBeziehungen], etc. — it is the education of the understanding in general, and therefore also includes language. — Practical education through work consists in the self-perpetuating need and habit of being occupied in one way or another, in the limitations of one’s activity to suit both the nature of the material in question and, in particular, the arbitrary will of others, and in a habit, acquired through this discipline, of objective activity and universally applicable skills’.
- ‘Philosophy of Right’
[Hegel’s division stems from Mendelssohn’s 1784 essay ‘On the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’ although Mendelssohn differentiated theoretical Aufklärung from practical Cultur].
Much of Hegel’s reflections upon education address its practical side and yet given he believes the two forms of education run in parallel an exploration of his model of practical education will clear up his view of its theoretical side and Stone contends that Hegel’s ideal of practical education implies that theory should articulate sensible experience which entails that an adequate theory of nature should articulate sensible experience of nature in particular. Hegel formulates his conception of practical education in response to what he perceives as the pressing need to overcome the socially entrenched opposition between duty and desire and this belongs within a network of fundamental oppositions which he thinks philosophy must overcome, oppositions between humanity and nature, duty and desire, self and community, and finite and infinite mind.
Hegel believes that the opposition between acting from duty (pure practical reason) and acting from (predominantly self-interested) sensible desires became institutionalized with the Enlightenment receiving its supreme expression in Kant’s ethics and in Hegel’s early writings especially ‘The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate’ he criticises Kant’s support for this duty/desire antagonism. Hegel contends that whoever adheres to the moral that is to say Kantian) standpoint is unfree because he carries his master in himself, yet is at the same time his own servant’ punitively forcing his sensible self to subserve his rational self. By the time of his mature system, Hegel’s hostility to Kant was not so marked indeed he makes a number of comments praising Kant:
‘I should do my duty [Pflicht] for its own sake … In doing my duty, I am with myself and free. The merit and exalted viewpoint of Kant’s philosophy are that it has emphasized this significance of duty’.
- ‘Philosophy of Right’
‘That which is just and ethical, however, belongs to the essential, universal will, which has being in itself, and in order to know what is truly right one must abstract from inclination, drive, desire as the particular; one must therefore know what the will in itself is. For benevolent, charitable, sociable drives remain drives, to which various other drives are opposed’.
- ‘Philosophy of History’
He now maintains that Kantian Moralität is excessively demanding because individuals can never prescind from sensible motivations to act from reason alone, action being possible only where the agent expects some sensible gratification from it:
‘An action is a purpose of the subject, and it is his activity which realises this purpose; only because the subject is in even the most disinterested action in this way, i.e. through his interests, is there any action at all .. drive and passion are the very life of the subject: they are needed if the agent is to be in his purpose and its realisation’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
The later Hegel concedes that this desire for sensible satisfaction may frequently conflict with the requirements of morality as specified by pure practical reason hence he endeavours to reconcile the necessity of sensible gratification with the morally binding character of rational requirements by arguing that individuals should instil their sensible urges with rationality, so that they will sensibly desire the good rather than impossibly longing to chase after it from duty alone, an Aristotelian answer to the reason/passion conflict. And so in the ‘Philosophy of Right’ the claim s made that individuals can only act in accordance with rational requirements if their drives undergo purification so that they internally concur with rationality and underlying the demand for the purification of the drives is the general idea that they should be freed from the form of their immediate natural determinacy and from the subjectivity and contingency of their content, and restored to their substantial essence and the truth behind this indeterminate demand is that the drives should become the rational system of the will’s determination.
