On Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ : A Free Reflex of Spirit — part twenty five.

David Proud

36 min readAug 11, 2023

‘Magnet’

by Maximilian Bern, (1849–1923)

The magic charm that drew me on,

Was not thine eyes’ resistless spell,

And not thy gleaming golden hair

Nor that sweet form I know so well.

The magic power that drew me on

Was just thy voice’s tender tone,

The nightingale had taught thee, sweet

That soothed my weary heart alone.

’Twas but thy pale and gentle face,

And just one tear that fell again,

Betraying that thy inmost soul

Was filled with a nameless pain.

Was mich zu dir so heftig zog

War nicht der Augen Allgewalt,

Der Schimmer nicht des goldnen Haar’s

Und nicht die schlanke Huldgestalt.

Was mich zu dir so mächtig zog,

War deiner Stimme trüber Klang,

Der mir wie Nachtigallensang

Ins Herz, ins lebensmüde, drang.

Die Blässe deiner Wangen war’s

Und deine Träne, die verriet,

Dass deine Seele tiefgeheim

Ein namenloses Weh durchzieht.

**‘A Blonde Woman’, c. 1520, Jacopo Palma il vecchio**

Caterina Assandra, (c. 1590 — after 1618), Motetti, Op. 2: Duo Seraphim

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831). ‘The Philosophy of Nature’. ‘Physics’.

As is well known principal among Hegel’s central ideas are the idea that everything is historical and must be studied in its historical context and this includes diverse bodies of knowledge and the idea that everything is dialectical means that it tends to turn into its opposite which is to say everything is interrelated or the true is the whole and in particular we attain fully self-consciousness through being recognised by other people. Among his other ideas are his account of the struggle for recognition and the Lord/Bondman dialectic, the unhappy consciousness, the religious person who is unable to find happiness in this world, and with regard to nature the idea that all of nature is mind-like and endeavours to realise its mindedness. In an early work the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ Hegel traced the history of different forms of thought and exposed inadequacies in them all that propel human history on an endless progressive course, and in later work there is less emphasis upon history and more of a systematic organisation of all the knowledge attained thus far and the ‘Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences’ brought all of this knowledge together. It is divided it into three parts, the logic, the philosophy of nature, and the philosophy of mind, and the logic is of course not traditional logic but Hegelian logic, that is to say, metaphysics, it describes all the most basic features and patterns in the universe.

Like all of the Encyclopaedia Hegel did not regard the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ as a a finished book but as a set of notes that he used in lecturing, he would read out paragraphs from the Encyclopaedia and then explain them orally. For instance, §311, on shapelessness:

‘Shape in its immediacy is posited as internally formless; at the one extreme it constitutes punctiformity and brittleness, at the other, self-globulizing fluidity. It is therefore shape as inner shapelessness’.

- ‘Philosophy of Nature’

This is followed by a Zusatz or addition that is notes added by editors, notes taken by students while he was giving his oral explanation of what the paragraph meant.

‘Addition. The determinations of form controlled by this interior geometry are firstly the point, then the line and the surface, and finally the overall volume. A brittle body is pulverizable and singular, properties we have already encountered as constituting a simple mode of cohesion. It is granular, as is particularly evident in grains of platinum. It stands opposed to globularity, the general self-rounding fluidity which effaces every dimension within itself, and which, while it is certainly the complete realization of all three dimensions, is a totality in which determinateness is not developed. The globular shape is universal, and has a formal regularity. It is freely poised, so that as universal individuality, it is also the shape of the free bodies of the heavens. Fluid matter globulizes itself, for as it is inwardly indeterminate, atmospheric pressure is the same on all sides of it; consequently, the determination of its shape is also the same on every side, and no differentiation is posited in it as yet. The shape is a real principle however, and is not merely an abstract determination, i.e. it is a real totality of form’.

- ‘Philosophy of Nature’

Such additions are not necessarily reliable and one should focus upon what Hegel says in his main paragraphs and some of these paragraphs include Remarks that were added to the text by Hegel himself. Paragraph §279) on bodies of opposition for instance.

‘Dark matter is primarily the negation of light, and constitutes the opposition to its abstractly identical ideality; it is opposition in its own self. It has material reality, and within itself falls apart into a duality of (1) corporeal variety, which is the material being-for-self of rigidity, and (2) the opposition as such. By itself, this opposition is not controlled by individuality, but is merely sunk within itself, and so constitutes dissolution and neutrality. This duality marks the difference between the lunar and cometary bodies’.

‘Remark. As relative centres of corporeality within the gravitational system, both these bodies also have a peculiarity which is based on the same concept as their physical peculiarity, and which may be stated here with more exactness, i.e. neither turns upon its axis. As the body of rigidity is a formal being-for-self, its independence is caught up in the opposition, and consequently it does not constitute individuality. It is therefore satellitic, and subservient to another body, in which it has its axis. The body of dissolution is the antithesis to that of rigidity, for it behaves aberrantly, and displays the same contingency in its eccentric revolution as it does in its physical existence. Comets present themselves as a superficial concretion, which may disperse again with equal contingency’.

