On Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ : A Free Reflex of Spirit — part three.
Inscriptions: VIII: ‘Ye Powers Unseen’
by Mark Akenside (1721–1770)
Ye powers unseen, to whom, the bards of Greece
Erected altars; ye who to the mind
More lofty views unfold, and prompt the heart
With more divine emotions; if erewhile
Not quite unpleasing have my votive rites
Of you been deem’d when oft this lonely seat
To you I consecrated; then vouchsafe
Here with your instant energy to crown
My happy solitude. It is the hour
When most I love to invoke you, and have felt
Most frequent your glad ministry divine.
The air is calm: the sun’s unveiled orb
Shines in the middle heaven. the harvest round
Stands quiet, and among the golden sheaves
The reapers lie reclin’d. the neighbouring groves
Are mute; nor even a linnet’s random strain
Echoeth amid the silence. Let me feel
Your influence, ye kind powers. Aloft in heaven,
Abide ye? or on those transparent clouds
Pass, ye from hill to hill? or on the shades
Which yonder elms cast o’er the lake below
Do you converse retir’d? From what lov’d haunt
Shall I expect you? Let me once more feel
Your influence, o ye kind inspiring powers:
And I will guard it well, nor shall a thought
Rise in my mind, nor shall a passion move
Across my bosom unobserv’d, unstor’d
By faithful memory. And then at some
More active moment, will I call them forth
Anew; and join them in majestic forms,
And give them utterance in harmonious strains;
That all mankind shall wonder at your sway.
Hegel sought to revalue Nature and to find intrinsic value in natural phenomena thereby anticipating current environmental thought which is an interpretation of what he was about at odds with the standard view whereby Hegel downgrades Nature deeming it of little interest by comparison with the human, historical, and socio-political phenomena with which he was primarily concerned. David Kolb, (1939 -), contends that Hegel does not offer new insights about nature as he does about social issues ‘because Hegel was more passionate about social and political matters’. And if Hegel fails to attend to Nature it is alleged that he denigrates it. Jeffrey Reid asserts that for Hegel ‘the purely natural is radically devalued’. Well Hegel does refer to Nature as a falling short (Abfall) of the idea.
‘Nature is what it is through its determinate existence, and it should not therefore be deified. It is wrong to regard and treat the sun, the moon, animals, plants etc. as works of God superior to the deeds and events of humanity. Nature is implicitly divine in that it is in the Idea; but in reality its being does not correspond to its Notion, and it is rather the unresolved contradiction. Its distinctive characteristic is its positedness, its negativity. The ancients grasped matter in general as non-ens, and nature has also been regarded as the Idea’s falling short of itself, for in this external shape the Idea is inadequate to itself. It is only to the external and immediate stage of sensuous consciousness that nature appears as that which is primary, immediate, as mere being. Even in such an element of externality, nature is, nevertheless, the representation of the Idea, and consequently one may and should admire the wisdom of God within it. Vanini said that a piece of straw was enough to prove the being of God, but every product of the spirit, the very worst of its imaginings, the capriciousness of its most arbitrary moods, a mere word, are all better evidence of God’s being than any single object. It is not only that in nature the play of forms has unbounded and unbridled contingency, but that each shape by itself is devoid of its Notion. Life is the highest to which nature drives in its determinate being, but as merely natural Idea, life is submerged in the irrationality of externality, and the living individual is bound with another individuality in every moment of its existence, while spiritual manifestation contains the moment of a free and universal relation of spirit to itself’.
And in characteristic Hegelian style he speaks of playing rough with Nature’s protean character.
‘Theoretical consciousness, because of its one-sided assumption that the natural things over against us are persistent and impenetrable, creates a difficulty which is refuted point-blank by the practical approach, which displays the absolutely idealistic belief that individual things are nothing in themselves. In its relationship to things, appetite is defective not because its attitude towards them is realistic, but because it is all too idealistic. Philosophically valid idealism consists in nothing other than the determination that the truth of things lies in their immediate particularity or sensuousness, that they are in fact mere show or appearance. According to a metaphysics prevalent at the moment, we cannot know things because they are uncompromisingly exterior to us. It might be worth noticing that even the animals, which go out after things, grab, maul, and consume them, are not so stupid as these metaphysicians. The same determination, i.e. that we think natural objects, occurs in the second aspect of the theoretical approach already indicated. Intelligence does not of course familiarize itself with things in their material existence. In that it thinks them, it sets their content within itself, and to practical ideality, which for itself is mere negativity, it adds form, universality so to speak, and so gives affirmative determination to the negative of particularity. This universality of things is not something subjective and belonging to us; it is, rather, the noumenon as opposed to the transient phenomenon, the truth, objectivity, and actual being of the things themselves. It resembles the platonic ideas, which do not have their being somewhere in the beyond, but which exist in individual things as substantial genera. Proteus will only be compelled into telling the truth if he is roughly handled, and we are not content with sensuous appearance. The inscription on the veil of Isis, ‘I am what was, is, and shall be, and my veil has been lifted by no mortal’, melts before thought. Hamann is therefore right when he says, ‘Nature is a Hebrew word, written only with consonants; it is left to the understanding to add the points’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
And so this is really complex thinking concerning the natural world which the above cited remarks are simply ignoring. Indeed oft dropping be my jaw while reading commentators on Hegel, they really need to hone up on their close reading skills. In a journal Hegel kept while hiking in the Berner Oberland during the months of July 29 and August of 1796 he proposed to transform physics into a winged thing:
