On Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ : A Free Reflex of Spirit — part thirty one.
‘Sonnet 44’
by William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
Injurious distance should not stop my way;
For then despite of space I would be brought,
From limits far remote where thou dost stay.
No matter then although my foot did stand
Upon the farthest earth removed from thee;
For nimble thought can jump both sea and land
As soon as think the place where he would be.
But ah! thought kills me that I am not thought,
To leap large lengths of miles when thou art gone,
But that so much of earth and water wrought
I must attend time’s leisure with my moan,
Receiving nought by elements so slow
But heavy tears, badges of either’s woe.
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831). ‘Philosophy of Nature’. ‘Physics’.
First, a look at Hegelian materialism, followed by a discussion of matter conceived as motion, and then the fluidity of matter. The self-transforming continuity of matter is ‘absolute fluidity, the truly real earthy matter’. Then, a return to terrestrial physics, an approach detailing the process of the Earth’s own life, and finally a brief look at Hegel’s theory of organism looking ahead to when we have finished with the ‘Physics’ section and move on to the final part of the ‘Philosophy of Nature’, ‘Organism’.
So, Hegelian materialism. Nature is not now a stage in the evolution of Spirit and no longer need we discover man and woman’s place in nature as a required prolegomena to transcendental philosophy on the contrary nature has a necessary function both in the evolution and in the developed existence of Spirit, and so it is incorrect to speak of Nature as the reality of the Idea so that Nature includes the self-realization of finite Spirit which takes over the order of physical Nature as its body. Hegel no longer speaks of the Idea as embodied in the Heavens or as coming down to Earth and so on or at least when he does so this language is somewhat more figurative and metaphorical than it was before. Henceforth the philosophical truth about Nature can only be articulated through describing it as the being of Spirit in alienated form or in its other-being, it is the negative side of the Incarnation dogma that is from now on to the fore, incarnation is kenosis (giving up divine attributes through becoming human) the body a tomb the Spirit in Nature is the Spirit in bondage and such embodiment or bondage is a necessary moment in the self-realization of Spirit and yet embodiment is no longer realization all by itself. The reality of the Spirit is its freedom which is its self-redemption from this bondage not its use of physical Nature as the matter for spiritual or self-made Nature and Nature is still the instrument of Spirit but it is now primarily a cognitive instrument. It is a mirror in which Spirit can know itself as one does in a mirror only by standing still hence cognition in the uttered form of Nature, is the condition of free or spiritual activity and further there is no longer a continuum between unconscious nature and the second nature in which the Spirit actively expresses itself instead there is a radical break between Spirit and Nature and nothing spiritual is Nature and men and women as bearers of the Spirit do not and cannot exist in the state of Nature at all.
Hegel’s philosophy of nature has been kept almost in its entirety from 1803 onwards which is to say almost as completely as he wrote it out but System III of 1803/4 is fragmentary because the great mind at this stage was experimenting and wrestling to decide upon the ontological implications of the monumental shuffle of perspective involved in the acceptance of the singular consciousness as the primary expression of incarnate divinity and the system of 1804/5 breaks off at the moment that Hegel is about to embark upon his theory of the organism albeit there are noticeable differences between the two versions of natural philosophy and yet it is in addition evident that they represent a continuous development of thought that broke off some time in the spring of 1805 and hence they can be attended to together with gaps in one filled in with relevant parts of the other and what comes out of this may not represent precisely what Hegel actually thought at any one time but proceeding cautiously should result in something at least intelligible and all-encompassing.
The aether remained as the foundation if something so airy and intangible can serve as a foundation of the philosophy of nature and it is seemingly unaffected by the shift from the natural to the transcendental starting-point for philosophy, seemingly in virtue of the information concerning Hegel’s doctrine of the aether before the end of 1803 being rather sketchy but the characterization of aether as absolute matter in 1804 taken in conjunction with the insistence that the aether is not itself God represents a radical shift for aether is the point of union between extension and thought between the physical and the intellectual between objective reality and subjective cognition and the concept of absolute matter is the outward reflection of the passive power of the intellect to become anything knowable, and taking these two sides together and Hegel did continue to speak of the intellectual aether albeit the physical aether vanishes from sight in his mature works but until the end of 1803 for Hegel the aether was the divine life the immediate existence of God. From 1804 onwards the immediate existence of God is rather the immediate existence of man and woman or of human cognition as the communal ground and medium of finite consciousness and upon declaring the aether not to be God the physical role of the aether as the universal presence of the divine power becomes philosophically insignificant, and if the aether is the immediate presence of the Spirit then it can have no proper role in the philosophical conception of Nature as Spirit that is not yet present to itself, and so in the end declaring the physical aether not to be God was insufficiently radical and System III of 1805/6 turned to be the rebirth of the Greek concept of Nature as the divine life.
Hegel accepted the view that in the conception of Nature as the death of God the divine life has to remain just over the horizon for now he is struggling with the concept of finite consciousness itself as the metaphysical process of the divine life and instead of a stroll along the terminal beach of human cognition in religious experience philosophy is now the recognition of divinity in human cognition, therefore upon Hegel identifying the aether of cognition with man and woman’s need of God the implicit identity of the physical aether as God’s presence appears crucially significant and this accounts for why the type of philosophical interpretation of theological dogmas which had earlier formed the culmination of speculation in the Triangle manuscript is now found in the introduction to the philosophy of nature and it forms the metaphysical context for a philosophical interpretation of natural science.
The creation of Nature is God’s moment of self-loss, God’s kenosis, and yet the metaphysical process of the divine life for which this is the beginning is the goodness of God, God’s essence, the necessary being referred to in the Ontological Argument. As St. Anselm, (1033/4–1109) formulates it:
- It is a conceptual truth (or, so to speak, true by definition) that God is a being than which none greater can be imagined (that is, the greatest possible being that can be imagined).
- God exists as an idea in the mind.
- A being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, greater than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind.
- Thus, if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then we can imagine something that is greater than God (that is, a greatest possible being that does exist).
- But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God (for it is a contradiction to suppose that we can imagine a being greater than the greatest possible being that can be imagined.)
- Therefore, God exists.
The formal life which is the subjective aspect of the starting-point recalls the ‘System of Ethical Life’ where it is the self-intuitive capacity of the living human organism and yet as natural life it is not yet necessarily a potential for rational comprehension or intelligence and yet is distributed over the whole chain of living species, or to put it another way the goodness of God appears to be identical with the instinct not of self-preservation but of species-maintenance and natural life as self-intuitive is the potentiality of spirit only and it is buried or entombed (verborgen) and only in the intelligent consciousness of the rational animal is this dispersal of life resumed into a comprehensive unity.
This formal life of the singular organism coming to its totality in the reproductive cycle of the kind (Gattung) is the objective of nature and the climax of natural philosophy and the beginning is the eternally and universally present yet forever invisible, self-movement of the aether and the aether is a world-soul in the Greek sense, that is it is a life-principle, the blessed Spirit but not the living God since it is only one side of the absolute Spirit, the side of identity and it is absolute Spirit yet it does not know itself as such, and since the essence of Spirit is its self-cognitive process to say that aether is absolute Spirit involves the paradox made explicit by calling it absolute matter. The life of God is the whole circular process by which this apparent contradiction is mediated and the aether as absolute matter is like Aristotle’s prime matter infinitely elastic, it can take any resting form but as Spirit it is absolute unrest it must take every form and as matter it must appear. as absolute matter it must remain invisible, likewise as Spirit it both must and cannot express itself.