‘The moon has no atmosphere, and therefore lacks the meteorological process. It exhibits only high conical mountains, in which craters correspond to valleys, and afford evidence of the internal combustion of this rigidity. Its form is crystalline, and Heim, one of the limited number of profound geognosts, has indicated that the Earth also had this form in its original and purely rigid state. The comet appears as a formal process, an unstable and vaporous mass; not one has given indication of a nucleus or anything rigid within it. The ancients regarded comets as mere momentary meteoric formations like fire-balls and shooting stars. Nowadays astronomers are not so reticent and standoffish as they used to be with regard to this view. So far, only a few cases of their return have been confirmed; the appearances of others have been calculated and expected, but have failed to materialize. The idea that the solar system is in itself a true system on account of its essentially coherent totality, necessarily rules out the formal interpretation of the comets, in which their appearances are regarded as being in accidental opposition to the entirety of this system when they cross and impinge upon it. It is therefore possible to conceive of the other bodies of the system as protecting themselves against comets, i.e. as having to maintain and preserve themselves as the necessary moments of an organism. There are better grounds of reassurance to be found in this conception, than those that have so far been advanced against the potential menace of the comets, for by and large these reassurances have merely been based upon the fact that in the vastness of the heavens, the comets have so much space through which to move upon their ways, that there is only a minimal chance of their encountering the Earth. The plausibility of this argument is not increased by its being transformed into a theory of probability’.

- ‘Philosophy of Nature’

The ‘Philosophy of Nature’ draws upon a lot of material from the sciences of Hegel’s time and it uses a lot of technical terms (geognosts?) and we need to understand the context in which these thoughts about nature are developed. The context was one of Germany influenced by the ideas of the German Romantics whereby as part of their proposal for the aestheticisation of science and culture they advanced the idea that there could be a poetic science, a science that was influenced by and similar to literature and this gave rise to a movement known as Naturphilosophie, a scientific movement that attempted to study nature in a poetic and philosophically informed way, and in addition to the Romantics the other main influence upon this movement was the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, (1775–1854), who came up with the idea of a philosophy of nature, his first book being ‘Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature’, 1797, and later he wrote ‘On the World-Soul’, 1798, and ‘First Sketch of a System of Philosophy of Nature’, 1799. Hegel went on to develop the original ideas concerning philosophy of nature in a more systematic and rigorous way than Schelling while Schelling went through a number of radical changes in philosophical position eventually ditching the project of philosophy of nature altogether as Hegel continued to work on it until his death in 1831.

A large number of influences came to bear upon Schelling’s idea for a philosophy of nature and in part albeit the project is closely connected to German Romanticism and the wish to re-enchant nature Schelling thought that a philosophy of nature could do this by working with a basic conception or interpretation of nature as unified upon the basis of which experimental research could be carried out and he sought to interpret all the diverse phenomena found in nature as exhibiting its fundamental unity. He contended that nature’s unity has an inevitable tendency to divide into two halves and upon being established , these halves continue to long for and strain towards the unity they have lost as they stand to one another in a dynamic, tense relationship, and hence Schelling defines them as polar forces.

‘It is the first principle of a philosophical theory of nature to start out in the whole of nature from polarity and dualism’.

- ‘On the World-Soul’

Schelling interpreted all sorts of natural phenomena as exhibiting this polarity, for instance positive and negative electricity, gravity, magnetism, and chemical processes, yet he persisted in thinking that the presence of polarity in these forms showed that natural things strive for their fundamental unity which remains basic. Electricity, chemistry, and magnetism were only just starting to be fully studied by scientists at this time and they did not yet have any explanatory frameworks capable of satisfactorily making sense of the many recent discoveries in electricity, magnetism, chemistry and biology and Schelling and Hegel viewed all these discoveries as exposing the need for new explanatory frameworks to be provided by the field of philosophy of nature for existing science was incapable of explaining these phenomena owing to the narrowly mechanistic approach it held which could not accommodate the basic striving for unity that pervaded the electrical, chemical, and biological domains.

Schelling did not believe that the philosophy of nature should straightforwardly oppose science however, that is to say science should be abandoned and superseded by philosophy of nature, on the contrary philosophy of nature was to provide a new and better framework in which scientific research could afterwards be done, this is the hope for a new science, not the mechanistic science of the Enlightenment but a science informed by the principles of unity and polarity, a science that rediscovers wholeness and vitality in natural things. A great number of scientists took up Schelling’s ideas while Hegel’s versions of those ideas never quite caught on so much probably due to their considerable depth, scientists such as Johann Ritter (1776–1810), who discovered electrochemistry and ultraviolet light, and Hans Christian Ørsted (1777–1851), who discovered electromagnetism, and in general these scientists carried out empirical research informed by Schelling’s idea of nature as structured through a hierarchy of polar forces. For a while Naturphilosophie was the dominant approach within the natural sciences but around the 1820s there was a new movement in science, a return to empiricism, to the idea that experimental research should be carried out with as little reliance on theories as possible, one should experiment first and only on that basis generalise to conclusions and theories, and as the new empiricism became fully entrenched Naturphilosophie acquired a bad press being seen as a dead end that scientists had ventured down for a while.

**‘St. Catherine of Siena Writing’, Rutilio di Lorenzo Manetti (1571–1639)**

Udite, lagrimosi spirti d’Averno,

Udite nova sorte di pena e di tormento.

Mirate crudo affetto

In sembiante pietoso

La mia donna crudel più de l’Inferno.

Ye tortur’d spirits, hear, that in Avernus’ doleful regions dwell,

Hear a new torment I endure;

See under pity’s mask conceal’d

A horrid kind of love. She I adore

Loads me with greater sufferings still than your hell.