‘After Guttanen the path gets wilder, more barren and monotonous. Always the same raw and dreary cliffs on either side …. The River Aar creates a number of tremendous waterfalls, plunging with frightful force …. Nowhere else does one get such a pure concept of the has-to-be [das Mussen] of nature than in viewing the eternally useless and eternally continuous crashing of waves of water against such rocks! … This family [seen gathering the roots of Gentian flowers for schnapps] lives all summer long here in complete isolation from other human beings; they have set up their distillery under towering granite boulders that nature has allowed to tumble there without purpose [zwecklos], yet out of whose accidental position these people know how to eke some advantage. I doubt whether the most devout theologian would dare, here in these mountains, to attribute to nature itself in any way the aim of utility for man; man, who has laboriously to rob nature of those few skimpy things he can use; who is never sure whether on account of his petty thefts, his tearing away a handful of grass, he will be crushed by rockslides or avalanches, whether the miserable labours of his hands, his squalid hut and cow stall will be ruined overnight. In these barren wildernesses, educated men would perhaps have invented every other theory and science, but they would scarcely have come up with that part of physico-theology that proves, much to man’s pride, that nature arranged everything for his enjoyment and well-being; a pride that characterizes our age, inasmuch as it is more likely to find satisfaction in representing all the things some alien essence did for him than in the consciousness that it is actually he himself who has dictated all these aims to nature’.
‘A physics with wings?’ asks David Farrell Krell, (1944- ). ‘Perhaps. Yet, if Hegel is the aeronautical engineer in question, all physics will be as grounded and as slow-paced and cautious as any experimental science could ever be’.
Hegel’s reassessment of Nature’s metaphysical and ethical status influences his stance towards other areas of philosophy for every part of Hegel’s system affects every other and yet the impact of his philosophy of Nature has been much neglected even though his endeavours towards a descriptively adequate conception of nature acks up a metaphysical reading of his wider philosophical system which is to say a reading according to which that system aims to furnish a realistic description of the structures of the universe while a good deal of metaphysical interpretations of Hegel discover his basic description of the universe to be contained within the categories of his Logic. Inasmuch as Hegel’s philosophy of Nature supports a metaphysical reading of his mature system non-metaphysical readings of Hegel are inclined to to play down the salience of Nature in his thought, for instance Robert Pippin asserts that: ‘Hegel concentrates on the basic idealist issues and usually stays far away from Schelling’s romantic philosophy of nature’.
And yet the Logic describes a series of ontological structures regarded in abstraction from how they are concretely instantiated in Nature and Mind and Hegel’s description of these concretely instantiated structures is primary for the Logic is established only derivatively through abstraction from the philosophies of Nature and Mind while his ethical theory is thought (by Allen Wood, (1942 — ), for instance) to be premised upon the value of certain specifically human goods or characteristics, such as self-realization or freedom but it would seem that an indispensable facet of Hegelian ethics is the recognition evinced in the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ of intrinsic value in Nature stemming from its practical rationality. Sebastian Gardner, (1960 — ), interprets German Idealism as a whole being in opposition to Spinozist (Baruch Spinoza, 1632–1677), naturalism by theorizing what he designates as our objectual relation to value which is to say our relation to value as ‘in some sense an object of experience’, embodied above all in Nature and here Hegel sides with recent environmental thinkers in extending the ethical realm beyond the narrowly human sphere.
Be it so his recognition of intrinsic value in natural entities does not much feature in his political philosophy as laid out in the ‘Philosophy of Right’ and his understanding of Nature only impinges upon his political thought in the sense that he becomes specifically concerned to deny moral considerability to natural entities and to demonstrate that in spite of their intrinsic value they make no moral claim upon human agents and so it is that the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ continues to exert a sustained if indirect influence on the conceptual structure of the ‘Philosophy of Right’. The ‘Philosophy of Nature’s influence extends in addition to Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Mind’, Mind being the English translation of Hegel’s term Geist which can also be translated as Spirit though Mind captures better the rational, conceptual, and thinking aspects of Geist, Spirit better captures its cultural, historical, and collective dimension.
Consider for instance the sections on sensation (Empfindung).
‘Sleep and waking are initially, in fact, not mere alterations, bur alternating states (a progression to infinity) . This is their formal, negative relationship; but in it the affirmative relationship is also present. Being is contained as an ideal moment in the being-for-self of the waking soul; the determinacies of the content of its sleeping nature, where they are implicitly as in their substance, are thus found by the waking soul within its own self and, indeed, for itself. This particular material, since it is determinacy, is distinct from the self-identity of being-for-self, and at the same time simply contained in its simplicity: sensation. As regards the dialectical progress from the awaking soul to sensation we have to make the following remarks. The sleep that follows waking is the natural mode of the soul’s return from difference to distinctionless unity with itself. In so far as mind remains entangled in the bonds of naturalness, this return exhibits nothing but the empty repetition of the beginning-a boring cycle’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Mind’
At one point he postulates a structural connection between the senses which collectively constitute sensation and the natural elements.
