On Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ : A Free Reflex of Spirit — part thirty three.
‘Nothing’
by Hermann von Gilm zu Rosenegg (1812–1864)
I should name, you say, my
queen in the realm of love?
You are fools, for I know
her less than you do.
Ask me about the colour of her eyes;
ask me about the sound of her voice;
ask me about her gait and posture, and how she dances;
ah, what do I know about it?
Is not the sun the source
of all life and all light?
And about this, what do
I and you and everyone know? Nothing.
‘Nichts’
Nennen soll ich, sagt ihr, meine
Königin im Liederreich?
Toren, die ihr seid, ich kenne
Sie am wenigsten von euch.
Fragt mich nach der Augen Farbe,
Fragt mich nach der Stimme Ton,
Fragt nach Gang und Tanz und Haltung,
Ach, und was weiß ich davon!
Ist die Sonne nicht die Quelle
Alles Lebens, alles Lichts?
Und was wissen von derselben
Ich, und ihr, und alle? — Nichts.
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831). The Philosophy of Nature.
As we have seen the physical model of the logic of understanding was the Newtonian theory of the Solar System, Hegel identifying his logic of simple connection as the logic of understanding and yet the direct transformation of the aether into space at the beginning of the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ reflects the simplicity of the connection between understanding and its object. Following upon this Hegel turns his attention to shape and chemism. And then follows physics. A great deal of Hegel’s discussion was needed for the understanding of the Earth’s shaping and chemism. In ‘Physics’ he advanced to a higher level of conceptual complexity and descended to a more immediate level of phenomenal observation, and the following section dealt with the organism, the last section dealing with plants and animals.
Mechanics or the Theory of Matter. The physical model of the logic of understanding is the Newtonian theory of the Solar System and Hegel identified his logic of ‘Simple Connection’ as the logic of understanding and he designated the first part of Logic the science of pure understanding in 1808 albeit the formal title is ‘Ontological Logic’. Which title he used for it in 1805 cannot be known for certain and yet the direct transformation of the aether into space at the beginning of the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ reflects the simplicity of the connection between understanding and its object. The aether is the immediate conceptual unity of being and non-being, it is ‘determinate being gone back into its concept’, which is just what absolute cognition is in its formal aspect at the end of the ‘Metaphysics’ of 1804. In the ‘Metaphysics’ the return of the infinite into its beginning is stressed and that beginning is the whole of Simple Connection and here the beginning has to be taken more radically as the return to the identity of being and nothing, the existence of the determinate rational consciousness).
The aether is characterized objectively as absolute elasticity and further as uncloudable transparency and unlike Aristotle’s prime matter it is an active potentiality, it is the unity of intellect and thing, not prime but ‘absolute’ matter, matter that can give itself form, and the concept is the same as that of 1804 but all the theological language is now missing, Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz (1805–1879) contended that the metaphors have gone over into the ‘Metaphysics’, and they are appropriate to the fullness of logical development but now that the aether realizes the immediacy of Pure Being = Nothing, not the self-conscious infinite of cognition, they would be somewhat misleading at the beginning of natural philosophy and such a bare treatment of the aether is precisely paralleled by the abstractly conceptual beginning of the Logic both in 1808 and in 1812 with the identity of Pure Being and Nothing, hence we may suppose that the speculative development of Quality in Hegel’s new Logic of 1805 commenced with this identity. The aether is the reality of Werden, the equilibrium of this unity of opposites is the rational awareness of space.
The existing aether is immediately space but the Concept which will mediate itself as the singular unity of genus and species is not space but space and time, and upon reaching the transition from space to time Hegel states that ‘space is immediately existing Quantity’. The categories of Quality and Quantity evolve together in their experiential application, real existence has two sides, it is for itself and it is for another, but the existence of space for its other, the intuitive Ego, is not of concern here and is to be considered separately or as existing for itself. That is how the understanding operates and that is why the quantitative continuity of space is the first reality of nature albeit things would be different if understanding turned first upon the intuitive activity of conscious understanding itself, that is what is done in the new critical logic, or phenomenology, then qualitative variety becomes the primitive form of otherness or multiplicity.