Drives should be cultivated to agree from within with the rational requirements that the will determines itself to obey and in this respect the later Hegelian ethics remains after all continuous with the Spirit of Christianity,in which he alleges that love the spontaneous virtue of the passions, renders the strictures of morality palatable and averts sadomasochistic enslavement to oneself. This cultivation of drives is not a matter for the solitary individual, cultivation depends upon education by appropriately rational social institutions for example through imposing marital bonds upon individuals’ sexual drives the family cultivates them into rational feelings of love, fidelity, and commitment. Similarly civil society establishes an all-round economic interdependence which cultivates individuals’ originally purely self-interested desires for material well-being by infusing them with a simultaneous concern to promote the general good, and as for how exactly Hegel understands the social cultivation/education of drives:
‘Education [Pädagogik] is the art of making human beings ethical: it considers them as natural beings and shows how they can be reborn, and how their original nature can be transformed into a second, spiritual nature so that this spirituality becomes habitual to them’.
- ‘Philosophy of Right’
There are two seemingly incompatible models of education, the first is a disciplinary model upon which education coerces individuals to suppress their natural desires and act instead as rational social norms dictate and eventually the individual becomes habituated to these norms that come to comprise his or her second nature at which point he or she can again be left free to act from his or her desires because these are now ingrained social norms rather than the merely natural drives he or she originally possessed and so from this perspective Hegel states that ‘in habit [Gewohnheit] … the resistance of the subject is broken’. and addressing the pedagogical coercion of children in particular argues that ‘One of the chief moments in a child’s education is discipline [Zucht], the purpose of which is to break the child’s self-will in order to eradicate the merely sensuous and natural’.
So, children’s natural desires are exclusively self-interested and hence must be suppressed for the child to become fully social, to which Robert Williams remarks his model of pedagogy here appears harshly ‘authoritarian-penal’. Jeffrey Reid on the other hand contends that Hegel espoused this pedagogical model in reaction against the prevalent romantic model of Bildung associated with Humboldt, Fichte, and Schleiermacher as a spontaneous, instinctually driven, process of self-development personified in the genius. But it is apparent that Hegel often envisages education as a process of suppressing natural desires and replacing them with internalized social norms.
This disciplinary model does not account for all Hegel’s remarks concerning education, education is also a process that should not suppress but sublate natural desires: children ‘must learn to … sublate [aufheben] their mere individual or particular wills and, moreover, … their sensible inclinations and desires, [so] that … their will may become free’. The crucial reference to sublation implies that natural desires should not be eradicated to make room for social norms but retained albeit thoroughly transformed and redirected and this opens up a developmental model of education different from the disciplinary model. Whereas Hegel’s disciplinary model envisages natural desires being progressively weakened and finally superseded by internalized social norms the developmental model envisages those desires being reorganized around their element of latent rationality and sociality Hegel making this explicit in discussing the educative function of art, which, he comments, purifies the drives by ‘dividing pure from impure in the passions’ sifting out and accentuating the passions’ implicitly universal and essential content.
Reasons we should take Hegel’s developmental model as definitive: It is better integrated with his picture of how modern social institutions function pedagogically, marital relationships do not eradicate spouses’ sexual feelings, but draw out and reinforce the proto-rational element of mutual respect and commitment immanent within those feelings.
‘Marriage … contains first the moment of natural vitality [Lebendigkeit] … But secondly, in self-consciousness, the union of the natural sexes, which was merely inward (or had being only in itself) and whose existence was for this very reason merely external, is transformed [umgewandelt] into a spiritual union, into self-conscious love’.
- ‘Philosophy of Right
And likewise civil society does not discipline its members to suppress and eradicate their self-interested tendencies but encourages them to recognize and embrace the adherence to the common good which is already implicit in their self-interested desires.
The developmental model coheres better with Hegel’s understanding of the desires or passions that he insists contain an essential, substantial, or proto-rational core. Hegel justifies this insistence in the ‘Philosophy of Mind’ by tracing the conceptual structures pervading every layer of mental life.