‘The general modes of sensing are related to the various physical and chemical determinacies of the natural, the necessity of which is to be demonstrated in philosophy of nature, and these modes are mediated by the various sense organs. The fact that in general sensation of the external divides up into such diverse, mutually indifferent modes of sensing, lies in the nature of its content, since this is a sensory content, and the sensory is so closely synonymous with the self-external that even internal sensations by their mutual externality become something sensory’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Mind’
Analysing his account of sensation it would seem believes human subjects to have a basic form of sentient awareness of Nature as elemental an awareness which the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ endeavours to articulate and which goes against the standard view that Hegel thought that philosophical thinking requires a purely rational and impersonal standpoint that breaks with sensation. Robert Wicks,(1946 — ), contends that: ‘Inspired by Plato, Hegel devalues sensation in favour of pure conception … Throughout his philosophical writings, Hegel constantly condemns feeling in general as a mode of knowledge’. Picture a dropping jaw again for Hegel’s attentiveness to the natural elements quite clearly demonstrates a thinking with regard to sentient experience that incorporates a pronounced strain affirming that philosophical theorizing specifically philosophical theorizing about Nature has to remain consonant with sensation and articulate sensation instead of separating from it and through tracing the impact of the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ upon Hegel’s system we acquire a new reading of his entire project whereby rather than devaluing Nature and sentient experience nature is revalued and sensation is revalued as against the abstract rationality of the Enlightenment.
As Jon Stewart, (1961 — ), suggests with reference to Hegel’s figuration of reason as a disease in the ‘Phenomenology of Mind’ Hegel ‘is very aware of the pernicious aspects of reason, and thus is best seen not as the last Aufklärer but rather as a forerunner of the so-called ‘irrationalist tradition’.’ Michael J. Petry , (1933–2003) and others in more recent times have questioned the earlier view that it outlines an essentially a priori and speculative theory of nature to combat scientific accounts on the contrary the project is not to oppose science but to reconstruct and reorganize contemporary scientific hypotheses and theories in light of the more sophisticated logical or ontological categories of his own philosophy although through interpreting it as a working-over of scientific materials from Hegel’s time the text may lose any substantive interest and be reduced merely to a document for historians of nineteenth-century science to mull over but by way of response more recent in particular English-speaking scholars have started to develop increasingly philosophical approaches to the text for we must emphasise the text’s impact upon Hegel’s wider metaphysical, ethical, and political projects, in addition to its relevance to environmental problems and to widespread concerns about the hegemony and excessive authority of modern science.
‘Hegel prefigures environmentalism’ contends Alison Stone and I agree albeit at the explicit level Hegel advances no single, unified, consistent position on the value of nature and has no explicit, unified, position on either the extent of his reliance on a priori reasoning or the content of the metaphysical presuppositions which underlie his theory of nature neither is there any single set of passages in which he explicitly defends such presuppositions as being superior to those of empirical science. And yet it is implicitly there in the text. It may be objected that a proper interpretation should attribute to authors only views that they could have held and expressed under the same description given their historical and intellectual location and the meaning of a text is fixed by its immediate context and then the interpreter’s job is to rediscover this meaning, a view of meaning challenged by Hans-Georg Gadamer, (1900–2002), who propounded a hermeneutics whereby the meaning of a text only arises in the relationship between that text and its interpreter or interpreters and any text contains innumerable potentials for meaning which become realized only as subsequent interpreters bring that text into dialogue with their own historical and intellectual contexts which is not to say that latter-day interpreters can simply project onto texts any meaning they choose for good interpretation still involves engaging with and responding to and endeavouring to understand the text. ‘Interpretation is a process of listening to what others through their words … have to say to us (in full recognition that what an act [or text] says to us may well differ from what it says to others in different interpretive situations)’, claimed Brian Fay, (1943 — ). According to this hermeneutic approach Hegel’s mature system and philosophy of Nature do not have one meaning as fixed by his immediate situation but an indefinite plurality of potential meanings each of which can emerge in appropriate contexts and as a consequence there can be no single correct interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of Nature rather a current context of environmental problems and growing interest in the possibility of a revaluing of Nature renders possible the disclosure of certain previously unrealized meanings within the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ and Hegel’s concerns over the adequacy of science and the ethical status of Nature which until now have remained only potentially present in the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ can now be realized and brought to life.
The additions to the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ by their editor, Jules Michelet, 1798 –1874), include Jena notes on philosophy of Nature from 1805 to 1806 as well as materials relating to his lectures in Heidelberg but they still make interesting additions pace John W. Burbidge, (1936 — ). Nor need we dwell upon Hegel’s relationship with Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, (1775–1854) albeit Hegel’s philosophy of Nature has been seen as an ‘arcane and derivative’ reworking of that of Schelling as George Ramsdell Lucas Jr, (1949 — ), put it. See previous article, though it is Schelling with whom the notion of philosophy of Nature is principally associated in the main in virtue of his influence upon many notable scientists of the time the so-called Naturphilosophen whom Hegel signally failed to influence indeed in fairness Schelling more or less invented the program of a philosophy of Nature with his ‘Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature’ and he redefined this program in subsequent works later revising it in the new context of his identity philosophy. Hegel however develops a more systematic and rigorously worked out version of the project initiate, and sketched out in a succession of conflicting ways by Schelling and Hegel effectively systematizes the philosophy of Nature as a distinctive conceptual space.