An immediate identity of day and night, in the ‘Natural Law’ essay we were informed that Nature is absolute self-intuition while Spirit is absolute intuition of itself as itself and after saying that aether is not the living God since it does not know itself as absolute Spirit we are further informed that nonetheless that it knows itself and in both contexts the aether is to be thought of as the identical ground, subjective and objective, of finite cognition, that this doctrine of the aether is a version of what is often called neutral monism, a monism in which the one aether comes to know itself as itself and the theological dogma of the Logos is clearly alluded to when he declares that the ‘speaking of the aether with itself is its reality’ and a Trinitarian preoccupation is evident when he adds that ‘what it utters is itself, what speaks is itself, and that to which it speaks is again itself.’ and the otherness of Nature is the otherness of his own uttered word as perceived by an intelligent speaker who is not hard of hearing.
The aether is not God from which we must face up to the fact that one has only a picture or a reflected image of this divine speech in nature and the aether contracts itself into a point and posits itself as light in the darkness, a star. This may be conceived as it was by George Berkeley, (1685–1753), as a speaking of the Creator to us, God’s created audience, yet even in the Triangle manuscript Hegel did not take it this way for Nature is not correctly understood as utterance until speaker and audience coincide and one comprehends it as one’s own utterance. The sense of awe, of sublimity, which Immanuel Kant felt at the spectacle of the starry heavens arose from his own comprehension as an intellectual point of the way in which he was himself comprehended as a physical point and in the absence of the real contraction of his consciousness there can be no wonder either subjective or objective. The word of the physical aether is unarticulated, formal speech, it has no meaning, it is only an externalized image of what intellectual expression and comprehension is, the fixed stars are not even a moving picture, they shine not for others they shine for themselves and only for themselves and their indefinite multiplication in the depths of celestial space is an image of spurious infinity, the starry heavens exemplify the range of possible geometric shapes and the endlessness of the number system but nothing interacts and until we attend to Sun, Moon, and planets we can discover naught in the heavens other than a reflection of the finite mind in its most purely theoretical activity.
Matter conceived as motion. The Solar System is an orderly self-moving whole and this is apparent as soon as one recognizes that there is a perfect periodicity in all the motions that it contains hence it presents to us an image of the true infinite it is the real concept of motion and periodic motion is that Hegel characterizes as the temporalizing of space and the spatializing of time. Time is the moment of infinity that is to say of endless succession, transience, othering, and space is the moment of self-identity because any point can be considered as fixed once and for all and as will be revealed in the ‘Philosophy of Spirit’ the union of these two moments is an outward image of consciousness hence the fact that periodic motion provides a comprehensible totality of these moments that is to say concretely it renders time determinable and measurable is of the utmost analogical significance to Hegel’s theory of intelligence, the absolute concept as motion.
The passage of time is the transient permanence of the present moment and this exemplifies the dialectic of quality, reality and negation or being and nothing, at the start of the Logic since the present moment is the reality of the first totality, it is simple connection in the form of limit and that which it relates is the past that ever will be as it was, the bare concept of essence, and the future that never will be till it is, the bare concept of freedom, and the future moves irresistibly into the present and it is only in the fixity of the past that the difference between them can be identified as an ordering or succession and this succession that realizes itself as the order of the past is the spurious infinite. The moments are all in themselves, the same, like the units in arithmetic, but their order is as relentless as the sequence of the cardinal numbers hence the past is the externalized reality of time, ‘the paralysed unrest of the absolute concept’, while the future is its inward reality, its active presence.
The mutual externality of the distinct moments in the past is the spatiality of time itself hence time comes out of itself into space, and when space goes into itself’ we have the point, which is the outward or positive expression of the self-negating moment of the present in time. The whole process of time can be posited as sublated in its spatial expression and the negativity or transience of time here appears as the fact that any infinite space has a spurious infinity of extension beyond or outside it. One passes over into space by comprehending the moments of time as a single dimension yet it is impossible to posit just one dimension in space, the positing of the one dimension is a demand that implies more than is expressed in that one, the single, infinitely extendable line defines a direction yet that direction is itself only determined by its relation to others, and space is real only in its full three dimensions, one can define a single dimension only through a process of double negation in which surface appears as the limit of a spatial volume and line as the limit of surface and the spatial point is the terminus of this process of negative limitation and line and surface are the middles between the point which is the inwardness of space and the volume which is its full realization or explication.
The unity of space and time of point and moment is the point in motion and real matter is motion, the aether as absolute or prime matter is essentially motion, inert matter is a metaphysical fiction an abstraction given out as a reality and yet phenomenal matter consists of bodies which also move in the invisible force field that one designates empty space. Both Cartesians and Newtonians made the assumption that this phenomenal motion was what has to be explained and that rest is phenomenally distinct from it is that which naturally pertains to matter, and Hegel on the other hand takes it to be the case that motion is the primitive phenomenon and rest or stability is the state whose coming into being requires explanation albeit this is somewhat misleading given that phenomenal rest and motion are both involved in the stability of the Solar System as a totality and absolute matter is not just motion but contains rest and motion within itself which is to say that it can only manifest itself as an energetic equilibrium.
We find here the same conception of the free motion of the heavenly bodies that was given more poetic expression in the Dissertation of 1801 and one should not approach the Solar System with mechanical notions like attraction and impact as our explanatory principles, phenomenal motion is rather to be seen as the outward expression of the energetic equilibrium of real matter, as absolute matter everything is self-moving and yet at the phenomenal level some things move themselves and others are moved, nothing stands still for even the Sun rotates upon its axis and stillness is found only in the axial line or if that sways, only in the centre point. What is attempted here is the construction of the ideal body of the Solar System and the discussion follows the same pattern as the Dissertation, what moves is the point and the pattern of its movement constitutes a line hence the positing of a line involves a time interval.
Time itself conceived in this way as a dimension is endurance (Dauer), phenomenal motion presupposes the motion of time itself in this dimension and this passing of time is both continuous and divisible therefore local motion has a velocity which is the ratio between a certain continuous quantum of time elapsed and the space traversed, and the law of acceleration in free fall involves a square ratio and Hegel takes this law as expressing the absolute nature of space and time and this is the law by which a point becomes a spatial line and for Hegel no mathematical proof’ of the law can be given. The free-falling bodies in space nonetheless behave as if they were attached to the point of origin by a line upon which they swing and in this swinging through which the line generates a surface their velocity rises and falls, they accelerate and decelerate, and yet by Kepler’s second law the surface is generated at a constant rate and for this reason the surface generated is elliptic and the acceleration occurs when the radial line is shorter, the deceleration when it is longer, and the proportion is again a square ratio but on this occasion it arises from geometrical considerations not from the law of falling bodies.
And so, thus far motion exists as a planar expression of time in space and yet real space has three dimensions and these moving points are in actual fact solid bodies and the expression of real space in real time requires a cubic ratio because both of them are properly three-dimensional and this demonstrates why Kepler’s third law holds, why the cube of the orbital distance equals the square of the orbital period, and finally the linear axis of the ellipse must be constituted by the regular alternation of acceleration and deceleration and this ellipse is the Idea of real motion to which we now proceeds and the centre point of the elliptical system of free motion is the infinite point from which the self-expression of the aether radiates.
This point is a point of axial rotation and the entire system of motions that depends upon it is as independent of and as indifferent to everything else in the Universe as a fixed star and yet its structure is not simple like that of a star and Hegel now turns his attention to how the constitutive resting and moving points of his mathematical model are actually constituted. He mentioned in the Dissertation that the true physics would show that the centre of the system of motion was necessarily the light source and such necessity appears to be no more than the simple assumption that the aether must express itself first as light, it is the nature of light, and yet that light should be identified with the aether itself and darkness presumably with its self-alienation is evidently a spiritual rather than a physical necessity if it is a necessity at all.