Space is that which precisely because it is the immediate object of understanding has no inside, it is essentially outside and the consciousness that is aware of it, is aware of a system of potential external relations. Space is, in itself, nothing, but also as continuous quantity it can be determined. Determination begins with the fixing of a point which both is and is not in space but a point can only be fixed in connection with another, its existence is as the beginning of a line, a beginning which is also logically one end of it but not only is the point either beginning or end depending how we choose to regard it, it is both at once since the line it terminates defines a linear direction on the other side of it as the finite terminus hence the straight line of geometry is the simplest model of the bad spurious infinite.
The necessary context of the line is a plane and the context of a plane is a volume and as to why the context of external relations should have three dimensions and need the fourth dimension of time in order for its concept to be realized Hegel explains in terms of the dialectical moments of self-othering and return to self. The concept of dimension itself necessarily involves a planar surface and the line is the first negative through which the non-spatial point gets position, the surface is the negative of that negative or the return of space to itself and the surface is a determinate space which means that a surface can be intuited whereas lines and points can only be intuited on it.
Determinate space itself thus defined is only the limit of a volume and it requires a context in turn for its definition, it is a realized limit and from it is derived the capacity to return and define line and point as ideal limits but now this negative has to have its negation in order to be determinate. Volume by itself is only the complex of all possible external relations and everything is determinable, nothing is determinate and the determining comes from the negative which has withdrawn out of space, that is to say from the intuitive activity which is in time and when that point posits itself in space it posits itself in space and time.
With the positing of time a shift is made from the logical category of Dasein to that of Veränderung (Change), and existence in time is a determinate process of self-negation. One is immediately conscious in the present but this present is a moving limit and the self-identity of any real thing is the identity of what is there now with what was there before but also with what will be there since the permanence of the present as the past requires its absolute impermanence its non-being or future aspect. The argument is the same as in 1804 but now it is urged in the terms of ordinary understanding. ‘The future will be, we represent it as something, we carry the very being of the present over to it, we do not represent it as something merely negative; but this imparted being falls outside it, it is a represented [being]. — Its true being is to be Now.’ The past simply is, it is completed time, the truth of time but that truth is possessed in the present. ‘The present is neither more nor less than the future and past.’ This absolute or eternal present is time itself and the permanent subsistence of future, present, and past as a structure is ‘the space that is in it’, that is to say it is the spatiality of time but time itself is motion and the real existence of negation and transition. In the permanence of the past as its totality it goes under and this is endurance, the model of which is the stars in their courses. Enduring, that is, perfectly periodic, motion is the reality of space and time as a conceptual whole. ‘The simple substance has dimensions in it too, like space and time, but they are dimensions which immediately have the significance of being just as much space as time.’ It is within this substance that our space and time truly exist.
The concept of endurance as the unity of space and time involves the same dynamic concept of matter as an equilibrium of motion that Hegel maintained in the textbook of 1804 but Hegel lets this come to light gradually and the unity of the here and the now he continued is ‘place’, as changeable, but change of place involves all the paradoxes of Zeno, a moving thing has a place which is no place. ‘This dialectic is just the infinite Concept that the Here is, in that time is posited in it.’ Duration is the path of motion, the correlation of places and times but simple motion in space and time is only the concept of duration not its reality. Free fall is not free at all but only derivative and causally subordinate motion.
The motion that defines a place and a duration is motion in a circle and when the circle spins on its axis a volume is defined and mass is posited and if the perfect periodic equilibrium of a spherical motion of this kind is immediately posited then we have a perceptible or stable mass whose self-sustaining motion resists disruption from outside. This is how it appears as a mass in relation with other masses, it is the resting equilibrium of self-sustaining motion that constitutes its inertia and further motion can be imparted to the inertial system as a whole but the mass is already a pattern of motions, the seeming inert thing of sense-perception is an abstraction hence mass involves both rest and motion just as duration involves both space and time.