The question of Hegel’s relationship to Schelling does raises the question of his attitude towards Romanticism and he certainly strove for a revaluing of Nature at the same time reuniting the rational and sensible sides of human personality albeit the early German Romantics, Novalis, (1772–1801), and Schelling in particular, viewed art and later religion as the medium for the revaluing of nature while Hegel scholars downplay his affinity with Romanticism in part due to a perception of Romanticism as theoretically naïve and, perhaps politically conservative in addition a rather untenable view in the light of Romanticism’s theoretical sophistication and political complexity in addition to its decisive influence upon European philosophy since Immanuel Kant, (1724–1804). Hegel’s thinking on Nature in fact critically develops key Romantic motifs that is to say the critique of empirical science, the need to reanimate the natural world, and the need to reconcile sensation and understanding though we need not dwell on Hegel’s rejection of biological evolution not specifically Darwinian (Charles Robert Darwin, (1809–1882)) evolution of course, because such a denial of evolution is simply a contingent, inessential, feature of his account of Nature for Hegel only ever accepts or rejects scientific findings and theories on an interpretive, provisional, basis.
So, issues to be addressed include the place of a priori reasoning in Hegel’s theory of Nature for it would appear a wholly a priori account of Nature could only be chimerical and fantastic and Alison Stone advocates for an interpretation of the method as that of strong a priorism whereby first it is rationally worked out what forms Nature contains by tracing how they necessitate one another then incorporating corresponding empirical scientific claims into the resulting account thus enabling Hegel to avoid falsely absolutizing fallible empirical claims and instead incorporating them into his theory on a merely interpretive and provisional basis thence his theory of Nature can be reinterpreted as corresponding to relatively recent scientific views such as relativity theory and cannot be dismissed as obsolete or of merely historical interest.
Furthermore Hegel’s substantive theory of nature may be constructed in accordance with the strong a priori method as Hegel elaborates a complex and systematic account of the progressive structure of the natural world. A reconstructing of Hegel’s overall view of natural development has been attempted by Errol E. Harris and others, without recognizing Hegel’s basic theory that nature progressively unifies its conceptual and material elements. Nature gradually progresses from an original division between its two constituent elements, thought and matter, to their final unification, crossing a necessary sequence of hierarchically arranged stages in the process, it is a metaphysical theory of nature as he endeavours to describe the organizing structures that nature actually has, structures that consist of forms of thought that become instantiated in matter in increasingly harmoniously ways and this metaphysical approach insures that this basic theory of Nature differs markedly from all the scientific accounts which he subsequently incorporates.
And even furthermore the question arises as to in what manner Hegel’s strong a priori method rests upon his distinctively rationalist metaphysics of Nature for if he is to incorporate scientific claims into his theory only provisionally and interpretively he must offer an initial account of Nature which characterizes it in substantially different terms to all empirical science and hence must frame this account in terms of a metaphysics distinct from that presupposed in empirical science and according to this metaphysics that Hegel espouses all natural forms are intrinsically rational in that they act and transform themselves according to rational requirements. This is in contrast to the metaphysics presupposed in empirical science whereby all natural forms are bare things that are intrinsically meaningless and we must inquire into the difference between these metaphysical conceptions of Nature in the light of Hegel’s belief that all empirical science rests upon this shared metaphysics for science’s metaphysical assumptions, it may e demonstrated, are inadequate while Hegel’s rationalist metaphysical assumptions are more adequate in the sense that they more accurately capture the real character of Nature.
Is Hegel is arguing for an alternative ecologically sensitive kind of science? Well, no, but he does hold that scientific claims have to be re-described and re-situated within his broader more metaphysically adequate philosophical framework and hence we should reconstruct the arguments embedded within Hegel’s mature system that defend his contention that his rationalist metaphysics is more adequate than that of empirical science. Hegel initially presents two arguments for his rationalist metaphysics of Nature the first being that his metaphysics can better explain the range of natural processes and events an argument to be understood in the cultural context of Naturphilosophie in those time an argument from explanatory power that turns upon a formal point about the logical structure of explanation. The second argument appeals to the systematic derivation of his metaphysics of Nature from his general metaphysical standpoint that has been proven uniquely true through the critique of rival metaphysical outlooks carried out in the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ an argument invokes the spurious problem concerning the transition from the general metaphysics of the Logic to the philosophy of Nature a problem central to Schelling’s and Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach’s, (1804–1872), disputes with Hegel, and if the system cannot be construed in linear terms such an argument from systematic derivation would be inapplicable.
Two more arguments for his metaphysics of nature are first his phenomenological argument whereby his rationalist metaphysics is especially adequate in virtue of it rendering possible an elaboration of a theory of the natural world that articulates our basic form of experience of it which is sensible which is to say preconceptual. The ideal of Bildung (culture or education) implies a general commitment to a principle that adequate theories must articulate sensible experience and in the light of the passages on sensation in ‘The Philosophy of Mind’ we can discern a view that we have a basic sensible awareness of Nature as composed of the elements and the theory of Nature can then be perceived to endeavour to articulate this awareness in that it portrays Nature as pervasively elemental and furthermore it is suggested that this rationalist metaphysics uniquely allows one to develop this theory by enabling one to conceptualize the dynamism and fluidity of the natural elements and so although why sensation should be considered veridical in the first place is to be explained.