The fact that the satellite bodies that are both moved and lit by this rotating centre also rotate illustrates the operation of reciprocal subsumption, axial rotation is rest subsuming motion. Axial rotation, something brought up in the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’:
‘The determination of Life as it has issued from the Notion, or the general result with which we enter this sphere, is sufficient to characterize it without having further to develop its nature. Its sphere is completely determined in the following moments. Essence is infinity as the supersession of all distinctions, the pure movement of axial rotation, its self-repose being an absolutely restless infinity; independence itself, in which the differences of the movement are resolved, the simple essence of Time which, in this equality with itself, has the stable shape of Space. The differences, however, are just as much present as differences in this simple universal medium; for this universal flux has its negative nature on]y in being the supersession of them; but it cannot supersede the different moments if they do not have an enduring existence (Bestehen). It is this very flux, as a self-identical independence which is itself an enduring existence, in which, therefore, they are present as distinct members and parts existing on their own account. Being no longer has the significance of abstract being, nor has their pure essentiality the significance of abstract universality; on the contrary, their being is precisely that simple fluid substance of pure movement within itself. The difference, however, qua difference, of these members with respect to one another consists in general in no other determinateness than that of the moments of infinity or of the pure movement itself’.
- ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’
Hence the orbital motion of the planet is motion subsuming rest, the unmoving axis of rotation, and the entire system is an infinite totality or a periodic equilibrium and this perfect equilibrium which one could not interpret properly if there were not other planets to observe is further complicated by the comets with their erratic orbits and periods, the comets are a physical expression of the arbitrary moment in freedom, they have no self-maintaining motion of axial rotation which represents the rational element, they are held in their orbit by the Sun but their eccentric wilfulness makes them an anticipation of organic life. The planets however are little systems of periodic equilibrium or reduced infinity on their own account since they have moons and the relation of Sun and Earth prefigures that of the rational individual and the community for Hegel identifies the Sun proper with the whole sphere of its radiant energy, the Sun as a visible sphere is its resumption into itself out of its otherness and recognition of this prefiguring gives the counter-subsumption of the Sun by the Earth great practical significance.
Excelsior! Turning to the fragments of 1803 the first of which tackles the transition to the ‘Earthly System’, the clear continuity of the 1804 doctrine of the Solar System with that of the Dissertation of 1801 warrants our assumption that the lecture courses of 1803 followed this same general line of argument and yet the fragments actually remaining from that course show that the critical concern of the Dissertation was also prominent in the lectures whereas the systematic manuscript of 1804 restricts itself apart from two short diversions on supposed mathematical proofs of the law of falling bodies and on the active character of the inertial theory of matter to a straight exposition of the true physics. In the first fragment of 1803 first in the systematic, not the chronological sense Hegel discusses and abandons the hypothesis that Immanuel Kant and prior to him Isaac Newton had entertained that the density of the planets decreases as their distance from the Sun increases for otherwise comparison of the two versions only serves to demonstrate how much Hegel’s mode of presentation improves with every draft.
The first section of Hegel’s discussion of the ‘Terrestrial System’ is the ‘Construction of Real Matter or Mechanics’ wherein is developed the theory of gravity. In the lecture notes of 1803 he declares: ‘As that indifferent self-equivalent inertia, substantiality was the essential [character] of the heavenly bodies; it has [now] become its own opposite, namely independence as sublation of independence.’ In 1804 he will not permit the approach to celestial motion as an inertial system altogether. Gravity is now treated as the negation of motion, as motion toward rest, the motion of the planets is positive, or self-maintaining motion, a return to the Dissertation in effect, but the mutual relativity of motion and rest or inertia is insisted upon and as a resting equilibrium the Solar System is thus a gravitational system.
Inertia proper belongs to what is moved only by the gravitational pull of something else and if the planets did not have a motion of their own simple gravity would pull them straight into the Sun hence not gravity but motion is the primitive concept of the Solar System and hence the laws of planetary motion must not be reduced to the single law of gravity because gravity can only account for the straight-line motion of bodies falling toward one another and in this realization of matter as mass the source of motion is in the body that remains at rest therefore this stage is ‘the existing concept of motion which does not have its reality in itself’.
In his first treatment of mechanics Hegel operated with atoms of an Epicurean kind and his discussion is evidently an application of the dialectic of discrete quantity numerical one and many in his logic and yet this theoretical background vanishes in the manuscript of 1804. Falling, being thrown, and pendular swinging on a line are the stages by which the point moved by inertial force, passes from straight-line motion toward self-sustaining motion in a circle and yet this array of mechanical possibilities is itself mechanical, all that matters is that in the end gravity reduces all finite motion to a fall toward rest. With the lever one moves forward from the concept of mass to those of weight and rigidity and in the process of the lever mass and distance become abstract or interchangeable quantities. The principle of the lever is the balancing of two weights on a supported bar so that the smallest impulse will move the side one desires and it is this establishment of a dynamic equilibrium that Hegel is referring to when he claims that ‘the lever is as the developed nature of body’, and when the weights are unequal the balanced lever also separates the moments of gravity that are united in the simple existence of mass for the smaller weight can balance the larger on if it is at a greater distance from the fulcrum and yet if a perfect balance is set swaying the motion does not continue for ever in spite of the equality of forces it is brought to rest by the frictional resistance of the testing environment.
In heavenly motion there is no friction but a resting balance of perfectly reciprocal motion, on earth any such motion has a distinct cause and it must come to an end and here the only mechanical equilibrium is a state of rest and the rest is not absolute, for any small impulse can upset the balance; the small stone slipping can start an avalanche and yet it is the destiny of matter as rigid to be inert to be at rest. Consider a levered avalanche whereby at the stage of the lever the world is to be thought of as composed of discrete solids that are heaped or hung in equilibrium and nothing can happen to such a heap and if an avalanche begins it must come from some transformative power in matter some continuity between the separately balanced bits which suspends their inertia and opposition and so upsets the balance for after all avalanches typically begin because ice melts.
The fluidity of matter. The self-transforming continuity of matter that gives rise to a continual need for mechanical readjustment of the gravitational balance, the absolute fluidity, the truly real earthy matter, and once one allows for the presence of any such fluidity in the elementary constitution of the Earth one can note how its periodic approach to and recession from the source of celestial heat and light must set up a dynamic cycle in its mechanical equilibrium and yet because that periodic approach and recession is the result of the Earths own motion the fluidity of the Earth-process is the ‘Mother of all things’ with due deference to the Sky Father whom Hegel overlooks instead Earth is treated as a virgin-mother who has ‘infinity, the principle of generation in herself’. But he can only afford to do this because the terrestrial phase of natural development contains the solar phase sublated within itself.
O you most gentle go-betweens, who with your lovely little elegancies ravish our senses, bind fast our hearts, fascinate our minds, and put our voluptuous souls in brothels, deliver a wise judgment on our barbarisms, demolish our solecisms, bung up our stinking chasms, castrate our Silenes, clap our Noahs into breeches, eunuchise our macrologies, patch up our ellipses, curb our tautologies, moderate our acrilogies, forgive us our ecrilogies, pardon our perissologies, excuse our cacophonies.
I next conjure you all in general and you in particular, severe, supercilious, and savage master Poliinnio, to cast off this contumelious rage and this criminal hatred of the noble female sex, and not to disturb what the world has of beauty and the heavens with so many eyes stare down upon. Return, return to yourselves and recover the wit by which you may recognise your rancour as nothing but the expression of mania and fanatical zeal. What is more insensate and stupid than a man who doesn’t see the light? What folly can be more abject than that which on account of sex is an enemy of nature itself, like that barbarous king of Sarza, who, repeating what he’d learned from you, declared:
No perfect thing can Nature e’er design
since Nature’s of the gender feminine.