Lucia Quinciani, (c.1566 — c.1615), ‘Udite lagrimosi spirti d’Averno, udite’:

Historians of science have however defended the philosophy of nature by arguing that really these scientists weren’t doing anything radically different from normal scientists for all scientists have theoretical assumptions and the Naturphilosophen had particular theoretical assumptions in this case stemming from Schelling that led them to some valuable discoveries. The philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn, (1922–1996), argued that Schelling’s influence contributed to the discovery of the principle of energy conservation:

‘Though the technical dynamical conservation theorem has a continuous history from the early eighteenth century to the present, its metaphysical counterpart found few or no defenders after 1750. To discover the metaphysical theorem, the pioneers of energy conservation would have had to return to books at least a century old. Neither their works nor their biographies suggest that they were significantly influenced by this particular bit of ancient intellectual history. Statements like those of both the eighteenth-century Leibnizians and the nineteenth-century pioneers of energy conservation can, however, be found repeatedly in the literature of a second philosophical movement, Naturphilosophie. Positing organism as the fundamental metaphor of their universal science, the Naturphilosophen constantly sought a single unifying principle for all natural phenomena. Schelling, for example, maintained ‘that magnetic, electrical, chemical, and finally even organic phenomena would be interwoven into one great association … [which] extends over the whole of nature’. Even before the discovery of the battery he insisted that ‘without doubt only a single force in its various guises is manifest in [the phenomena of] light, electricity, and so forth’. These quotations point to an aspect of Schelling’s thoughtfully documented by Brehier and more recently by Stauffer. As a Naturphilosoph, Schelling constantly sought out conversion and transformation processes in the science of his day. At the beginning of his career chemistry seemed to him the basic physical science; from 1800 on he increasingly found in galvanism ‘the true border-phenomenon of both [organic and inorganic] natures’. Many of Schelling’s followers, whose teaching dominated German and many neighbouring universities during the first third of the nineteenth century, gave similar emphasis to the new conversion phenomena. Stauffer has shown that Oersted-a Naturphilosoph as well as a scientist-persisted in his long search for a relation between electricity and magnetism largely because of his prior philosophical conviction that one must exist. Once the interaction was discovered, electro-magnetism played a major role in Herbart’s further elaboration of the scientific substructure of Naturphilosophie. In short, many Naturphilosophen drew from their philosophy a view of physical processes very close to that which Faraday and Grove seem to have drawn from the new discoveries of the nineteenth century. Naturphilosophie could, therefore, have provided an appropriate philosophical background for the discovery of energy conservation’.

- ‘The Essential Tension’

The virtues or otherwise of Naturphilosophie depend upon what broader views we hold about the nature of scientific research. As for the notion of a science informed by philosophical theories about nature all science is informed by philosophy anyway albeit the likes of Richard Dawkins, (1941 — ), and Stephen Hawking, (1942–2018), are seemingly oblivious of that fact.

**‘Ritratto di giovane monaca’ (‘Portrait of a Young Nun’), Giacomo Antonio Melchiorre Ceruti**

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O salutaris Hostia,

Quae caeli pandis ostium:

Bella premunt hostilia,

Da robur, fer auxilium.

Uni trinoque Domino

Sit sempiterna gloria,

Qui vitam sine termino

Nobis donet in patria.

O saving Victim, opening wide

The gate of Heaven to man below;

Our foes press hard on every side;

Thine aid supply; thy strength bestow.

To thy great name be endless praise,

Immortal Godhead, One in Three.

Oh, grant us endless length of days,

In our true native land with thee.

Amen.

- Thomas Aquinas, (1225–1274)

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The chief objective of Hegel’s philosophy of nature is to provide a theoretical account of the natural world which he views as being organised into a hierarchy of stages and the work is divided into three main sections, ‘Mechanics’, the ‘Physics’, and the ‘Organic Physics’, each of which describe a range of natural phenomena and within that range all these different things are united by a central characteristic. In the introduction Hegel defines the mechanical sphere as the realm of singular individual beings, material beings tat are not structured by any overarching unity and that don’t have any form or organising structure and in this sphere, he says, the idea has the determination of mutual externality and of infinite singularisation. Unity of form is external to this.

‘The Idea, as nature, has: I. the determination of extrinsicality and of infinite individuation. Unity of form, as it is external to this, is of an ideal nature, and as it is simply implicit, is merely sought after. This constitutes matter and the ideal nature of the system of matter, i.e. mechanics. II. the determination of particularity, in which reality is posited with an immanent determinateness of form and its own existent differentiation. This is a relationship of reflection, the being-in-self of which constitutes natural individuality, i.e. physics. III. the determination of subjectivity, in which the real differences of form are also brought back into a unity of an ideal nature, which has found itself and has being for itself, i.e. organics’.

- ‘Philosophy of Nature’

The ensuing physical sphere contains beings which are divided, they have structures but these structures only imperfectly manifest themselves within their material parts, for instance crystals have a structure but this is not properly manifest in the parts of the crystal, although they are organised into a single body still it appears each part could be split off and maintain an independent existence and so the parts aren’t fully integrated into the whole structure. Finally, the organic sphere contains a type of matter that is unified with its structure, unambiguously organised by and reflecting the unity of the whole, which is to say there is a holistic structure to the living organisms that populate this third sphere and within these organisms the real differences of form are also brought back to the ideal unity, which has found itself and is for itself.