Matter becomes inertial when it is subordinated as in free fall or projectile motion but the substantial nature of mass is what is revealed in the balanced pattern of the celestial sphere. The Newtonian method of reasoning from the inertial character of the parts of the Earth to the inertial character of the Earth as part of the Solar System is mistaken since the Solar System is not that kind of whole, the heavenly spheres endure, these motions are not to be compared with those of falling apples or colliding billiard balls, rather they show what mass is, they show how we such experiential phenomena should be thought of as stability and inertia.
Such instruction regarding theory construction is what Hegel seeks in the heavens and now he seems to have abandoned the belief that Kepler’s laws contain an easily recognizable lesson of this kind yet he believes for instance that we must study to see what comets can teach us about the necessities of the natural order and the limits of physical possibility instead of looking for theories which will explain ‘where they came from’ as if they need never have been there at all. The lessons that he discovers in comets, moon, and planets are not new relative to 1804 but most of the speculative romantic atmosphere of the previous year has disappeared. Being a moving image of eternity, the sky is for the most part full of illustrations of the theory of dynamic geometry but a romantic view is still present to an extent for Hegel is willing to call the Sun the mother of Earth and the Moon its regent but much has no significance except to illustrate the range of possibility and Hegel no longer discerns deep significance in the orbits of Saturn’s moons or even in the ratios of the planetary orbits but the cycle of day and night and of the seasons is the context of all higher development.
Shape and Chemism. All Nature falls within the category of determinate being (Dasein). The celestial system is the determinate model of the true infinite. With the next phase, Shaping and Chemism, we move on to the determinate illustration of Essence. The transition from Heaven to Earth is made in 1805 as it was in 1804 through the concept of Light. Light is the determinate existence of the inward force that holds the whole together, or the manifestation of simple force, its relation to gravity is difficult to express but it seems that Hegel thinks of light as the showing forth of free force, it is the totality of the aether which is polarized into the existing bodily units of the system hence it has its proper focus in the Sun. And here is the final explication of the claim in the Dissertation that the true physics would show that the centre of the system of motion was necessarily the light source.
As against this ideal manifestation gravity itself is the reality of force exerted upon an opposed centre. Gravity is the medium in which inert bodies exist, it is force as conceived by the understanding, whereas light is force as conceived by Reason. and speaking precisely gravity brings everything to rest whereas their life is motion. Light is the ‘source of life but not life itself’ and it is ‘absolute velocity’ hence in passing to the phenomena of finite mechanics one is in the proper sphere of the Understanding.
The principle of motion is now an external one, the gravitational force of the Earth, and the goal of all such finite motion is to come to rest. In free fall the law of acceleration is the same for all bodies because it is only their being subordinate that counts and in this logical respect all are equal whether big or small, heavy or light but in projectile motion which goes against this general subordination the magnitude of the motion is a product of the force of the throw and the weight of the mass thrown. Gravity operates with its indifferent general force on all projectiles causing them to fall while they are also moving with this specific acceleration.
In Hegel’s mature ‘Philosophy of Nature’ this straightforward recital of the facts of finite mechanics becomes the prelude to celestial mechanics which properly belongs to the logic of understanding but in 1805/6 Hegel treats finite gravity as the manifestation of an occult force and hence as the rsfit appearance a mere Schein in the language of the 1812 Logic of force proper or of the concept as an inward essence the noumenal unity which explains the diverse phenomena of falling, throwing, pendulum swinging, and so on.