And then there is an ethical argument for this rationalist metaphysics of Nature whereby this metaphysics is uniquely adequate because for it permits us to recognize that all natural forms are intrinsically good in virtue of their practical rationality an argument grounded in the broadly Kantian thesis that goodness consists in action from reason a thesis typically used to devalue natural forms relative to rational human agents but Hegel’s view that all natural forms act from rationality too permits him to extend intrinsic goodness into the whole of nature which may be compared with recent assessments of Nature’s moral status from within environmental philosophy although it may be objected that the ethical argument suffers from the rationalist criterion of goodness ultimately entailing that human beings are morally obliged to transform natural entities without restraint as emerges in his ‘Philosophy of Right’ but the ethical argument establishes the requirement for a distinctively philosophical conception of Nature that can appreciate its intrinsic value though one might ask if his rationalist metaphysics can satisfy such a requirement.
Such arguments can be read together as constituting one interconnected defence of the metaphysics, method, and theory of Nature while establishing the need for a metaphysical view of Nature opening the way for a construction of a phenomenologically concrete theory that recognizes intrinsic value in Nature’s constituent forms and thence the arguments have the lasting achievement of opening up the philosophy of Nature as a project, the project of theorizing natural forms on the basis of a metaphysics that is distinct from that of science, and which is made adequate by its phenomenological richness and ethical implications and upon being identified th project has the potential to be rearticulated outside the parameters of Hegel’s thought in ways that could contribute to the contemporary task of revaluing the natural world.
Subsequent upon presenting us with the notion of the philosophy of Nature involving rationally reconstructing empirical findings there is advanced an alternative interpretation of te method whereby which envisages a priori and empirical components as inversely related is envisaged suggesting the philosopher should initially theorize Nature through pure reasoning and then only afterwards compare this theory with empirical scientific claims. In the philosophical procedure not only must the object be given according to its conceptual determination but also the empirical appearance that corresponds to [entspricht] it must be identified, and it must be shown that it actually corresponds to its concept. However, this is not an appeal to experience [Erfahrung] in relation to the necessity of the content.
‘The relationship of philosophy to what is empirical was discussed in the general introduction. It is not only that philosophy must accord with the experience nature gives rise to; in its formation and in its development, philosophic science presupposes and is conditioned by empirical physics. The procedure involved in the formation and preliminaries of a science is not the same as the science itself however, for in this latter case it is no longer experience, but rather the necessity of the Notion, which must emerge as the foundation. It has already been pointed out that in the procedure of philosophic cognition, the object has not only to be presented in its Notional determination, the empirical appearance corresponding to this determination also has to be specified, and it has to be shown that the appearance does in fact correspond to its Notion. This is not however an appeal to experience in regard to the necessity of the content, and an appeal to what has been called intuition, which was usually nothing 25 more than a purveyance of random concepts by means of fanciful and even fantastic analogies, is even less admissable here. These analogies may have a certain value, but they can only impose determinations and schemata on the objects in an external manner’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
That is to say the philosopher’s initial task is to deduce the existence and character of the forms comprising the natural world to give objects rationally, according to conceptual determinations for as he states elsewhere the method through which the philosopher has to construct this basic theory of Nature is through deriving each natural form as the necessary consequence of its predecessor as i]n the empirical sciences, matter is taken up as it is given by experience, from outside while in opposition to this speculative thinking has to demonstrate each of its objects and their development, in their absolute necessity and this happens in that each particular concept is led forth [abgeleitet] out of the self-originating and self-actualising universal concept, or the logical idea.
‘In contrast to the empirical sciences, where the material as given by experience is taken up from outside and ordered by an already established universal rule and brought into external interconnexion, speculative thinking has to demonstrate each of its objects and the development of them in their absolute necessity. This happens when each particular concept is derived from the self-producing and self-actualizing universal concept or the logical Idea. Philosophy must therefore comprehend mind as a necessary development of the eternal Idea and must let what constitutes the particular parts of the science of mind evolve purely from the concept of mind. Just as in the living creature generally, everything is already contained, in an ideal manner, in the germ and is brought forth by the germ itself, not by an alien power, so too must all particular forms of the living mind grow out of its concept as from their germ’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Mind’
The “logical idea” is the ultimate category of the Logic immediately preceding Nature and we need to work out what the logical idea requires as its necessary consequence and lead this onwards as the first natural form thereafter deducing succeeding natural forms from it albeit Hegel does not speak explicitly of Deduktion in this context but this is clearly equivalent to his leading forth and conceptual giving and in the introduction to the ‘Philosophy of Mind’ Hegel urges us to adopt rather than merely pretend to employ a philosophical approach that derives each logical category in a necessary series, a derivation which he describes as the deduction (Deduktion) and leading out (Ableitung) of categories. A. V. Miller translates both terms as deduction. And in the revised Michael Inwood, (1944–2021) edition:
‘In contrast to the empirical sciences, where the material as given by experience is taken up from outside and ordered by an already established universal rule and brought into external interconnexion, speculative thinking has to demonstrate each of its objects and the development of them in their absolute necessity. This happens when each particular concept is derived from the self-producing and self-actualizing universal concept or the logical Idea. Philosophy must therefore comprehend mind as a necessary development of the eternal Idea and must let what constitutes the particular parts of the science of mind evolve purely from the concept of mind. Just as in the living creature generally, everything is already contained, in an ideal manner, in the germ and is brought forth by the germ itself, not by an alien power, so too must all particular forms of the living mind grow out of its concept as from their germ. Our thinking, which is propelled by the concept, here remains entirely immanent in the object, which is likewise propelled by the concept; we merely look on, as it were, at the object’s own development, not altering it by importing our subjective ideas and notions. The concept needs no external stimulus for its actualization; its own nature involves the contradiction of simplicity and difference, and therefore restlessly impels it to actualize itself, to unfold into actuality the difference which, in the concept itself, is present only in an ideal manner, i.e., in the contradictory form of undifferentiatedness, and by this sublation of its simplicity as a defect, a onesidedness,to make itself actually the whole, of which initially it contains only the possibility’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Mind’
Having through a priori reasoning constructed a skeletal vision of Nature we must subsequently asks whether any of the forms independently identified by empirical scientists correspond to (entsprechen) the forms whose existence have been ascertained rationally, for instance Hegel states that to prove that space accords with [gemäß sei] our concept we must compare the representation of space with the determination of our concept.