The developmental model coheres better with Hegel’s overriding ambition that education should overcome the duty/desire opposition and urging that desires should be eradicated would hardly contest Kant’s opposition of duty to desire, on the contrary it would carry that opposition through more decisively than Kant himself did. According to Stone Hegel in the end was committed to the developmental model since he is often associated exclusively with the disciplinary model in the secondary literature and scholars typically construe Hegel as a disciplinarian since the scheme of progression from natural desires to social norms to re-naturalized norms exemplifies his preferred ontological pattern of progression from unity to division to higher unity. However, this ontological pattern is equally instantiated by the developmental form of education, involving progression from immediate natural desires to the accentuation of the rational nucleus within those desires and lastly the successful reorientation of the desires around their rational element.
Upon turning to theoretical education Hegel repeats his assertion concerning the urgent need to overcome the modern culture of entrenched division (Entzweiung) between reason and sense, or theoretical understanding and sensible experience and an indictments of this oppositional culture is to be found in his lectures on Art:
‘[T]his … battle of mind against flesh, of duty for duty’s sake … [now appears] as the contradiction between the dead inherently empty concept, and the full concreteness of life, between theory or subjective thinking, and objective existence and experience. … Mental culture, the modern understanding, produces this opposition in man which makes him amphibious … he lifts himself to eternal ideas, to a realm of thought and freedom … strips the world of its enlivened and flowering reality and dissolves it into abstractions … But for modern culture and its understanding this discordance in life and consciousness involves the demand that such a contradiction be resolved’.
- ‘Aesthetics’
Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana, (1590–1662), ‘O Magnum Mysterium’
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The parallel with Hegel’s concern to overcome the duty/desire antithesis suggests that he must urge that sensible experience be developed, cultivated, until its content inwardly reflects that of theoretical understanding albeit he characterizes this process of theoretical education in sometimes disciplinary, sometimes developmental terms:
‘Habit is part of the ethical, just as it is part of philosophical thought, since the latter requires that the mind should be formed [gebildet] to resist arbitrary fancies and that these should be broken and overcome to clear the way for rational thought’.
- ‘Philosophy of Right’
This makes theoretical education like practical education in that fancies, like desires, should be broken and superseded by rational thinking but then even here Hegel advocates for cultivation conceived in developmental terms, in the ‘Philosophy of Mind’ according to which education enables individuals to surmount or resist the “madness” of submergence in single sense impressions:
‘Self-feeling, immersed in the particularity of the feelings (of simple sensations, and also desires, urges, passions, and their gratifications) , is not distinguished from them. Bur the self is implicitly a simple relation of ideality to itself, formal universality, and this is the truth of the particular; in this life of feeling the self is to be posited as this universality; thus it is the universality that distinguishes itself from particularity, the universality that is for itself. This universality is not the content-packed truth of the determinate sensations, desires, etc., for their content does not yet come into consideration here. Particularity is, in this determination, just as formal; it is only the particular being or immediacy of the soul in contrast to its equally formal, abstract being-for-self. This particular being of the soul is the moment of its bodiliness; here it breaks with this bodiliness, distinguishing from it itself as its simple being and becomes the ideal, subjective substantiality of this bodiliness, just as in its implicit concept it was the only the unqualified substance of bodiliness’.
‘That the soul thus makes itself into abstract universal being, and reduces the particularity of feelings (of consciousness too) to a determination in it that j ust is, is habit. In this way the soul has the content in possession, and contains it in such a way that in such determinations it is not actually sentient, it does not stand in relationship to them by distinguishing itself from them, nor is it absorbed in them, but it has them in itself and moves in them, without sensation or consciousness. The soul is free of them, in so far as it is not interested in or occupied with them; while it exists in these forms as its possessions, it is at the same time open to other activity and occupations, in the sphere of sensation and the mind’s consciousness in general’.