Fall ends in rest through impact and impact discloses the differential elasticity of bodies, elasticity is the continuum of the most directly solicited aspect of essence, this is the scale of absolute gravity or absolute force since the compression of the yielding body makes it more dense and with its elastic rebound it becomes momentarily less dense. This specific response of bodies in their universal mechanical relationships is their Tone and now that he has a hidden essence to contend with Hegel’s metaphors and analogies abound. A thing’s tone is the ‘seed of its life’, it is ‘axial rotation or restless light’. Phenomenal elasticity discloses the essential inward ‘fluidity’ of matter and this inward fluidity expressed as a conceptual continuum is specific gravity and every different kind of matter has a gravity that can be fixed on the scale.
Hegel has now decided that this concept of the real fluidity of matter is what was referred to as ‘universal cohesion’ in Schelling’s Darstellung and the degree of inward fluidity of a substance is its ‘inner Gestalt’. Hence water to take the model case of explicit fluidity gains a proper tone when it becomes ice and brittleness and malleability are different degrees of ‘fluidity’ and will give different ranges of ‘tone’.
Water is itself fluid and thus ‘shapeless’, air and fire represent higher degrees on the scale of free fluidity. In the scale of fixed or ‘shaped’ fluidity we must do things such as pounding in order to discriminate different degrees. Hegel regards magnetism as a manifestation of how fluidity moves down the scale towards shape, as a self-organizing power of matter, magnetism is its ‘subject-being’. Magnetism is the first (linear) dimension of subjectivity. The Earth is a magnet with a variable axis. It does not behave like a finite magnet, in that its force is felt everywhere equally, but it is axially oriented. ‘Force’, in Hegel’s understanding of it, is a theoretical concept not an observable datum and this is well illustrated in his observation that it is ‘the business of the physicist to discover and display the identity of the Begriff as identity of phenomena’. His general conception of gravity becoming ‘fluid’ in specific gravity and ‘self-shaping’ in magnetism is an attempt to fulfil this duty and at the base of his interpretation of the phenomena is ‘the still life-principle peculiar to nature which expounds itself without deeds, and from whose formations one can only say that it is there’.
This concept of the Earth’s gravity as ‘fluid’ and ‘self-shaping’ comes to its final fruition in Hegel’s geology but magnetism is not yet purposive as Hegel takes the formation of crystals to be, the formation of crystals and of fossils is the highest manifestation of the Earth’s self-shaping power. To fossils I will return later they are not explicable in terms of ‘specific gravity’.
From magnetism Hegel passes to static electricity. This represents a conceptual advance since now the poles of force are separate ‘shapes’ and the phenomenon transcends ‘shape’ altogether and here light is born again from the dark opacity of solid matter. Static electricity along with acoustic phenomena fits neatly into the framework of Hegel’s theory of gravity as an inward tension or tone of matter. With friction and the electric spark we have not only light however but heat also. Light, heat, and the chemical elements are all of them in Hegel’s theoretical construction, aspects or moments of the one substance, Fire, and the living force of this substance reveals itself, first, in the way that the ‘tone’ of things is affected by heat. Heat is the ‘forceful Dasein’ of this Heracleitean fire, ‘or purely material force’. By calling it ‘material’ Hegel means to insist upon its identity with the matter that it is in and he takes heat to be not a ‘stuff’ in itself but a force that flows through the matter that it operates on and all matter is always in tension, so that heat is an increasing tension.
If we compare the definition of heat given in 1804: ‘The concept of the fluid which has realized itself, i.e. [realized] the way in which it is against shape and frees its moments, giving them subsistence, is heat, so that heat-stuff has rightly been [re]cognized as the imponderable base, the immaterial matter of the determinacies’, with the approach in 1805, it is pparent that Hegel was here making another endeavour to isolate what was correct in the widely accepted hypothesis of ‘heat-stuff’. In the Berlin Encyclopaedia he declares that ‘the experiments of Rumford on the heating of bodies by friction (in the boring of cannon for example) could long ago have completely banished the Vorstellung of the specific independent existence of heat; here it is demonstrated beyond all dispute, purely in its origin and nature as a modal condition (Zustandsweise).’ This was his view on the ontological or substantial question all along but in the Encyclopaedia he found almost no virtue in the ‘heat-stuff theory’ other than that ‘the abstract Vorstellung of matter contains explicitly (für sich) the determination of continuity, which is the possibility of transmission, and qua activity the actuality of the same’. Finally he reaffirms the definition of 1804: ‘this implicit (ansichseiende) continuity becomes activity as negation against form,-specifc gravity and cohesion, as [these exist] from now on, against shape.’