Generally speaking nature progresses or develops from a stage in which it consists of matter which is not organised to matter which is only partly and imperfectly organised and finally to matter which is fully and manifestly organised which is to say that throughout all of its forms nature is divided into a material aspect and a conceptual aspect and these become increasingly unified as nature progresses and the conceptual aspect is the element of unity, wholeness and structure while the material aspect is the element of diversity and lack of integration. In saying that nature has a conceptual aspect this is conceptual in the Hegelian sense whereby concepts are not items that only exist in the human mind, a concept is not simply something that we think about, concepts also exist objectively independently of whether human thinkers are thinking about them.

‘In accordance with these determinations, thoughts can be called objective thoughts; and among them the forms which are considered initially in ordinary logic and which are usually taken to be only forms of conscious thinking have to be counted too. Thus logic coincides with metaphysics, with the science of things grasped in thoughts that used to be taken to express the essentialities of the things’.

‘The relationship of forms such as concept, judgment, and syllogism to others like causality, etc., can only establish itself within the Logic itself. But one can see already, though only in a preliminary way, that, since thought seeks to form a concept of things, this concept (along with judgment and syllogism as its most immediate forms) cannot consist in determinations and relationships that are alien and external to the things. As we said above, thinking things over leads to what is universal in them; but the universal is itself one of the moments of the Concept. To say that there is understanding, or reason, in the world is exactly what is contained in the expression ‘objective thought’. But this expression is inconvenient precisely because ‘thought’ is all too commonly used as if it belonged only to spirit, or consciousness, while ‘objective’ is used primarily just with reference to what is unspiritual’.

‘Addition 1 . If we say that thought, qua objective, is the inwardness of the world, it may seem as if consciousness is being ascribed to natural things. But we feel a repugnance against conceiving the inner activity of things to be thinking, since we say that man is distinguished from what is merely natural by virtue of thinking. In this view we would have to talk about nature as a system of thought without consciousness, or an intelligence which, as Schelling says, is petrified. In order to avoid misunderstanding, it is better to speak of ‘thought-determinations’ instead of using the expression ‘thoughts’.

‘In line with what has been said so far, then, the Logical is to be sought in a system of thought-determinations in which the antithesis between subjective and objective (in its usual meaning) disappears. This meaning of thinking and of its determinations is more precisely expressed by the Ancients when they say that nous governs the world. or by our own saying that there is reason in the world, by which we mean that reason is the soul of the world, inhabits it, and is immanent in it, as its own, innermost nature, its universal’.

- ‘The Encyclopaedia Logic’

Throughout the world there is a structure of forms of thought on which all other beings depend and these forms of thought are not merely subjective categories but rather they objectively exist within the world independently of human thought about them and human beings might come to think using categories which have the same content as these objective forms and upon this happening humans are having thoughts that are true, thoughts that accurately describe the world’s independent structure, nevertheless the independent structure itself is not something that only exists within the human mind. This is idealism, reality is fundamentally made up of or structured by thought, that is ideas and the objective of the Encyclopaedia as a whole is to describe these objective forms of thought in all the domains where they are present, in the Logic, as the basic forms behind all existence, in the philosophy of nature, as present in nature, and in this case these forms of thought, conceptual structures, are combined with matter in different ways — as nature develops, the forms of thought increasingly pervade and organise matter, and finally in the ‘Philosophy of Mind’ how these forms of thought are present in the human mind is addressed. One wonders how the idea of objective thoughts is to be understood and whether or not it makes any sense that there could be thoughts existing independently of anyone thinking them and what might serve as an example of such an objective thought.

**‘A nun’s flight of fancy’, Eugen von Blaas, (1843–1932)**

Let us pause for a while and return to the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ an introduction and first part of the Jena System that introduced the other parts of his project and it is worth considering how the Phenomenology relates to the other parts in light of Hegel’s understanding and commitment to the natural philosophy of his day for Hegel used the natural sciences of his day in creating his system and through demonstrating these relations we can see that his concept of Spirit is born within his natural philosophy and his cosmology. In what follows I refer to his earlier so-called System III where he presents a philosophy of nature alongside the Phenomenology. For instance natural philosophy starting with space, time, and existence which are treated of in chapter one of the Phenomenology, the constitution of bodies as masses in motion in the mechanics sections of the philosophy of nature are treated in chapters two and three of the Phenomenology, the underlying forces of the corporeal substrate and the cosmology of the earth in the chemistry and process chapters of the philosophy of nature are treated in chapter three of the Phenomenology, the emergence of life and the individual’s evolution from the species in organism chapter of the philosophy of nature is treated in chapter four of the Phenomenology, the formation of the organic individual as the self in the philosophy of nature is treated in chapter five of the Phenomenology, the blood ties forming ethical bonds in the philosophy of nature are treated in chapters four and six of the Phenomenology.

Hegel was committed to a system of philosophy that incorporated the natural science of his day contrary to a widely held belief, (see Robert B. Pippin, (1948-), that the Phenomenology treats exclusively with self-consciousness and social science. Hegel certainly focusses upon them yet Spirit, Geist is a natural occurrence, the result of the evolution from inorganic to organic nature, hence the Phenomenology in order to exhibit a unified system has to relate Spirit to natural processes, the Phenomenology has integrated within it the other parts of the system. the Naturphilosophie was the first part of System III to be written, the Logic never was or has been lost, and unlike the earlier System II (yes I know this is confusing) of 1804–5 it is more empirical, has no discussion of God, a cursory treatment of aether, and the ideal elements put in an appearance only from the processes of the real elements.