Consider a little the truth, raise up your eyes to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and note the antithesis and opposition between one thing and another. Regard what men are and what women are. Here you see as subject the body corpo, which is your friend, masculine, and there the soul, anima, which is your enemy, feminine. Here chaos, caos, masculine; there organisation, disposizione, feminine. Here, sleep, sonnio, masculine; there, vigil, vigilia, feminine. Here, lethargy, letargo, masculine; there memory, memoria, feminine. Here, hate, odio, masculine; there, friendship, amicizia, feminine. Here, fear, timore, masculine; there, security, sicurtà, feminine. Here, harshness, rigore, masculine; there, tranquillity, quiete, feminine. Here, scandal, scandalo, masculine; there, peace, pace, feminine. Here, error, errore, masculine; there, truth, verità, feminine. Here, defect, defetto, masculine; there, perfection, perfezione, feminine. Here, hell, inferno, masculine; there, felicity, felicità, feminine. Here, the pedant Polimmo; there, the muse Poliinnia. To sum up, all the vices, defects, and crimes are masculine; and all the virtues, excellencies, and goodnesses are feminine. Hence, prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, beauty, majesty, divinity, as they are named, as they are imagined, as they are described, as they are painted: so they are feminine all.
- Giordano Bruno, ‘Dialogues Concerning the Cause Principle, and One’, 1584.
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Such fluidity of real matter is to be conceived as the collapsing of the Earth’s two celestial motions into one: ‘it has taken the bad reality [i.e. the linear endlessness] of time … back into one’, and the axial and the solar rotation of the Earth is an image of how the balance of tensions is maintained in each distinct bit of matter as its characteristic tone and Hegel’s analogy has evident Pythagorean roots and he intends for us to hear the ‘music of the spheres’ in it. but the Heracleitean and Stoic root which is not so evident is indeed more significant and the types of matter are to be arrayed on a scale of rigidity so that the audible tone which a solid body emits becomes an index of the tension of its inner equilibrium and via this conceptual hypothesis Hegel renders the principle into an ideal extension from the conception of mechanical gravity operating upon discrete bodies to that of specific gravity existing differentially within each different type of discrete body and the explication of this array of inward tones is the ideal process of matter.
First however there is the matter of the evolution of the chemical phase in the theory, the sections just looked at named in 1804 ‘the construction of shape’ and ‘the lever’ were part of ‘the construction of the earth’ in 1803 and what is named in 1804 ‘the absolute construction of matter’ originally led up to the theory of terrestrial magnetism, of the tides, and of climate and in the ‘Outline of Universal Philosophy’ the Earth’s polar axis is treated as the axis of rigidity and of magnetism and the equatorial axis on the other hand was the axis of fluidity and the variable declination of the magnetic poles was a variation of cohesion arising from the tension in the Earth between rigidity and fluidity. This tension is a strain between the lunar rigid and cometary fluid nature of the Earth. The rigid, magnetic, structure of the Earth is its shape, the mechanical moment in the displaying of the chemical process of the Earth. The fluid equatorial belt is electrically charged by the Sun, and this is the motor of barometric pressure and other climatic variations, and in conformity with this construction of the Earth Hegel went on to deal with the specific gravity of finite bodies under a new heading ‘Chemism’.
The construction of the Earth and the theory of magnetism and the points of the compass are directly continuous with the Dissertation and the outline of 1801 and yet in this respect the manuscript of 1804/5 represents a break and a new departure, the shape of the Earth is not dealt with at this mechanical level in any fashion nor are the Earth’s magnetic properties spoken of and cohesion no longer has a place in the conceptual scheme of things and the atoms are removed from the catalogue of real entities. The evolution of finite bodies which have specific gravity rather than general cohesion proceeds apace throughout mechanism and chemism and the definition of the Earth is arrived at only in physics upon which we observe that the new scheme of things reflects an endeavour to develop the philosophy of nature according to the standpoint of consciousness. The definition of the earth is the realization of cognition and in the approach to it through finite observation of inorganic phenomena the total environment of the Earth is present only as a negative absolute. The lecture notes of 1803 put on display the materials of Hegel’s earlier system put into disorder somewhat by the needs of the new methodology while the manuscript of 1804 presents a construction in accordance with such needs.
The ideal process of matter. As part of the general gravitational field all bodies on Earth have weight the quantitative expression of general gravity and yet as distinct one from another different types of material body have each their own specific gravity and having this definite place on a continuous or fluid scale gives to each its tone but it may be objected that specific gravity cannot be reduced to a merely quantitative measure, the specific gravity of a piece of matter is an intensive quantity which marks it as what it is like its melting-point which is the breaking point of shape. Shape is properly the unity of gravity and tone, air is perfectly fluid, water in its ordinary condition has specific gravity but no fixed tone therefore no determinate shape, natural shaping the clear expression of a fixed tone is what crystals have and every type of solid matter that can be crystallized out of a liquid medium has its own distinctive Gestalt and whatever crystallizes can be dissolved again. Such a capacity of solid matter to crystallize from a liquid medium is one aspect of the ideal process of shape and at the other extreme very many types of naturally solid but not crystalline matter will melt when sufficiently heated and this loss of shape is different from the dissolving of crystals because when the cooling matter regains its tone it takes the shape of whatever unmelted vessel or mould it may be in. Specific gravity and tone are stages in the logical evolution of the self-shaping capacity that crystals have and the middle stage which is tone proper is significant since it demonstrates the earth-process itself at work. ‘The universal on its own account, as what dissolves the singularity of the body is light, insofar as it is heat.’
The light of the Sun alone dissolves the shape of a crystal ideally by rendering it transparent and yet Hegel believes it is the earth-process that transforms sunlight into heat and he mentions both light and heat and identifies them in order to warrant the linking of tone and its dissolution with Gestalt and its dissolution. Simple heating and cooling removes and restores tone and yet does not alter it and this is the ideal process of matter which is so neatly exemplified in the three states of water that we have grounded based one of the temperature scales upon it, and the real process of matter is a hidden one for which the model is provided by the experimental procedure through which specific gravity and tone are brought to the perfect equilibrium that gives rise to crystalline shape or in other words the neutralization of acid and base to produce a salt.
For this two different complementary materials are necessary and they cannot themselves be solids and this process is not to be expounded concretely for the process that is of interest to us in is the interaction of the chemical elements. There are four of them, and as fluidities they are gases recognized as types of air in the chemistry of the time, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. These are the elements of the process through which the light unfolds itself as the expressed infinity and what is now of concern is the chemism of the Earth itself or with the way that sunlight is transformed into heat and yet just as the Earth operated at the mechanical stage only as the negative power of universal gravity so it operates here only as the invisible environment of the atmosphere.
The identification of the chemical elements is determined partly by what was then known about combustion and partly what was known about the composition of atmospheric air and water and the chemical elements are distinguished from the tables of elements found in chemistry textbooks and gases are thought of as elementary moments of a real process but not proper things in the sense that although they are simple and can be isolated they do not maintain a separate identity in their combinations. Carbon itself is a form of the real physical element, of earth and the identification of phlogiston as hydrogen was accepted from Henry Cavendish, (1731–1810), and Hegel knew the later work of Cavendish on the chemical composition of water.
Nitrogen which Cavendish and Priestley called phlogisticated air is defined as the inert and passive form of fluidity, the differentiated moments of the infinite process of this inert identity are hydrogen, (Cavendish’s inflammable air, and oxygen, dephlogisticated air. The self-resuming identity of fluidity, which contains this cyclic opposition within itself is carbon dioxide which Hegel and a host of chemists called fixed air and the pure Begriff of this fluidity that is the motor of the cyclic process is heat, ‘the immaterial matter of the determinacies’, an active power which can only exist, like these phases themselves, in a fluid medium. The medium cannot exist unqualified; there is no ‘primary gas’, so to speak. Nor can the quality exist unmediated, there is no nitric stuff, and yet there is nitrogen-gas as a phase of the air-process at a certain temperature and the fluidity of the chemical elements is latent heat not air itself for air is a physical element and as such ‘has no place in this sphere’.