‘As it is our procedure to ask how the. thought which has been established as a necessity by means of the Notion looks in our sensuous intuition, the further requirement is that the intuition of space shall correspond to the thought of pure self-externality. Even if we should deceive ourselves in this respect, this would in no way effect the truth of our thought. In the empirical sciences on the other hand, the opposite procedure is adopted; the empirical intuition of space comes first, and is then followed by the thought of space. In order to prove that space accords with our thought, we have to compare the image of space with the determination of our Notion. The content of space has nothing to do with space itself, in which various heres are juxtaposed without impinging upon one another. Here is not yet place, it is merely the possibility of place. The heres are completely identical, and this abstract plurality, which has no true interruption and limit, is the precise constitution of externality. Although the heres are also differentiated, their being different is identical with their lack of difference, and the difference is therefore abstract’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Only if an empirical account accords or corresponds with some element in Hegel’s pre-constituted a priori theory of Nature does that empirical account get incorporated and by supplementing the a priori framework with empirical material in this manner the initially skeletal account is corroborated and amplified albeit for the skeletal account of Nature to be properly non-empirical, its descriptions of Nature’s component forms cannot be couched in terms that derive from and so already presuppose the compatibility of empirical claims and so the natural forms thereby deduced are discoursed upon in unfamiliar language for instance starting with a form called the universal being-outside-itself [Außersichsein] of nature, that, corresponds to space as characterized by empirical scientists for the primary or immediate determination of nature is the abstract universality of its being-outside-itself its unmediated indifference, space.
‘The primary or immediate determination of nature is the abstract universality of its self-externality, its unmediated indifference, i.e. space. It is on account of its being self-externality, that space constitutes collaterality of a completely ideal nature; as this extrinsicality is still completely abstract, space is simply continuous, and is devoid of any determinate difference…. The content of space has nothing to do with space itself, in which various heres are juxtaposed without impinging upon one another. Here is not yet place, it is merely the possibility of place. The heres are completely identical, and this abstract plurality, which has no true interruption and limit, is the precise constitution of externality. Although the heres are also differentiated, their being different is identical with their lack of difference, and the difference is therefore abstract. Space is therefore punctiformity without points, or complete continuity. If one fixes a point, space is both interrupted and simply uninterrupted. The point has significance only in so far as it is spatial, and so external both to itself and to others. The here also has within itself an above, a below, a left and a right. If anything were no longer external to itself, but only to others it would be a point; but as no here is the last, there can be no such thing. No matter how far away I place a star, I can always go beyond it, for no one has boarded up the universe. This is the complete externality of space.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
The to begin with unfamiliar form henceforth attains concrete significance as space thereby illustrating how a basic a priori theory of Nature portrays natural phenomena in sui generis specifically non-scientific terms a wholly non-empirical theory from thence becoming embedded in an overall picture of Nature emerging from the subsequent interpolation of empirical materials. Two interpretations of the method are proposed assigning inversely symmetrical roles to a priori and empirical knowledge though Hegel has been accused of inconsistency. Thomas Webb contends that Hegel vacillates between saying that ‘empirical phenomena … merely illustrate the necessary and autonomous development of the natural categories’ and that these phenomena are ‘constitutive of the content of the categories of nature themselves’. The two methods may e designated respectively and following Stone the weak and strong a priori methods whereby according to the former one must learn about Nature’s constituent forms from scientists and then work out rationally why these forms are as they are by tracing how they necessitate one another and according to the latter one must work out rationally what forms Nature contains by tracing how they necessitate one another given the initial import of the logical idea and subsequently one incorporates corresponding empirical claims into the resulting theory. Can we have both interpretations? as he says elsewhere : ‘[W]e can first say . . . that the philosophy of nature does not need experience; on the one hand, this is true. . . . However we must not envisage the relationship of philosophy to experience as if it did not need experience’. (Vorlesung über Naturphilosophie, Berlin 1823/24). And Hegel contends that he philosophy of Nature takes the material which physics has prepared from experience at the point to which physics has brought it and reorganises it without basing itself upon experience as the final proof [Bewährung] hence physics must work into the hands of philosophy.