System III has three main sections, ‘Mechanics’, ‘Formation and Chemistry’, and ‘Organism’. System III is a philosophy of the real that looks to the natural sciences as its source and in it we observe the emergence of the concept culminating in the unity of self and world an identity presupposed in the Phenomenology itself since it being the introduction and first part of Jena System III necessarily assumes the other parts and their unity with it. The Naturphilosophie opens with the concept of absolute matter which in System II was called aether but almost immediately following on from this is a turns to the concepts of space and time that are explicitly Kantian, (Immanuel Kant, 1824–1874)), and here space and time are thought of as concepts albeit this is not how we experience them in our phenomenal existence for experience is prior to abstract conception. The concepts are quantitative determinations of absolute matter and not ordinary concepts of space and time but are as geometers and physicists had worked out created from mathematical abstractions and pure intuition and these involve only the absolute forms of space and time. In the Phenomenology towards the conclusion of chapter one, ‘Sense Certainty’, we can observe the parallel treatment of these concepts whereby the universals of space and time here called the ‘here of many heres’ and the ‘now of many nows’ are formed by an act of intelligence that creates the universal in which the fleeting moments of time and space, individual nows and heres, appear.

‘The Here pointed out, to which I hold fast, is similarly a this Here which, in fact, is not this Here, but a Before and Behind, an Above and Below, a Right and Left. The Above is itself similarly this manifold otherness of above, below; etc. The Here, which was supposed to have been pointed out, vanishes in other Heres, but these likewise vanish. What is pointed out, held fast, and abides, is a negative This, which is negative only when the Heres are taken as they should be, but, in being so taken, they supersede themselves; what abides is a simple complex of many Heres. The Here that is meant would be the point; but it is not: on the contrary, when it is pointed out as something that is, the pointing-out shows itself to be not an immediate knowing [of the point], but a movement from the Here that is meant through many Heres into the universal Here which is a simple plurality of Heres, just as the day is a simple plurality of Nows’.

- ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’

The transcendental universal is an abstract concept that determines how the matters of sense will occur in perception and the concept is in the Kantian manner mathematical in virtue of it setting the order, dimension, and sequence for things and sense qualities to appear in observation nonetheless n both accounts Hegel veers away from Kant’s ‘Transcendental Aesthetics’ upon identifying the intuition of space with a mode of self-consciousness.

‘Space is in-itself the immediate inward ensouled spirit which, as being in-itself, is not valued for its truth. Instead, it now becomes a nature that is present there and is no longer in-itself. In spiritual nature the self-conscious essence of space falls outside of spirit; that is to say, spirit is self-consciousness implicitly, or internally, in its idea. The connection of this determinacy with existing space is that space should be considered an intuition which until this moment was not spatial’.

- ‘Jena System III: Naturphilosophie’

And so, space is the abstract essence of nature which encloses Spirit, it is simply there to be marked empirically but as a concept it is only the presence of nature that has not acknowledged its own soul, self-consciousness, and Spirit first begins to emerge with spatial intuitions. The spatial determinations of nature as we are informed later in the system are absolute quantities and importantly they are moments of self-consciousness but are not recognized as such. The Naturphilosophie is an odyssey of the concept to the recognition of self-consciousness in nature which only occurs in the final pages of ‘Organism’ where Hegel presents the process of individual life and death and the odyssey articulates the Idea a term taken from Schelling’s natural philosophy which culminates as the absolute point of identity between self and nature. Schelling pointed out that Hegel’s concept is just what both of them had been calling idea and later Schelling elaborated upon this notion in asserting that Hegel developed the concept of Spirit as germinating from the idea rooted in natural philosophy:

‘God is nothing other than the concept that by stages becomes the self-conscious idea, and as this idea discharges itself into nature, and, returning from nature into itself, it becomes absolute spirit’.

- ‘On the History of Philosophy’

The Naturphilosophie of System III remains true to the earlier natural philosophies and is influenced by Schelling and his ilk which implies that the Phenomenology is also grounded in this school of natural philosophy and Hegel depends upon the same version of natural science that Schelling articulates in such works as On the World-Soul yet Hegel’s objection to Schelling’s view of natural science occurs in System II where he considers Schelling’s version to express only the quantification of the concept. Schelling’s entire system is placed under the category of Quantum and in the Phenomenology Hegel also objects to the occultism inherent in Schelling’s system (though he doesn’t mention Schelling by name but Schelling knew he was meant. They fell out because of it.#

‘In my view, which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject. At the same time, it is to be observed that substantiality embraces the universal, or the immediacy of knowledge itself, as well as that which is being or immediacy for knowledge. If the conception of God as the one Substance shocked the age in which it was proclaimed, the reason for this was on the one hand an instinctive awareness that, in this definition, self-consciousness was only submerged and not preserved. On the other hand, the opposite view, which clings to thought as thought, to universality as such, is the very same simplicity, is undifferentiated, unmoved substantiality. And if, thirdly, thought does unite itself with the being of Substance, and apprehends immediacy or intuition as thinking, the question is still whether this intellectual intuition does not again fall back into inert simplicity, and does not depict actuality itself in a non-actual manner’.

- ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’

Michael Vater and others have denied the inherent connection between Hegel’s Phenomenology and Schelling though Hegel develops Schelling’s account for his own ends, and in Schelling’s explication of the Idea nature has a soul that is the organism from which the human species develops, so Hegel accepts that the soul of the world is generated from the organism as a result of this development. In System III as in System II, in the Philosophies of Nature and Spirit of the former and the Logic, Metaphysics, and Philosophy of Nature of the latter, the focus of the odyssey of the Idea is on nature and the process of the species appears central to his presentation of the concept yet the account in System III expresses the experience of the parts of the system and in addition articulates the Idea as the essence of the entire movement for it is the complete concept. While the Idea is abstract it comes from experience and experience (Erfahrung) is formal knowledge, that is, knowledge mediated by concepts, and what is meant by experience here is scientific experience which involves ratiocination, critical reflections, and schematization in order to get to grips with the profundities and complexities of the concept.

**‘A 17th century French Dominican nun contemplating the Scriptures’, unidentified artist, 17th century.**

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Salve, Regina, Mater misericordiæ,

vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve.

Ad te clamamus exsules filii Hevæ,

Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes

in hac lacrimarum valle.

Eia, ergo, advocata nostra, illos tuos

misericordes oculos ad nos converte;

Et Iesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui,

nobis post hoc exsilium ostende.

O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria.

Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Mercy,

Hail our life, our sweetness and our hope.

To thee do we cry,

Poor banished children of Eve;

To thee do we send up our sighs,

Mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.

Turn then, most gracious advocate,

Thine eyes of mercy toward us;

And after this our exile,

Show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

O clement, O loving,

O sweet Virgin Mary.

Caterina Assandra, ‘Salve Regina’:

The complete concept comprises in this manner the factual evidence present to consciousness itself and it is not a concept generated from metaphysical laws or conceptual formalities as had been the case in System II for in the latter Hegel approaches the journey of the concept rationalistically, its centrepiece, ‘Essence’, was adapted from Leibniz’s ‘Monadology’. (Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, (1646–1716). ‘The dialectic of Reciprocity is the dialectic of rational monads …The only real or active reciprocity is the establishment of the closed cycle of monadic rationality’, explains H. S. Harris.

’43. It is true, furthermore, that in God is found not only the source of existences, but also that of essences, in so far as they are real. In other words, he is the source of whatever there is real in the possible. This is because the Understanding of God is in the region of eternal truths or of the ideas upon which they depend, and because without him there would be nothing real in the possibilities of things, and not only would nothing be existent, nothing would be even possible’.

’44. For it must needs be that if there is a reality in essences or in possibilities or indeed in the eternal ‘truths, this reality is based upon something existent and actual, and, consequently, in the existence of the necessary Being in whom essence includes existence or in whom possibility is sufficient to produce actuality’.

’45. Therefore God alone (or the Necessary Being) has this prerogative that if he be possible he must necessarily exist, and, as nothing is able to prevent the possibility of that which involves no bounds, no negation and consequently, no contradiction, this alone is sufficient to establish a priori his existence. We have, therefore, proved his existence through the reality of eternal truths. But a little while ago we also proved it a posteriori, because contingent beings exist which can have their ultimate and sufficient reason only in the necessary being which, in turn, has the reason for existence in itself’.

- ‘Monadology’

And yet in System III Hegel endeavours to demonstrate the compatibility between empirical investigations and transcendental idealism and in the new version of his natural philosophy the evidence of the concept is empirical, it is vindicated in the experimental and theoretical work of contemporary natural scientists but their empirical work would be otiose in the absence of the form of the concept, the form is a priori and reflects an abstract universal, hence empirical science only presents the concept as it shows itself in the material world and it does not show us how the form of the concept occurs. The essential drive of the complete concept, or Idea, is the generation of Spirit from nature. The development of the concept from ‘Organism’ onwards is the presentation of embryonic Spirit.

At the start of the Naturphilosophie upon the movement of space and time finally emerging as matter in motion the emphasis shifts from quantity to movement and matter is a mass which is to say a body with extension and weight and it is in continuous motion, it fills its place, it spreads to every inch that it can occupy, and since nature abhors a vacuum matter moves to guarantee that no vacuum can actually be formed among masses and matter is in essence a moving fluid but a mass is a body fixed to its place by other matters and it has in contrast to the fluidity of matter a principle of individuation due in it to inertial tendencies, to rest, to resist, and to fall.12 Hegel is speaking of how a thing remains ‘one’ externally despite the fact that it exists only in relation to other bodies in a continuum of parts outside of parts. ‘Die Masse in diesem Sinne fixirt heißt, träge; nicht so daß das Ruhen damit ausgedrückt würde. Die Dauer ist Ruhe in der Beziehung, daß sie als Begriff ihrer Realisirung der Bewegung entgegengestzt wird’.