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Nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide are distinct, analytically simple forms of physical air; but that it is a mistake to think of them as mixing physically. Their appearance and disappearance is rather the manifestation of the chemical process in the air a process that is not independently maintained by the air but depends upon the physical process of the real elements in the total life of the Earth hence we can no more expect to reproduce the whole cycle of atmospheric chemism with finite portions of air, heat, reagents, and so on, in a laboratory, than we can hope to produce a real perpetual motion machine since whereas the power of gravity and its dangers of death is apparent in finite mechanics the Earth-process is a life-giving force known only through its absence in finite chemistry. Upon fully apprehending the cyclic character of the infinite chemical process we have reached physics proper. In the earlier lecture manuscripts the whole dialectic of the elements, physical as well as chemical, is dealt with under the heading ‘Chemism’ the reason to be seen in the reviews of the argument upon reaching the level of physics in 1803 and the principle character of the conceptual movement in the earlier course is the Earth itself. ‘Shape, the result of mechanics is the simple formation of the Earth within itself … in chemism this simple [positing of tone and fluidity within one another] goes into otherness [with its moments] outside one another.’ Hence the chemism of the Earth-process embraces the whole of the movement of its concept.
Mechanics is the realization of the shape of the Earth as an intuition, Poles, Equator, compass points, climatic zones, all the things with which a scientific geography text must begin, then this intuition disappears from view and the cycle of the meteorological process takes over and this is the chemical process of the Earth but the Earth is only the stage upon which the movement of the concept occurs. Terrestrial physics comes on the scene only when that mere stage is recognized again as the living body of continents and oceans, mountains and deserts, and so on to which that process belongs as its life. For now concept and intuition are reunited in the Idea of the Earth in a rational conceptual pattern albeit the language is ambiguous for the Earth does not have an intuitive Gestalt like that of a crystal, there is a chasm between the infinite use of the term and all the finite ones and upon coming to the ‘movement of its concept we discover that on the other side of the chasm one’s chemical and one’s physical concepts alike are just phases in its chemistry.
Hegel’s new method seeks to establish a continuum in the place of this chasm and our concepts the concepts that we need for our finite situation must evolve in accordance with the deeper need for the comprehension of the infnite totality which is equally a need of ours hence we do not begin with the world like the student opening his geography book but we must discover from our mechanical problems with perpetual motion why chemistry is needed and from there why physics is needed and the map of our progress has to be drawn in terms of the frontiers that we need for our scientific use and it remains true that the frontiers on our map can only be drawn by one whose consciousness contains the whole globe of Earth and the whole cycle of the sciences that deal with it, there were no noteworthy working chemists at this time who would have drawn the boundary between chemistry and physics as sciences where Hegel drew it in 1804, except for mechanics none of the boundaries he proposed was of great use then although as for today who knows?
In 1804 an endeavour was made to map the distinct levels of our scientific consciousness of nature, not as prior the levels or phases of a process that was independent of consciousness and as Stephen Houlgate has noted the evolution of Hegel’s natural philosophy resembles that of Greek Drama, it has now reached its Aeschylean phase, at first there was only one actor, the Earth, which spoke and acted its story for the chorus of philosophers, now the protagonist is man the scientist who used to be the Chorus leader and the Earth is his antagonist with whom he will finally be united in the way that Prometheus is united with the Earth in Percy Bysshe Shelley, (1792–1822), rather than as he is reconciled with Zeus in Aeschylus (c. 525/524 — c. 456/455 BC).
The intolerable artificiality of the boundary lines that he had to draw for this cosmic dialogue may have been one of the factors that led Hegel to abandon it unfinished and the distinction between chemical and physical elements was obviously a pressing one in his view for he always maintained it but the infinite standpoint of his earlier theory at least allowed him to deal with the whole range of inquiries engaged in by those who were for good practical reasons all called chemists and he pointed out the chemical character in his own restricted sense of the word of such processes as organic putrefaction after death a matter which in the evolution of consciousness must necessarily wait until we have attained to cognition of the organism itself.
Terrestrial physics. In 1804 physics is still the science in which we eventually comprehend the nature of our world as an individual whole and yet our approach starts with the process of the real elements a process which cycles deep underground and far above our heads but has its focal centre upon the surface where we are and this is the process of the Earth’s own life. There was no individuated world in which the solar process or the mechanical and chemical processes happened, the solar process of motions constitute a world, they do not happen within it or belong to it, and the mechanical and chemical processes do not belong to any individuated world constituted by that process either. Infinite mechanics is the solar process itself and ought not to be thought of mechanically at all, finite mechanics is the constitution process of finite individuals and the comprehension of the inevitable triumph of inertia. Chemism is the process from light to heat that takes place between the free motion of the heavens and the one world-order constituted in that motion that is itself free not dominated by an inertial equilibrium. The Moon has a shape as fixed as a crystal and the Earth in contrast has an atmospheric process that sustains its life. Physics is the study of how the chemical interaction between Earth and Sun sustains the life cycle of the Earth itself.
The step from chemistry to physics is straightforward enough and what is not so straightforward is strictly not to take that step while one is studying chemism. For the chemical process presupposes a real substrate and the real physical elements, fire, air, water, earth, each pass through the whole cycle of chemism, and also represent one moment of that cycle and the real elements maintain themselves by self-transformation into the others and eventually return to their own form through that transformation and this cyclic process gives each of them a definite shape unlike the chemical elements, which remain invisible gases throughout their conceptual exemplification of the process.
The unity of light and heat from which we must begin is fire and fire first exists on Earth, not in the Sun and Hegel takes fire as an element but because all of his elements are processes this turns out to be more sensible than one might suppose in the context of present day usage, it is light as the tone that is to say tension of shape and as heat it is formal resolution, that is to say chemical agency. In its essential transience there is the first visible model of what the chemical elements are, conceptual abstractions. Fire itself involves hydrogen and oxygen and produces carbon dioxide and the assumption that nitrogen is the neutral state of air that passes over into the process reflects the theory of the English investigators who designated nitrogen phlogisticated air, as a matter of fact it is their place in the fire-process that determines the order of the phases in chemism. Fire is the concept of the physical elements and as such stands first among them and the very fact that fire is a process is what leads Hegel to make of it the foundation stone of his dynamic conception of chemistry.
Hydrogen, inflammable air, is the moment of kindling but the explosion of hydrogen is momentary, combustion requires oxygen for its maintenance, phlogiston is the latent being of hydrogen a mode of speech expressive of the mature view of Cavendish, only in the transient existence of the flame does it have a demonstrable existence. Oxygen on the other hand is the moment of infinity of fire the immediate relation of fire to otherness which means that oxygen is the active, moving force in the process of combustion, infinity being the motion of the concept and so Hegel is ahead of Cavendish who still called oxidation phlogistication. Fire, as the moving concept itself, is turned against both shape and gravity, it is a free-moving shape that reduces fixed shapes to the indefiniteness of ashes and the flame of fire itself always rises. Fire will not burn either in nitrogen or in carbon dioxide and these are the opposite extremes of the process. Carbonic acid is a chemical compound or synthetic unity involving carbon and the unity of oxygen and hydrogen but this last is not called a synthetic unity so a chemical formula is not being proposed. The process of burning itself is an escape from gravity whereas both the initial components of the process and the products are gravitational matters and this moment of freedom in the process is phlogiston which is afterwards hydrogen.