- ‘Philosophy of Mind’
Education does this by inculcating in individuals repetitive habits that accentuate the regularities in their experience, enabling them to detect those regularities and then organize their experiences under correspondingly general concepts and these educative habits initiate a process of ‘building up the particular or corporeal determinations of feeling into the being of the soul [via] … a repetition of them. … the external multiplicity of sensibility is reduced to its unity, this abstract unity is posited’. Hence education leads individuals beyond arbitrary fancies by positioning them to articulate in general concepts the patterns already implicit within their repeated experience and so just as practical education cultivates individuals’ sensible desires by reorienting them around their rational centre theoretical education cultivates sensible experience by leading individuals to articulate conceptually the rational centre of this experience around which its remaining purely sensible aspects are reorganized.
The analogy between theoretical and practical education discloses that Hegel believes that theoretical culture should articulate sensible experience rather than breaking with it and this ideal of theoretical culture entails that acceptable theories will be those that articulate how we sensibly experience their objects of enquiry and by extension an acceptable theory of nature must articulate our implicitly rationally structured sensible awareness of the natural world. The ideal of theoretical Bildung therefore already implies a commitment, according to Stone, for his theory of nature which is borne out by the substantive content of his theory that meshes closely with his analysis of sensible experience of nature suggesting that he aspired while directed by his ideal of theoretical Bildung, to construct a theory that coheres with sensible experience and from here we need to look into how the theory of nature relates to Hegel’s analysis of sensible experience.
Divertimento 1: Fluid 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.
‘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’
The suggestion here is that the task of Bildung, education or cultivation, is always to enliven and invigorate the activity of thinking which is the case of ancient, medieval, or modern Bildung whereby they have the same end but arrive at it via differing means, thinking is by nature active but by habit can quite easily become passive, and early on in its development in the ancient world Spirit or Geist had to work against the fixity of sensuous existences in the imagination while later it must work against the fixity of principles in the understanding. And now the task that befalls upon us modern thinkers is to bring ‘fixed thoughts into fluidity’, a much harder task than that which confronted the ancients, bringing fixed thoughts into fluidity is not at all easy in virtue of it insisting that we relinquish something even nearer and dearer to us than the familiar stability of sensuous existences for it insists that we relinquish the fixity of the ‘I’ or itself as a principle. The thoughts that I have inherited indeed belong to me and I view them not as a transmission but as the product of my own will and it is this muddle that hampers the progress of recollection (Erinnerung … this is crucial to Hegel’s philosophy) that would reintroduce activity and dynamism and fluidity into the landscape of thoughts.
Here is something that Hegel introduces in a number of ways in the preface to the Phenomenology. The individual subject has to forfeit whatever pretence it has to complete independence and acknowledge I-ness as a moment in the total movement of thinking as such, the I is not the foundation of thinking, rather thinking is the foundation of the I which is only one species of thinking. Thinking need not be always identified as mine, identified with an I, it can also be your thought or it can be anonymous and it can be the sort of thinking I identify with this discipline or this institution or this language, and so on, and on. Descartes approaches nearly such a critical thought when he looks upon thinking as indubitable to itself but then immediately interprets this foundation as his own thinking. ‘I think, I am as opposed to ‘there is thinking, there is being’. The I is not the preeminent or fundamental kind of selfhood but it presents itself as such hence to make thoughts fluid requires the work of a phenomenology through which we will learn to see the ego-object disparity as merely one species of negativity among others.
Georg Philipp Telemann, Divertimento in a major:
‘The disparity which exists in consciousness between the ‘I’ and the substance which is its object is the distinction between them, the negative in general. This can be regarded as the defect of both, though it is their soul, or that which moves them. That is why some of the ancients conceived the void as the principle of motion, for they rightly saw the moving principle as the negative, though they did not as yet grasp that the negative is the self. Now, although this negative appears at first as a disparity between the ‘I’ and its object, it is just as much the disparity substance with itself. Thus what seems to happen outside of it, to be an activity directed against it, is really its own doing, and Substance shows itself to be essentially Subject. When it has shown this completely, Spirit has made its existence identical with its essence; it has itself for its object just as it is, and the abstract element of immediacy, and of the separation of knowing and truth, is overcome. Being is then absolutely mediated; it is a substantial content which is just as immediately the property of the ‘I’, it is self-like or the Notion. With this, the Phenomenology of Spirit is concluded. What Spirit prepares for itself in it, is the element of [true] knowing. In this element the moments of Spirit now spread themselves out in that form of simplicity which knows its object as its own self. They no longer fall apart into the antithesis of being and knowing, but remain in the simple oneness of knowing; they are the True in the form of the True, and their difference is only the difference of content. Their movement, which organizes itself in this element into a whole, is Logic or speculative philosophy’.
– ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’
Dissolving the subject-object disparity, the task of modern Bildung, is much more difficult than relinquishing the individuality of some sensible particular or other for the purpose of seeing it as a moment in the activity of a universal form, the task of ancient Bildung, the ancients had merely to demonstrate that sensuous immediacy is already mediated whereas moderns have to demonstrate that mediation itself, that is to say, the subject-object disparity, is mediated, that is by negativity in general. We have to learn to see what we regard as an ultimate horizon for thought, subject-object consciousness, is merely one species within the genus of thinking more broadly conceived and to bring to light further this problem the impotent abstract immediacy of being as the condition for sensuous determinations is compared with the power of the I as a condition for thought determinations.
Let us delve more deeply. Being is identified with abstract immediacy and to apprehend the whole as an abstract immediacy is to apprehend what is called being, this does not mean that being itself is abstract immediacy but that the way of thinking the whole which we associate with the name being is of this kind, the abstract here refers to a lack of context, an absence of prior reflections which qualify the claim to immediacy, an abstract immediacy is abstracted or removed from its surroundings or conditions. Abstract immediacy as opposed to concrete or achieved immediacy is a kind of bare assertion without any background, context, condition, or qualification and we must not assume that the only form of immediacy possible is necessarily abstract because any form of context would render the content non-immediate.
Hegel had contended earlier in the preface nonetheless that upon demonstrating a mediated content to be self-mediating that is to say the source of its own mediations then a content has been identified that is both mediated and in a very particular sense immediate to the extent that it is not mediated by anything outside itself but rather by its own self, and this special sort of content is not an abstract immediacy but a concrete immediacy and there is little by way of obstacle to countering any determination presented in the mode of abstract immediacy. In the chapter on sense-certainty in the Phenomenology there are several instances of this. For example, and this recalls trwarks made by both Aristotle and Augustine on time, the impossibility of identifying an individual now, for once we identify the now it has already passed, if we write down, ‘now it is night’ as an endeavour to articulate the immediate truth of pure being this will be false upon reading it later, and any endeavour to articulate the truth of immediacy is already mediated, and if immediacy is to be known as true it must be articulated. Hence the immediate appearance of something to the senses is not a stable, reliable truth and this is a profound lesson that was taught to us by the earliest philosophers, such is the impotence of sensuous immediacy that ancient philosophy was required to expose, but what is the power of the I that modern philosophy must needs overturn?
The I is already a movement, already a mediating activity, hence it cannot be taken by surprise with as much ease as it can be pointed out that that the now or any sensuous immediacy for that matter is never the same. I carries on being I even while consciousness changes. Kant’s account of the transcendental ego, the I think that accompanies every possible representation, is a reasonable articulation of the power of the I and the ego can accompany any thought without being unhorsed so to speak or demonstrated to be conditioned by something else. For this very reason Kant regards the transcendental unity of apperception as a condition for any experience whatsoever and many philosophers to this day concur with this but Hegel on the other hand contends that there is an activity of thinking that proves even more fundamental than the activity of thinking we associate with the I that represents things to itself. I-centred accounts of thinking are to be challenged.
And this is a principle task of modern philosophical Building, to challenge the I-centred accounts of thinking which have risen to prominence, and in the process of doing so to render thinking fluid.