Hegel is discoursing upon how a thing remains one externally despite the fact that it exists only in relation to other bodies in a continuum of parts outside of parts and the genuine identity of a body is internal to the mass according to its inertial property, a mass’s material identity belongs to these inert qualities which we observe and calculate as a body’s specific gravity and its composition in motion and its preservation of place requires a force to repel other bodies which attempt to occupy its location. The principle of its identity thereby appears Archimedean for upon Archimedes, (c. 287 — c. 212 BC), discovering the principle of true material identity as specific gravity he observed that the weight of each substance is unique in regard to its displacement of water, he was measuring the Träge (specific weight) of a mass, so, the qualities of a body’s mass in motion are essential to forming the body itself and they show within the body relations of comparative forces at play. The analysis of mass in Hegel’s natural philosophy also appears in the Phenomenology in particular at the beginning of chapter three, ‘Force and Understanding’, where he identifies the underlying substance of a perceived body as a play of forces.

‘One moment, then, appears as the essence that has stepped to one side as a universal medium, or as the subsistence of independent ‘matters’. But the independence of these ‘matters’ is nothing else than this medium; in other words, the [unconditioned] universal is simply and solely the plurality of the diverse universals of this kind. That within itself the universal is in undivided unity with this plurality means, however, that these ‘matters’ are each where the other is; they mutually interpenetrate, but without coming into contact with one another because, conversely, the many diverse ‘matters’ are equally independent. This also means that they are absolutely porous, or are sublated. This sublation in its turn, this reduction of the diversity to a pure being-for-self, is nothing other than the medium itself, and this is the independence of the different ‘matters’. In other words, the ‘matters’ posited. as independent directly pass over into their unity, and their unity directly unfolds its diversity, and this once again reduces itself to unity. But this movement is what is called Force. One of its moments, the dispersal of the independent ‘matters’ in their [immediate] being, is the expression of Force ; but Force, taken as that in which they have disappeared, is Force proper, Force which has been driven back into itself from its expression. First, however, the Force which is driven back into itself must express itself; and, secondly, his still Force remaining within itself in the expression, just as much as it is expression in this self-containedness’.

- ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’

The body itself is the individuated mass, that it is one and moving is due to the unseen but necessarily occurring play between the fluidity and individuating mass of the body and a mass is both a continuum of fluidity and an individual entity restricted to a place. Hegel inquires into its two sides as two relata in one conceptual relationship and regarding the continuum of matters a body becomes an individual due to the influence of the external motion of its mass which is in opposition to other masses and of the internal motion of its chemical formation which forms its internal cohesion. Hegel looks at first external motion which is presented as accidental to the body’s essence and second he looks at internal motion which is presented as the essence.

With regard to external motion consider the body as belonging to cosmic movements, a cosmic mass may move externally in one or two ways either in a perfect cycle such as the fixed stars or in an irregular cycle such as the comets and planets and the latter are irregular since they are elliptical and have a distinct polarity. The planetary cycle in which our earth is a part presents the oscillating ellipse and the bodies themselves are rotating ellipsoids and this particular shape and irregular movement are important to the concept since these imperfect bodies demonstrate a dynamic tension of expansion and retraction between their poles and there would not be such an irregular motion if there were no poles, that is to say no opposite forces pulling and pushing on each other and an oscillating ellipse occurs only through a dynamic that moves from one extreme to another, continuously strives towards equality, but never succeeds in attaining it. The irregularity of the motion demonstrates that the poles exist as opposing unstable tendencies and only the fixed stars have equality without conflict and hence they are less important to the concept than the planets and comets, and in contrast to the stars the shape and motion of the oscillating earth show that a natural history is possible because such an imperfect shape demonstrates continuity within change, a repetition of oppositions that seeks unity without rest.

**‘The Artist’s Sister in the Garb of a Nun’, 1551, Sofonisba Anguissola**

‘Es hat sie [Bewegung] an ihm, aber sie bleibt ebenso gleichgültig, und verschieden zurück, als ein besonderes Daseyn, als eine Geschichte, oder als der Ursprung, gegen das Fürsichseyn gekehrt ist, um eben für sich zu seyn’.

Veni dilecte mi, egrediamur in agrum,

commoremur in villis,

mane surgamus ad vineas,

videamus si floruit vinea,

si flores fructus parturiunt.

Si floruerunt mala punica,

ibi dabo tibi ubera mea.

Come, my beloved, let us go out into the field

let’s stay in the villages

let’s get up in the morning to the vineyards

let’s see if the vineyard has blossomed

if flowers bear fruit.

If the evil pink bloomed,

I will give you my breasts there.

Caterina Assandra, (1590–1618), Veni dilecte mi:

This oscillating earthly motion and its ellipsoid shape are implicative of how Hegel’s transcendental logic or dialectic ought in addition to be represented for World Spirit and the logical movement captures the motions that determine precisely the principles of identity and difference in all things. The cycle of oppositions understood logically is not a perfect series of contraries and contradictions for were they so there would have stasis, no actual development and hence no history. The logical pattern of opposition is to do with this earth and our existence emerging from it, living on it, and ultimately returning to it and the earth cycle is elliptical and imperfect hence its movement has a natural history of oppositions in extremis, which is to say one side supersedes the other only to be undone by its counterpart and similarly the logical pattern discovered in the earth cycle is elliptical, which is to say it has an irregular movement that strives for equality and unity through the supersession of opposites but it never actually sustains them in unity. Hegel will employ this pattern of the earth cycle both in the opening section of chapter four, ‘Self-Certainty’, and the opening section of ‘Self-alienated Spirit’ in chapter six, ‘Spirit’.