At the end of the fire-process the active acidic product what remains is CO2 or fixed air hence air is the next term in the ideal cycle of the elements. Air in its simple unfixed state is the element in which the chemical elements are simply inside one another and because it is not immediately perceptible it is not to be regarded as an intuition but rather the paralysed concept (all chemical reaction being at a standstill. Water, on the other hand is the opposite reaction of hydrogen and oxygen, or fire’s being unequal to itself and Hegel is on the side of Cavendish against Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, (1743–1794), by insisting that we should not think of water as composed of hydrogen and oxygen and these are simply the forms of the chemical elements which appear in it. Hegel was from the outset more interested in the chemical relation between air and water than he was in that between water and fire since the weather-process involves a chemical transformation of water into air, and the converse. Fire exhibits the whole chemical process, but is kindled and extinguished, water only disappears into the invisible atmosphere and air only appears on the way back to water, as clouds, mist, and so on. Yet both of them as elements are processes of appearing and disappearing and there is a hidden process involving the disappearance of hydrogen in nitrogen water to air and of nitrogen in water itself carbon dioxide being chemically submerged, as it were, in both air and water.
Since air and water are therefore complementary, fire as the whole process is drawn out into a tension between them and a question arises as to why their true middle or mingled unity is earth as an element, perhaps Hegel is availing himself of his step from the chemical to the physical level, it is because the Earth is the substrate of the physical process that earth is the true middle of the elements and yet even if this is right every new sentence generates a fresh problem. ‘Earth is the transparent nothing that lets [the other elements] shine through … as the nothing of the elements it is equally their being’. And what this means is that the process of the physical elements is the Earth’s life-process its self-sustaining energetic cycle to eliminate all the inappropriate undertones of birth, maturation, degeneration, and death. Earth as an element has the passive role of providing a stage, an inertial background, for the cycle and yet the Earth is not just a background; it is the process. The physical process of fire, air, water, and earth, can now be recognized as the real expression of this energetic cycle. Mechanism and chemism are the ideal moments, the moments by which the Earth’s outward shape, and the resolution of that shape into climatic fluidity, are determined or to put it another way these are the aspects of its being and the conditions of its energetic process that are determined from outside by its place in the Solar System.
In such a very real context it is no longer the element of fire, but the Earth itself, that plays the main role. Fire exhibits the whole process but earth sustains it. Earth as an element is no more self-subsistent than the others. The Earth is a concept realized in intellectual intuition. As an Idea the Idea of the elemental process, the Earth is ‘absolute cognition and it makes sense to say this if we think of natural philosophy as a transcendental theory of science. Hegel has shifted from the intuition of absolute motion in the heavens to the energetic-cycle of the physical elements as the necessary frame of all our physical and chemical knowledge and in so doing he has demonstrated that the Idea of the World has a constitutive role in our cognitive organization of experience. It is not a dialectical Idea of Reason as Kant maintained but an absolute cognition a concept that has an a priori intuition as its content. The Earth itself is spoken of as cognition in this peculiar way since we have now reached a turning point, the absolute motion has now become an absolute, self-sustaining or living substance. The biological organism will be the individuation of this life-principle the rational consciousness will then at last be the self-cognition of this same universal self-maintaining equilibrium which now exists as objective cognition and what the interpretive frame of all our finite cognition is is finally understood, when we have comprehended what cognizing is the manner of speech assumed here will desist from apparent oddity.
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Scriabin: Promethée — Le Poème du Feu, Op. 60:
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‘Prometheus’
von Franz Kafka (1883–1924)
Von Prometheus berichten vier Sagen:
Nach der ersten wurde er, weil er die Götter an die Menschen verraten hatte, am Kaukasus festgeschmiedet, und die Götter schickten Adler, die von seiner immer wachsenden Leber fraßen.
Nach der zweiten drückte sich Prometheus im Schmerz vor den zuhackenden Schnäbeln immer tiefer in den Felsen, bis er mit ihm eins wurde.
Nach der dritten wurde in den Jahrtausenden sein Verrat vergessen, die Götter vergaßen, die Adler, er selbst.
Nach der vierten wurde man des grundlos Gewordenen müde. Die Götter wurden müde, die Adler wurden müde, die Wunde schloß sich müde.
Blieb das unerklärliche Felsgebirge. — Die Sage versucht das Unerklärliche zu erklären. Da sie aus einem Wahrheitsgrund kommt, muß sie wieder im Unerklärlichen enden.
Prometheus
There are four legends concerning Prometheus: According to the first he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed.
According to the second Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.
According to the third his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of years, forgotten by the gods, the eagles, forgotten by himself.
According to the fourth everyone grew weary of the meaningless affair. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily.
There remains the inexplicable mass of rock. The legend tries to explain the inexplicable. As it comes out of the substratum of truth it has in turn to end in the inexplicable.
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The physical manifestation of the chemical process of sunlight, heat, and weather which he previously constructed in theory is now described, the action of light is called solicitation a terminology to be encountered again in the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ and one which evidently implies that the effect is not a mechanical continuation of the causal action but a response that expresses the independent nature of the force solicited, the separation of the elements at the surface of the Earth are characterizes in terms of the elementary motions of the Solar process. This finite expression of infinite gravity, the distribution of continents and seas, desert and icecap, is the Earth’s mechanical totality or shape, and the outer envelope of all of it is air, which is shapeless or cometary. By this envelope the free process of the Earth is protected not even the worst desert is the waterless moon which simple gravity would make of it, and the shape of the Earth is merely the gravitational setting of the stage for its self-shaping process and the fluid elements air and wate are the vehicle of this process. The infinitely dynamic element of fire is localized within the Earth and makes only momentary appearances at the volcanic and atmospheric extremes of the meteorological process itself.
What that process does is make the earth itself into fertile soil and Hegel designates the Earth-process cognition because the Earth produces life on its surface and so makes its infinite self-shaping visible, makes it a matter of experience for the rational life so produced and we are to distinguish between the way the process exists for us and the way that it exists for the Earth itself. This distinction anticipates the great division between two modes of cognition in the Phenomenology. For us the whole process is what the Earth is, it is what must be expressed in the definition of the Earth, the scientific cognition to which we now proceed but for the Earth what falls apart into the process of the other elements with the sunlight is earth itself as an element and the two senses of the word earth hence offer a model of the cognitive process of the Phenomenology. The Earth is an unconscious cognitive process which is to say our conscious cognitive process depends upon the identification of a set of intellectual terms or elements that would be impossible for us if we did not have the light-process of the physical elements before us and we do not have that process before us in the relevant sense until we have developed the concept of Earth with the element of earth as its starting-point and terminus and our ability to conceptualize our own conceptual activity adequately depends upon our prior comprehension of the Earth.
The meteorological process is discussed and illustrated in much greater detail in the lecture manuscripts of 1803 and from the detail we get an indication of the right interpretation of the condensed systematic exposition of the textbook and what is gone through earlier in the 1803 discussion appears in 1804 as part of the definition of the Earth to which we now proceeds, this definition is spoken of as having arisen immediately from the motion of its self-cognition from which we are not to suppose a kind of Earth-mind for we are informed that the Earth-process as a whole and the ordering of its moments exists only for us. It is human consciousness that is the self-cognition of the Earth and humankind is the child of Earth and the transcendental structure of consciousness is an expression first of our embodied existence on this planet, we are not to accept either the reflective formalism of the transcendental unity of apperception or the abstractly rational formalism of Fichte’s Ego theory and the next phase of our conceptual progress is the move from the conceptual context of geography to that of biology. The definition of the Earth shows us how the infinite process defines itself in a ladder of forms that culminates with the rational organism for which the whole Earth-process exists as an environment an inorganic nature in just the way that the process of the other elements is here said to exist initially for the Earth itself.