Since the 1805 manuscript represents a tentative step further in the appreciation of an opposed view an exposed position from which Hegel subsequently withdrew nothing from this discussion of heat was taken over into Michelet’s edition of the Encyclopaedia text and lectures and yet much of the detail of the mature theory was, in fact, first worked out here for instance the theory of ‘specific heat’. Hegel’s theory of heat as ‘material force’ was designed to reconcile the general truth that heat flows from one body to another until an equilibrium is established with the particular truths that every body has a specific heat capacity, some get hot much more slowly than others, some absorb radiant heat readily, while others reflect it, and so on.
The burning glass ‘condenses’ light into heat while remaining itself relatively cool but the communication of heat between bodies is marked by expansion which is indeed a reliable index of temperature. The ‘condensation’ is the materialization of the force, while the expansion is the incipient dissolution of the ‘shape’ without which matter is not fully actual. Heat is not properly material since it cannot maintain its concentration, it shares itself out hence compression can give rise to heat emission, and the striking together of different elasticities produces a spark.
All through these notes Hegel is finding his way and in the textbook of 1804 he stated a theory and now he is employing that same theory to generate hypotheses. It is still the same theory but he expresses it in materialist terms as far as possible since he is now applying it to finite terrestrial phenomena not just to the Earth’s atmospheric process. He notices oddities for instance the irregular behaviour of water which expands when it freezes but always the 1804 position, which he restated in his maturity, stood as a constant for his attempts at detailed application. Heat is the principle that negates shape. ‘Specific heat’ is the union of this negative principle with its own opposite to produce a definite shape.
The ‘chemical element’ is the mere concept of Shape, the space-filling, airy potentiality for specific determinacy. ‘Its essence is heat, heat-matter, its ponderable base, the chemists take it conversely as the imponderable.’ The chemical elements have specific gravities and specific heat-capacities but their existence is just their capacity to enter into the atmospheric process and this process which was the context and foundation of the constructive theory of 1804 is the climax of the theory of finite shaping now, since the logic by which we move to consciousness of the Infinite is now recognized as the process through which the Infinite moves to consciousness of itself, the whole procedure of real comprehension is transformed. One moves from the visible finite phenomena of heat as the material force transmitted differentially by contact to the invisible process of radical chemical transformation in the atmosphere and from there to the total process of Sun and Earth acting and reacting at a distance and of the terrestrial fire expressing itself in the weather-cycle.
The atmospheric process is the process of the dissociated moments of fire. Hegel describes it in more recognizably empirical terms since he wants to pass directly to the phenomena of ordinary combustion as rapidly as possible yet there is no change in the doctrine of 1804 and the advance of logic to speculative status legitimates the description of the transition from mechanics to chemism in terms of an analogy that we encountered in the 1804 logic: ‘The immediate armaments [of the infinite cycle] are oxygen and hydrogen, whereby it individualizes nitrogen to carbon dioxide.’
Gregorian, ‘Lady in Black’:-
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The real physical elements are the realization of this concept, or the ‘mechanics’ of chemism. Fire now materializes, it becomes phenomenally visible as one of the four physical elements and the chemical process itself is the real element of Air and at this point Hegel acknowledges the chemical analysis of water into oxygen and hydrogen insisting only that this is quite different from a mechanical composition of parts. Its chemical composition makes water the neutral element. Water becomes earth in the process of crystallization, recall that for Hegel the physical element is sea-water.