‘Thoughts become fluid insofar as pure thinking, this inner immediacy, recognizes itself as a moment, or insofar as the pure conscience abstracts from itself, — not to be left behind or set to the side, — but [so that] it gives up the fixity of its self-positing [Sichselbstsetzens] and also gives up the fixity of the purely concrete, which is the I itself in opposition to different contents, as much as it gives up the fixity of differences, which are posited in the element of pure thinking and participate in the unconditionedness [Unbedingtheit] of the I’.
– ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’
To put it another way how thinking becomes fluid, the task of modern philosophy, can be apprehended as a sublation of the subject-object disparity albeit this sublation is a lengthy process and it is what Hegel is endeavouring to do throughout the Phenomenology but the above description provides some indications as to why this sublation that is to say this negation, internalization, and contextualization of the subject-object framework is so difficult to attain. Hegel demonstrates the ego to have layers such that giving up one layer is not good enough in the absence of giving up them all. The work of the ego can be found in self-positing, in the opposition to differentiated content, and in the differentiations themselves, the I demonstrating quite a tenacity and sustainability and ability to bounce back. It is so very adept at negating itself in part without negating itself in full which recalls every time some aspect of consciousness is called into question without a questioning of the self-positing of consciousness itself.
Such partial or incomplete negativity works for the ego because the ego itself is a power of negation, as a matter of fact the ego is presumptuous enough to regard itself as the power of negation, for every time I delay gratification, and yes I have been known so to do, I am exercising the power of the I to negate itself in one respect without surrendering ‘the fixity of its self-positing’, I can extend my interest into the non-actual, into the future, into the possible and build my nest there, and while I negate the sensuous existences and determinations of the present, this does not undermine the unconditionedness of egoity itself and to go further and surrender this fixity of self-positing hence allowing thinking to become fluid is not to surrender this or that desire but to surrender the fixed structure of desire itself. Surrendering fixity here does not amount to leaving the I behind or setting it aside, it is rather a matter of recognizing the ego within Geist not putting the ego aside to embrace Geist instead, and what this means is that we do not in actual fact surrender desire we rather re-position it inside a more comprehensive activity of being-a-self, the ego is not surrendered, but its fixity is, a process Hegel characterises in the last passage quoted above.
Dedicated to my lovely Muse who has taught me new sensations oooh yes I want the principles of my timeless Muse …
I don’t like guilt be it stoned or stupid Drunk and disorderly I ain’t no cupid Two years ago today I was arrested on Christmas Eve
I don’t want pain, I want to walk not be carried I don’t want to give it up, I want to stay married I ain’t no dog tied to a parked car
Ooohhh, new sensations Ooohhh, new sensations
Talkin’ ‘bout some new sensations Talkin’ ‘bout some new sensations
I want the principles of a timeless muse I want to eradicate my negative views And get rid of those people who are always on a down
It’s easy enough to tell what is wrong But that’s not what I want to hear all night long Some people are like human tuinals
Ooohhh, new sensations Ooohhh, ooohhh, new sensations
Talkin’ ‘bout some new sensations Talkin’ a new sensations
I took my GPZ out for a ride The engine felt good between my thighs The air felt cool, it’s was forty degrees outside
I rode to Pennsylvania near the Delaware Gap Sometimes I got lost and had to check the map I stopped at a roadside diner for a burger and a coke
There were some country folk and some hunters inside Somebody got themselves married and somebody died I went to the juke box and played a hillbilly song
They was arguing about football as I waved and went outside And I headed for the mountains feeling warm inside I love that GPZ so much, you know that I could kiss her
Ooohhh, new sensations Ooohhh, ooohhh, new sensations
Talkin’ ‘bout your new sensations Talkin’ new sensations
Ooohhh, new sensations Ooohhh, new sensations Ooohhh, new sensations Ooohhh, new sensations Ooohhh, new sensations
Lou Reed ‘New Sensations’:
Coming up next:
The Elements in Sensibility.
It may stop but it never ends.