This way of talking about the Earth-process as self-cognitive is new in the textbook of 1804 and yet the course of the argument is not noticeably changed when this new way of speaking is added to the more traditional pre-critical terminology in which the real physical Earth is the substance for which the individual elements are accidents, properties, ideal moments. Even in 1804 the Darstellung of the Earth must inevitably repeat the deduction and yet now that we properly know what is going on what was implicit before becomes explicit and the role of fire as the concept that is moving force of the whole process is made clear and the cometary tension of the air is revealed as its power to form clouds, and the opposite extreme or lunar tension presents itself in the spontaneous formation of dead earthy bodies, (meteorites, aerolites, in the atmosphere. Fire is now declared to be the Sinn of the Earth and this sensation nonetheless is only its ideality or inward essence or to put it another way it signifies or outwardly represents the productive imagination and its intuitive reality is as a moment of tension at the opposite extremes of the meteorological process of the elements, as volcanic activity in the Earth and as shooting star in the atmosphere. It is the source of cometary tension at both extremes, as lightning it stands also at the limit, and turning-point of the rain-cycle between air and water.
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Liszt: Prometheus, symphonic poem:
Crystallization takes place in a watery medium and leaves a liquid residue and this analogy is used for the formation of mountains, rivers, and springs, and the fresh water formed in this process between the Earth and its atmosphere is essentially unstable. As a stable element water has the chemical neutrality of the sea. Atmospheric air differs from any of the chemically distinguishable forms of air in virtue of all the tensions already discussed and the whole range of water-forms emerge from it and so do forms of earth and fire and yet it is the Earth itself that is the active substance to which this whole process belongs and this is the totality from which the motion of fire through the two fluid media starts and to which it finally returns. And having returned to fire we now start on the ideal evolution of particular bodies and here fire as the driving energy of the infinite cycle must primarily appear as a negative, destructive, consuming agency. But the consuming activity of fire is only chemical resolution and the first particular bodies Hegel considers are the real chemical elements isolated by the work of scientists like Cavendish and Priestley and he reiterates the view that mephitic air’(Stickstolf, nitrogen) is the original being of inflammable air, hydrogen, while fixed air, carbon dioxide, is what oxygen passes into as a result of combustion. Oxidation and deoxidation are now discussed as processes in the laboratory and in finite natural contexts and what is important here is not the details of Hegel’s chemistry but his view that this is the most elementary form of ordinary combustion or finite fire-process.
Chemical fire has no apparent shape. The distinguishable components of finite fire as an apparent shape, the flame, are light and heat, and light breaks up in finite experience into the colours or it synthesizes with an opaque surface as its colour. Heat permeates bodies and is communicated from one to another and every body has some definite temperature at any time but different bodies have different heat-capacities which is their capacity to subsume fire in this fluid form. The transition from temperature to the concept of a singular finite body can only be called magical and Hegel declares that a singular body is an extinguished fire since in it a visible process has come to a standstill. Whereas his definition of the mechanical concept of body in terms of the lever is prophetic the transition to mineralogy from the Heraclitean fire-process looks back to alchemy and yet anticipates no modern development but the fact that colour and melting-point are identifying marks for metals does demonstrate Hegel’s genuine concern to construct a conceptual framework for empirical inquiry.
The positing of air and water in solid bodies is equally symbolic. Air is the moment of rigidity, and water of neutrality and since metals do melt there is an analogy between this neutrality and water and as for the analogy between rigidity (Sprödigkeit) and any quality of air it is the supposed capacity of the air to produce metallic bodies, meteorites, that forms the link, water, on the other hand, is the medium of crystallization, and in its elemental state, as sea-water, it is neutral and at this stage now that we are dealing with solid bodies the atomic hypothesis shows itself. The Earth as a finite body that is to say not an energetic cycle of the elements but as one of the moments isolated from that process and can be analysed into absolute bits, an analysis for the purpose of cognition merely.
Earth is an abstract universal (formale Allgemeinheit) and its ideality is not a living potential but a fixed reflection (formelle Idealität) hence the reason why the Earth must fall into atoms is that knowledge itself must have simple elements that are not further analysable and the atoms here are not necessarily physically indivisible, not like the atoms of Newton and Dalton, it would be self-defeating to divide them further and all that can be learned from a small piece of pure gold can be learned equally well from a larger piece. The physical atom here would be a minimum perceptible piece because to endeavour to divide that would be to lose sight of it yet we have reached the conceptual atom of Earth as a formal community of simple natures, once we have isolated gold as an element in the sense of the chemistry textbook. The Earth must be constituted of such simples since its self-cognition takes place through a community of individuals, whose experience embraces only finite segments of it. Ultimately it is we the finite thinkers who are the real atoms and when we come to deal with cognition from the subjective side there will be no serious difficulty about the proposition that the Earth cognizes itself as the absolute multiplicity of these mid-points and yet Hegel desires us to note that singularity has a long sequence of applications before we come to the indissoluble unity and privacy of the individual consciousness.
‘Prometheus Unbound’ (excerpt)
by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
A CONFUSED VOICE
We hear: thy words waken Oblivion.
DEMOGORGON
Spirits, whose homes are flesh; ye beasts and birds,
Ye worms and fish; ye living leaves and buds;
Lightning and wind; and ye untamable herds,
Meteors and mists, which throng air’s solitudes:
A VOICE
Thy voice to us is wind among still woods.
DEMOGORGON
Man, who wert once a despot and a slave,
A dupe and a deceiver! a decay,
A traveller from the cradle to the grave
Through the dim night of this immortal day:
ALL
Speak: thy strong words may never pass away.
DEMOGORGON
This is the day which down the void abysm
At the Earth-born’s spell yawns for Heaven’s despotism,
And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep;
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.
Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance —
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction’s strength;
And if, with infirm hand, Eternity,
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length,
These are the spells by which to reassume
An empire o’er the disentangled doom.
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life; Joy, Empire, and Victory!
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To begin with absolute motion requires indissoluble gravitational units and the parts of the Earth itself have a single gravitational centre and the Solar System depends on the singularity of its Solar body and these bodies are uncuttable in the sense that the whole system would be affected if they were cut hence the system of absolute motion falls apart into atoms and the Earth as an atom of that system falls apart first into motions the elementary processes and yet now the substantial unity of the elementary processes has to fall apart into elementary substances and to be a substance is to contain the process and this kind of process constituting substance, and containing substances constituted by process’ is what reality is, because it is what cognition is or vice versa, the transcendental standpoint as primary, the proper parts of the Earth must contain a process within themselves that is analogous to the cyclic process of fire, water, air, and earth and in the description provided of the constituents of the Earth regarded as a universal container nonetheless all real process comes to a standstill and this is a stage where a form of cognition is somewhat static so a detailed pursuit of his mineralogy or his geology is unnecessary. .
In order to exhibit his frozen image of process, Earth-cognition at the level of immediate sense impression, Hegel divides his elementary solids into metals, combustibles, neutrals, and earths. In his 1803 lectures this classiffication is brought into connection with the distinction drawn by Paracelsus between mercury, sulphur, and salt; and the use of earth as a sub-classiffication is linked with Jakob Böhme (1575–1624). Hegel explains that mercury, sulphur, and salt were class-names in the older tradition hence in his own textbook he defines the categories that they symbolized. Metal is the class of simple solids. Metals melt and change colour when heated but they are not chemically changed as a result. Combustibles and salts are the opposite aspects of the fire process physically realized. The combustibles are simple elements that burn readily, the salts are decomposable compounds arising from a chemical process.
Earths contain the totality of the conceptual process of simplicity and opposition hence they can be classified according to which moment of the process is dominant. The self-formation of the Earth is of interest, rock formations are treated of at length, struggling continually to discover the principles governing the type-sequences and yet his assumption is that he is looking at a transformation process frozen into an image of spatial continuity and this is not an evolutionary view but he appears to be asking how the earlier formation was modified or transformed into the later one and he is interested in sequence only as a function of deeper continuity, he was an enthusiastic field geologist, as well as an industrious student of the textbooks and he could have accommodated to an evolutionary hypothesis without difficulty but he thinks of the Earth on the model of an organism rather than as a great chemical laboratory as a totality, rather than a Gegensatz so no evolutionary revision of any of his successive hypotheses is of much use. .