The ‘original’ crystal is diamond, the crystalline form of the chemical element, carbon and in an echo of the theological language of the Triangle fragment and of Boehme Hegel calls this ‘the firstborn Son of Light and Gravity’ — ‘firstborn Son of Light’ is a title often given to the fallen angel opposed to God and here it stands for the internalized light which is the life-principle of Earth itself and the recourse to theological language signalizes the fact that the argument has now reached the extreme of purely symbolic significance and the most significant point is that the Lebenslauf of Nature now pictures the ‘fall’ of Spirit again not merely the ‘goodness of God’ as in 1804.
This characterization of the elements is a logical ‘process’ only, a ‘process brought to rest’ as Hegel noted in the margin and the speculative goal is to understand the way in which the light-principle is embodied within opaque matter, or to structure our experience of the physical world as a reflected image of the self. Hegel’s theological metaphor serves as an acknowledgement of an intuitive leap, an interpretive step at this stage somewhat gratuitous and the process of comprehension has reached a turning point that can only be validated by the coherent pattern of the argument as a whole. As Hegel says of the title ‘Substance’ at the beginning of his theory of Relationship in the logic of 1804: ‘for now it has only the significance of a sign’, but in this case the sign-status is eternal and the elements are the brute raw material with which the marks that carry the meaning of the Logos are made.
The ‘total process’ involves the activity of the Sun against the self-shaping Earth called on that account a crystal but one that is in solution. ‘The sun is pure force’ and ‘its actuality is the Earth-process’ but in the process the elements become chemical abstractions, matter itself is in process of transformation, and the real element that provides the substrate for this is water. What is powered by the sunlight is the rain-cycle. The Earth is dried and its moisture disappears in the free fluidity of the air and the moments presented directly in the simple being of space and time, as moon and comet are here realized in the physics or essence of the Earth but at the lunar core of the dry Earth, there is its own living fire, while the ‘cometary’ atmosphere is electrically charged, and discharges itself in the lightning flash. The Earth’s atmosphere actually produces both moons (aerolites) and comets (meteors) according to the terrestrially self-sufficient meteorology that Hegel inherited from Aristotle.
I dedicate this slight work to my lady in black.
She came to me one morning One lonely Sunday morning Her long hair flowing In the midwinter wind.
I know not how she found me For in darkness I was walking And destruction lay around me From a fight I could not win
Ah, ah-ah, ah-ah, ah-ah-ah Ah, ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah
She asked me name my foe then I said the need within some men To fight and kill their brothers Without thought of love or God
And I begged her, give me horses To trample down my enemies So eager was my passion To devour this waste of life
Ah, ah-ah, ah-ah, ah-ah-ah Ah, ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah
But she wouldn’t think of battle that Reduces men to animals So easy to begin And yet impossible to end
For she’s the mother of all men Who counselled me so wisely then I feared to walk alone again And asked if she would stay
Ah, ah-ah, ah-ah, ah-ah-ah Ah, ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah
Oh, lady, lend your hand outright And let me rest here at your side “Have faith and trust in peace”, she said And filled my heart with life
There is no strength in numbers Have no such misconception But when you need me Be assured, I won’t be far away
Ah, ah-ah, a-ah, ah-ah-ah Ah, ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah
Thus, having spoke, she turned away And though I found no words to say I stood and watched until I saw Her black coat disappear
My labour is no easier But now I know I’m not alone I’ll find new heart each time I think upon that windy day
And if one day she comes to you Drink deeply from her words so wise Take courage from her as your prize And say hello from me
Ah, ah-ah, a-ah, ah-ah-ah Ah, ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah Ah, ah-ah, a-ah, ah-ah-ah Ah, ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah Ah, ah-ah, a-ah, ah-ah-ah Ah, ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah
Uriah Heep, ‘Lady in Black’:
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Coming up next:
The process of separation.
To be continued …