‘The material prepared out of experience by physics, is taken by the philosophy of nature at the point to which physics has brought it, and reconstituted without any further reference to experience as the basis of verification. Physics must therefore work together with philosophy so that the universalized understanding which it provides may be translated into the Notion by showing how this universal, as an intrinsically necessary whole, proceeds out of the Notion. The philosophic manner of presentation is not arbitrary, it does not stand on its head for a while because it has got tired of using its legs, nor does it paint up its every-day face just for a change; the ways of physics are not adequate to the Notion, and for that reason advances have to be made. The philosophy of nature distinguishes itself from physics on account of the metaphysical procedure it employs, for metaphysics is nothing but the range of universal thought-determinations, and is as it were the diamond-net into which we bring everything in order to make it intelligible. Every cultured consciousness has its metaphysics, its instinctive way of thinking. This is the absolute power within us, and we shall only master it if we make it the object of our knowledge. Philosophy in general, as philosophy, has different categories from those of ordinary consciousness’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Such taking and reorganising appears initially to refer to the initial acceptance and subsequent reconstruction of empirically generated accounts of Nature as envisaged by the weak a priori interpretation but one may also read this as referring to the final examination of empirical accounts and incorporation of those that correspond to philosophical claims as anticipated on the strong a priori interpretation for Hegel asserts in another place speculative science does not leave the empirical content of the other sciences aside but recognises and uses it and in the same way recognises and employs the universal of these sciences, the laws, the genera, etc., for its own content; but it also introduces other categories into these universals and gives them validity [geltend macht].
‘Hence the relationship of speculative science to the other sciences is simply the following: speculative science does not leave the empirical content of the other sciences aside, but recognises and uses it, and in the same way recognises and employs what is universal in these sciences, [i. e., ] the laws, the classifications, b etc., for its own content; but also it introduces other categories into these universals and gives them currency. So the distinction between speculative and empirical science relates only to this alteration of the categories. Speculative Logic contains the older logic and metaphysics; it preserves the same forms of thought, laws, and ob-jects, but it develops and transforms them with further categories. What has usually been called a ‘concept’ has to be distinguished from the Concept in the speculative sense. The assertion, repeated many thousands of times, until it became a prejudice, that the Infinite cannot be grasped through concepts, is made only in the customary, or one-sided sense’.
-’The Encyclopaedia Logic’
Should we thereby accept empirical accounts but amend them which is to say introduce other categories so that the forms identified can be recognized as constituting a necessary chain hence receiving additional vindication from reason? Or should we grant validity to empirical accounts by identifying them as corresponding to philosophically derived characterizations of natural forms an identification that introduces other categories into those accounts? Hegel informs us that it is only an ill-minded prejudice to assume that philosophy stands antithetically opposed to any sensible appreciation of experience and these shapes of consciousness, such as science are recognised by philosophy and even justified [gerechtfertigt] by it and rather than opposing them the thinking mind steeps itself in their basic import; it learns from them and strengthens itself.
‘In order to reach a provisional agreement about the distinction that has been mentioned and the insight connected with it, namely, that the genuine content of our consciousness is preserved when it is translated into the form of thought and the concept, and even that it is not placed in its proper light until then, we can conveniently call to mind another old prejudice. This prejudgment holds that, when we want to experience what is true in ob-jects and occurrences, as well as in feelings, intuitions, opinions, notions, etc., then we must think them over. And the very least that this thinking-over does in any case is to change our feelings, and notions, etc. into thoughts’
‘But since philosophy claims that it is thinking that is the proper form of its business, and since every human is by nature able to think, what happens as a result of this abstraction, which leaves out the distinction that was indicated in § 3, is just the opposite of what we have mentioned already as the complaint about the unintelligibility of philosophy. Philosophic science is often treated with contempt by those who imagine and say-although they have not made any effort to come to grips with it-that they already understand what philosophy is all about quite spontaneously, and that they are able to do philosophy and to judge it just by holding on to what they have learnt at a very ordinary level, in particular from their religious feelings. In the case of the other sciences, we admit that one has to have studied them in order to know about them, and that one is only entitled to judge them in virtue of a studied acquaintance. We admit that in order to make a shoe, one has to have learnt and practiced how to do it, even though everyone of us has the required measure in his own feet, and we all have hands with a natural aptitude for the trade in question. It is only for doing philosophy that study, learning, and effort of this kind is supposedly not needed.-Of late, this convenient opinion has received its confirmation through the doctrine of immediate knowing, [i. e., ] of knowing through intuition’.
- ‘The Encyclopaedia Logic’
Elsewhere we are told that the first thing is now the a priori conceptual determination and the second is to seek out the way and manner that this conceptual determination exists in our representation, in the discussion on light:
‘The apriori Notional-determination of light is now the primary consideration. In the second instance we have to discover the mode and manner in which this Notional-determination occurs in our sensuous perception. As immediate, free, and independent motion returned into itself. matter is the simple self-equality of integrality. As motion has returned into itself, the celestial sphere has perfected and concluded the independent and ideal life within it. This completed being-in-self is the precise constitution of its integrality. As existent it is in itself; that is to say that this being-in-self of the totality is itself present. It contains the moment by which it is for another; that which is for itself is the power of its centre, or its self-containedness. This simple power is itself present however, and as it is the other of this determinate being, that which is merely internal is to the same extent external’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
The immanent philosophical element is here as everywhere the internal necessity of the conceptual determination, which must then be shown to be some natural existence.