Having completed his account of the elements he proceeds to his account of finite or empirical chemical process. Geology is the static image of an infinite process including even petrifactions that is to say fossils which are an anticipatory portrayal of the real infinite process or organic life for which the static image is a stage and a backdrop. In 1803 Hegel as a matter of fact considers the ecology of the Earth briefly as a prelude to finite chemistry. Like his consideration of the Earth as a mechanical Gestalt this is eliminated in 1804. Finite chemical process is a reaction between two singular bodies that are complementary poles of a single cycle and in this process we discover the kind of energy-equilibrium locked up within any neutral body that placidly maintains itself within the general environment unaffected by anything except the wear and tear of the weather. The finite chemical process is the displaying (Darstellung) of cognition and the three types of element distinguished, metals, combustibles, and salts, reveal the process in ways analogous to the absolute process of fire, water, and air respectively and the types of earth exhibit a process like that of earth itself as a universal element.
Metals present the bare concept of the process, they change in form, by melting, glowing, and so on., when heated, their specific gravity also called their cohesion changes, they liquefy but they do not crystallize, each metal has its distinctive melting-point and is in this way defined by the process. In the galvanic process, with a watery medium, and fire in the form of acid, on the other hand, metals go through real chemical change and yet the synthetic products are not bodies but only the chemically affected, oxidized or reduced, metals themselves. What is released by the process is a gas, and fire exists as acid or caustic base. As thus polarized, fire cognizes itself that is to say it reveals what it is for our cognition, for these are the poles of chemical neutrality. The formation of the metal-salt transforms the abstract metal into a form of the reality of the earth while its phlogiston, hydrogen, escapes into the air.
The theory that the hydrogen thus released is the phlogiston of metal provides Hegel’s transition from the metals to the combustibles especially sulphur for sulphur is hydrogenated metal. Free fire’ or flame is fire posited in the form of air, it requires a combustible material but it is a chemical reaction in the atmosphere and to deduce his thesis that acid is fire posited as a real body Hegel interprets that reaction as the neutralization of hydrogen, phlogiston, by nitrogen, phlogisticated air, to produce an acid, carbon dioxide. Acid is fire realized in physical form. Acid is active fire, sulphur is passive fire and yet in the chemical neutrality of a salt fire has become the other of itself. In earth itself we have that which is dry but incombustible, (Hegel’s paradigm is silica, yet at the end of the chemical process we have an equilibrium in which the fire has gone out. The assumption is that chemical neutrality gives us the clue to what earthiness is. Chemistry is properly the analysis of what is static into its abstract, or dynamic components and the Earth as a divisible whole is a totality of neutral elements and in chemistry different reagents have different specific products and yet every stably neutral thing must be conceived as having an acid/base polarity of its own distinct kind and only in the noblest of the metals do we discover a simple element which really resists chemical polarization and neutralization.
Neutrality is therefore a systemic characteristic and if the different things that have settled into equilibrium are shaken up into a new pattern a new process toward chemical equilibrium must occur and the elementary substances out of which our earth seems to be built up are only stable in their established chemical balance. Chemical process brings the ideal substances into real compounds, and breaks up compounds into ideal physically unstable substances again and only the cyclic process is a true substance and yet in chemistry there is no true cycle there is only the swaying motion of a pendulum and the truly cyclic process of a self-maintaining substance is the organism.
The discussion of chemical process in the manuscript of 1803 is easier to follow in virtue of it being more directly descriptive and is illustrated by empirical data at every turn and Hegel owed much to the theory of chemical affinity in Claude Louis Berthollet’s, (1748–1822), Chemical Statics and prior to that to the pioneer work of the Swedish chemist, Torbern Bergman, (1735–1784), in this area. It is from Bergman that his chemical classiffication of minerals into metallic, inflammable, saline, and earthy comes, though he insists on fnding an earlier pedigree for it in Paracelsus, (c. 1493–1541), and Böhme. Hegel maintained that no chemical element, not even gold or platinum, remains stably in its pure form, and the empirical difficulty of obtaining pure reagents for chemical work has a foundation in physical necessity.
Upon comparing the doctrine of chemical fire in 1803 with the transcendental theory in the 1804 textbook we get an indication of why Hegel insisted on the emblematic significance of mercury, sulphur, and salt in the older tradition of Paracelsus. In 1803 the moments of the mineral organism are metal, simple concept, salinity, combustibility, antithesis, and earthiness, totality, and yet in 1804 when the conception of the Earth as a mineral organism has fallen by the wayside like the conception of it as a mechanical Gestalt the pattern is triadic. Earthiness is now interpreted in terms of neutrality that therefore ceases to be half of the antithesis and becomes the a priori synthesis through which the nature of the Earth as a chemical system but not as an organism is revealed and there ought now to be no room for such crudely material emblems of chemical process as mercury, sulphur, and salt and yet as a matter of fact, sulphur occupies a crucial place in the evolution of the three logical moments of chemical process, metal, acid, neutrality. In 1803 Hegel surveys the forms of fire beginning from free flame and moving through the array of its otherness, galvanism, static electricity, chemical affinity, and the atmospheric process, to the purely theoretical concept of phlogiston. This array disappears in 1804 rather an attempt is made to deduce the first big step from free flame to the inwardly fiery character of acid. For this step the natural combustibility of some minerals is crucial, sulphur being important because it provides a powerful acid, and what is deduced is a theory of the transformations of phlogiston and because Hegel sided with the phlogiston chemists he had to be able to deduce their assumptions from his transcendental theory. Hegel’s theory is a transcendental one that developed through an increasing tendency to focus attention upon the triad of Paracelsus, that is, from his study of the elements Paracelsus adopted the idea of tripartite alternatives to explain the nature of medicines which he thought to be composed of the tria prima three primes a combustible element (sulphur), a fluid and changeable element (mercury), and a solid, permanent element (salt) but let us not go down that road and complicate matters …..
‘Prometheus Bound’ (ending)
by Aeschylus
PROMETHEUS
The time is past for words; earth quakes
Sensibly: hark! pent thunder rakes
The depths, with bellowing din
Of echoes rolling ever nigher:
Lightnings shake out their locks of fire;
The dust cones dance and spin;
The skipping winds, as if possessed
By faction-north, south, east and west,
Puff at each other; sea
And sky are shook together: Lo
The swing and fury of the blow
Wherewith Zeus smiteth me
Sweepeth apace, and, visibly,
To strike my heart with fear. See, see,
Earth, awful Mother! Air,
That shedd’st from the revolving sky
On all the light they see thee by,
What bitter wrongs I bear!
Charles-Valentin Alkan: Grande Sonate ‘Les Quatre Âges’ Op. 33 ’50 Ans: Prométhée Enchaîné’ :-
Dedicated to the One who always lights my fire. 🔥And my soul and mind. I love you ❤️
You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
Girl, we couldn’t get much higher
Come on, baby, light my fire
Come on, baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire
The time to hesitate is through
No time to wallow in the mire
Try now we can only lose
And our love become a funeral pyre
Come on, baby, light my fire
Come on, baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire, yeah
The time to hesitate is through
No time to wallow in the mire
Try now we can only lose
And our love become a funeral pyre
Come on, baby, light my fire
Come on, baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire, yeah
You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you Girl, we couldn’t get much higher
Come on, baby, light my fire
Come on, baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire
Try to set the night on fire
Try to set the night on fire
Try to set the night on fire
====
The Doors, ‘Light My Fire:
Coming up next:
Theories of the organism.
It may stop but it never ends ….