‘The ethical Substance kept the antithesis confined within its simply unitary consciousness, and preserved this consciousness in an immediate unity with its essence. Essence has, therefore, the simple determinateness of mere being for consciousness, which is directed immediately upon it, and is the essence in the form of custom. Consciousness neither thinks of itself as this particular exclusive self, nor has substance the significance of an existence excluded from it with which it would have to become united only by alienating itself from itself and at the same time producing the substance itself. But the Spirit whose self is an absolutely discrete unit has its content confronting it as an equally hard unyielding reality, and here the world has the character of being something external, the negative of self-consciousness. This world is, however, a spiritual entity, it is in-itself the interfusion of being and individuality; this its existence is the work of self-consciousness, but it is also an alien realty already present and given, a reality which has a being of its own and in which it does not recognize itself. This real world is the external essence and the free content of legal right -But this external world, which the lord of the world of legal right takes to himself, is not merely this elemental being confronting the self as something contingently given; on the contrary, it is his work, but not in a positive, rather in a negative, sense. It obtains its existence through self-consciousness’s own externalization and separation of itself from its essence which, in the ruin and devastation which prevail in the world of legal right, seems to inflict on self-consciousness from without, the violence of the liberated elements. These by themselves are sheer ruin and devastation and the dissolution of themselves. This dissolution,-however, this negative nature of theirs, is just the self; it is their subject, their activity, and their process. But this activity and process whereby the substance becomes actual is the alienation of the personality, for the self that has an absolute significance in its immediate existence, i.e. without having alienated itself from itself, is without substance, and is the plaything of those raging elements. Its substance, therefore, is its externalization, and the externalization is the substance, i.e. the spiritual powers ordering themselves into a world and thereby preserving themselves’.

- ‘Phenomenology of Spirit.

Spirit can only repeat the pattern of the earth cycle, it has only that logical movement even as it develops its own identity and in addition it informs us that the reality of World Spirit will come to an end. The logical pattern governing World Spirit appears uniform in that its shape is formed by its peripheral movement and yet the pattern examined in-depth is in fact irregular like the orbits of planets and comets, and inertial, and the perpetual striving for equality in planetary motion is a movement towards decay and death and this is also a predominant theme regarding the materiality of World Spirit, death is precipitated in it. And the inertial features of a mass inform us of this and the specific external appearance of movement on the earth always has this downward feature.

The natural pattern of motion is towards destruction. and in relation to his mechanics of bodies this merely means that bodies seek to return to the fluidity from which they arose, that the rigidity of their existence is contingent on a separate process by which the fluid matter became inertial. The importance of the inertial tendency for Spirit is seen in the Phenomenology, in the opening section of chapter four which leads to the confrontation of one self to another in a life and death struggle, ending in death for the defeated.

‘The presentation of itself, however, as the pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself as the pure negation of its objective mode, or in showing that it is not attached to any specific existence, not to the individuality common to existence as such, that it is not attached to life. This presentation is a twofold action; action on the part of the other, and action on its own part. In so far as it is the action of the other, each seeks the death of the other. But in doing so, the second kind of action, action on its own part; is also involved; for the former involves the staking of its own life. Thus the relation of the two self-conscious individuals is such that they prove themselves and each other through a life-and-death struggle. They must engage in this struggle, for they must raise their certainty of being for themselves to truth, both in the case of the other and in their own case. And it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won; only thus is it proved that for self-consciousness, its essential being is not [just] being, not the immediate form in which it appears, not its submergence in the expanse of life, but rather that there is nothing present in it which could not be regarded as a vanishing moment, that it is only pure being-for-self. The individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness. Similarly, just as each stakes his own life, so each must seek the other’s death, for it values the other no more than itself; its essential being is present to it in the form of an ‘other’, it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality. The other is an immediate consciousness entangled in a variety of relations hips, and it must regard its otherness as a pure being-for-self or as an absolute negation’.

- ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’

Further in chapter six the last gasp of ‘Self-Alienated Spirit’ is when the être supreme is slaughtered in the ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’ section.

‘The object and the [moment of] difference have here lost the meaning of utility, which was the predicate-of all real being; consciousness does not begin its movement in the object as if this were something alien from which it first had to return into itself; on the contrary, the object is for it consciousness itself. The antithesis consists, therefore, solely in the difference between the individual and the universal consciousness; but the individual consciousness itself is directly in its own eyes that which had only the semblance of an antithesis; it is universal consciousness and will. The beyond of this its actual existence hovers over the corpse of the vanished independence of real being, or the being of faith, merely as the exhalation of a stale gas, of the vacuous Etre supreme’.

- ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’

As long as the process is governed by the logic of material forces, that is to say by the cycle of the earth then death is the only outcome. Spirit is an earthly phenomenon. Even as it produces its own history and social identity it cannot transcend its material origins but we are still only looking at the external side of the motion not to its internal development or its essence and the other motion of the body that was mentioned previously is internal and it produces the necessary and sufficient conditions of individual existence (Existenz) and it is the responsible agency for generation and natural motion. Hence Hegel’s complete concept or Idea moves from external inertial tendencies to internal dynamics and by doing so it develops towards ‘Organism’ wherein the soul of nature will be demonstrated.

Dedicated to my lovely Muse who has been under the weather, I hope this is good medicine for you on top of my love… Keep well, always!! Hegel was the last of the great system builders yet the systems of love and romance that you construct for me mean so much more and deliver so much more … 🌹❤️

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