‘To oriental intuition, it is the pure selfhood of consciousness which constitutes the substantial identity of spiritual and natural, and this constitutes the self-identical thought which in the abstract form of the true and the good is one with light. There is an attitude of mind which is said to be realistic, and which denies that ideality is present in nature; it should be asked to concern itself among other things with light, which is pure manifestation, and nothing but manifestation. The resultant self-identity now has matter within it as the primary abstract self of centrality, and is the simplicity of existent ideality. We have shown in the introduction, that in order to prove that this thought-determination is light, an empirical procedure has to be adopted. Here as everywhere, that which is immanently philosophical is the inherent necessity of Notional determination, which then has to be illustrated by some natural existence or other. Here I shall merely make a few remarks on the empirical existence of pure manifestation as light’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Hegel presents intriguing arguments linking each natural form to its successor includes numerous summaries of material from the sciences of his time, providing detailed sections on, for instance, geometry, magnetism, electricity, and geology but as we are by no means exhorted to dispense with scientific claims indeed we are instructed to thoroughly consider and frequently endorse scientific claims as supplements to our basic non-empirical theory of nature and the extensive presence of scientific findings in the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ fits with a robust a priorism and furthermore a good deal of such findings feature in the additions to Hegel’s main paragraphs which implies that they simply supplement his principle argument in line with the robust a priori interpretation albeit the arrangement of the presentation Hegel’s paragraphs does not immediately suggest that empirical claims or concepts are incorporated only after previously deducing a specifically philosophical form and nearly all of the headings demarcating discussions of individual forms are names drawn from empirical science for instance sound and electricity hence implying that the descriptions of those forms originate in that science yet upon examining the substance of those discussions one often discovers the empirical names to e introduced only subsequent upon initially characterizing the relevant natural form in sui generis philosophical terms for instance in the claim that there is a type of body characterized by inner quivering within itself, sound, and the existence of this oscillating in itself appears as sound.
‘The ideality which is posited here is an alteration which consists of a double negation. The negating of the extrinsic subsistence of the material parts is itself negated as the reinstating of their juxtaposition and their cohesion. As the exchange of mutually cancelling determinations, this single ideality is the inner vibration of the body within itself, i.e. sound. Addition. The determinate being of this oscillation within itself seems to differ from the determination we had in elasticity. The being-for-other of this determinate being is sound, which is therefore the third determination’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Nature’
Similarly, physical bodies exhibit their real selfhood as their light, but a light that is intrinsically differentiated, electrical relationship.
‘Bodies stand in relation to the elements in accordance with their determinate particularity; as shaped wholes however, they also enter into relationship with one another as physical individualities. They are independent through a particularity which has not yet entered the chemical process, and preserves their mutual indifference within a wholly mechanical relationship. Within this mechanical relationship they manifest their self as sound, which is an internal oscillation, a motion of an ideal nature. Now however it is as their light, in the reciprocal physical tension of their particularity, that they exhibit the real nature of their selfhood. Nevertheless, although this selfhood is at the same time an abstract reality, it is an intrinsically differentiated light-electrical relationship’.
- ‘The Philosopher of Nature’
No matter, although it may be unphilosophical I revel in ambiguity. Yet commentators persist in denying that a roust a priori reading of this account of nature has any textual warrant. Gerd Buchdahl, (1914–2001), states that the idea that Hegel’s approach was basically speculative ‘bear[s] little relation to the truth of the matter, and [is] certainly not supported by a reading of Hegel’s actual writings’. Picture the dropping of a jaw once more. One must not overlook the slight detail that robust a priorism does indeed recommend incorporating empirical material into one’s philosophical theory of Nature and it is our privilege to adopt whichever method is more philosophically cogent albeit the prevailing judgement among commentators is that roubst a priorism is less philosophically cogent than the more flaccid a priorism, well, whichever form of a priorism is to be preferred will become more apparent as we press on.
Dedicated to my lovely One who serves me particularly well when writing on Nature for my muse is one of Nature’s most wondrous products, who can doubt the enchantment of Nature when we witness such poetry in motion?
When I see my baby
What do I see
Poetry
Poetry in motion
Poetry in motion
Walkin’ by my side
Her lovely locomotion
Keeps my eyes open wide
Poetry in motion
See her gentle sway
A wave out on the ocean
Could never move that way
I love every movement
And there’s nothing I would change
She doesn’t need improvement
She’s much too nice to rearrange
Poetry in motion
Dancing close to me
A flower of devotion
A swaying gracefully
Whoa
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa
Whoa
Poetry in motion
See her gentle sway
A wave out on the ocean
Could never move that way
I love every movement
There’s nothing I would change
She doesn’t need improvement
She’s much too nice to rearrange
Poetry in motion
All that I adore
No number-nine love potion
Could make me love her more
Whoa
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa
Johnny Tillotson — ‘Poetry in Motion’:
Coming up next:
The deduction of natural forms.
To be continued …
