On Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ : A Free Reflex of Spirit — part twenty nine.
‘You have not recognized me in the crowd’
by Arseny Arkad’yevich Golenishchev-Kutuzov (1848–1913)
You have not recognized me in the crowd,
Your glance did not say anything.
But I felt wonder and fright
When I caught it:
It was only a moment;
But believe me, within it I re-lived again
All the delights of past love,
All the bitterness of oblivion and tears!
‘Меня ты в толпе не узнала’
Меня ты в толпе не узнала,
Твой взгляд не сказал ничего.
Но чудно и страшно мне стало,
Когда уловил я его.
То было одно лишь мгновенье,
Но, верь мне, я в нём перенёс
Всей прошлой любви наслажденье
Всю горечь забвенья и слёз!
====
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831). ‘The Philosophy of Nature’. ‘Physics’.
The objectivized and rational recognition of procreation. And so to the final stage of this particular pathway which is to do with the form of recognition that manifests itself through procreation and that constitutes the first objectivized structure of reason. The voice is analysed as a theoretical determination and in relation to the part it plays within the double cycle of self-preservation and of sexual reproduction and the expressive and communicative function of the voice is connected with the development of this cycle and cannot be understood separately from it hence the animal voice presents itself first of all as a sexual appeal of the organism and subsequently as a cry of alarm of the animal in danger or else as the moan of an animal approaching death and with regard to the first aspect the expressive function of the voice is precisely tied up with sexual differentiation of individuals.
‘Insofar as in the voice the singular returns absolutely to itself, and the individual expresses itself as absolutely universal, this turning back of its own entire individuality is also immediately its becoming other as this whole; its simple voice breaks itself and the individual enters the difference of sexes. In the voice species and individual, universality and infinity coincide; and in this absolutely reflected unity of the individual, the individual as a whole has become something external to itself’.
‘Indem in der Stimme das Einzelne absolut in sich zurückgeht, das Individuum sich als absolut allgemeines ausspricht, so ist dies sein Zurückgehen seiner ganzen Individualität, unmittelbar sein sich als dies Ganze Anderswerden; seine einfache Stimme bricht sich, und das Individuum tritt in die Geschlechtsdifferenz. In der Stimme fallen Gattung und Individuum, Allgemeinheit und Unendlichkeit in eins; und in dieser absoluten reflektierten Einheit der Individualität ist es sich als ganzes Individuum ein äußeres geworden’.
- ‘Jena System III’
It is with the moment of procreation that a new form of natural recognition becomes possible and desire or appetite was already fundamentally bound to find itself in another, in an opposite yet the constitutive relation to the opposite was present only in a negative form and with procreation a new form of objectivation and positive intuition of oneself in another is now possible. ‘By knowing the child, the animal is the species that has become to itself’ Hegel explains. ‘Im Erkennen des Kinds ist das Tier sich gewordne Gattung’. In the child the organism can have a positive intuition of its own Gattung and it is precisely here that the first natural structure of Reason (Vernunft) emerges. The fact that in the child the species becomes something external for the animal, that it separates itself from it (the species), this becoming external of universality, is the highest form of rationality of which the animal is capable. ‘Dies, daß dem Tier die Gattung im Kinde selbst ein Äußeres wird, daß es sich von ihr unterscheidet, dies Äußerlichwerden der Allgemeinheit ist die höchste Form Vernünftigkeit, deren das Tier fähig ist’.
Natural recognition in its higher moment is therefore the natural form of the universality of reason and the structures of rationality are emergent in the natural process, in particular rationality arises out of the recognitive structures of animal interaction which manifest primitive, natural forms of social objectivation and of social universalization of individuals and the universality of the Gattung assumes here the consistence of a new individual, a middle term which objectivizes the relation between the parents and it is exactly this recognitive and objectivizing aspect of the relation to the universal that constitutes the rational content of this moment and as the first form of this objectivation the form of recognition linked to procreation is the natural antecedent of the spiritual and institutional objectivation in which reason consists.
Nonetheless this remains a defective form in virtue of the individual is not being preserved as such and further subsequent upon reproduction the individual falls back again into the obscurity of the Gattung. In their child the parents intuit their own annihilation and the exhaustion of their vital cycle rather than the preservation of their own individuality and the action of the individual manifests itself as an action of the Gattung, a natural form of the cunning of reason that makes use of the individual and of its appetites to perpetuate itself and here we confront the limits of animal’s individuation and of the natural form of the universality of reason, in nature the universal does not subsist for itself unlike in the spiritual domain where the universal is objectified in a series of habits and institutions and is as such the condition of true individuality and further albeit the individual’s longing for recognition is emergent in nature individuality is nonetheless not recognized as such in the universal of the species and remains a fragile, evanescent moment and natural recognition and objectivation indicate the beginning of a process of individuation through universalization that accomplishes itself only when social universalization manifests itself as institutional socialization of individuals yet the higher more complex forms of spiritual universalization are further developments of the natural process and continue to presuppose natural forms of social recognition and to constantly reshape them in always new forms of second natural habits and customs.
According to Axel Honneth the point of departure of Hegel’s theory of recognition was in the System der Sittlichkeit, natural ethical life (natürliche Sittlichkeit), that is an Aristotelian system of primary practical intersubjectivity. Later and already in his 1803–4 Jena System Hegel ditched this communicational framework preferring a metaphysical and monological model of Spirit but this interpretation of the Jena writings overlooks the analysis of natural recognition at the animal level an account that remains valid also upon Hegel distantiating himself from Aristotelian substantialism and introducing the notion of Spirit hence Honneth is compelled to understand Hegel’s introduction of the notion of Spirit as a metaphysical move that breaks up with natural interaction and were one to realize the role that recognition already plays within nature then the naturalistic foundation of recognition that Honneth looks for in George Herbert Mead can be retraced in Hegel himself and the notion of Spirit can be read in a non-monological and non anti-naturalistic way, that is as something emerging from natural interaction and the reprise of Hegelian Spirit along such lines may offer a procedure to revitalise the program of an anthropological and naturalist reading of social agency such as Honneth earlier developed with H. Joas and later progressively ditched in favour of a normatively oriented approach and the discarding of a more naturalist and materialist oriented theory of interaction certainly has its shortcomings.
The final stage of this process is the determinations of sickness and death whereby the expressive recognitive dimensions connected to these moments of the analysis of the animal organism should be taken into account and the natural self’s yearning to be recognized for its own individuality is as a matter of fact the driving force behind this process, sickness is exactly that moment in which the animal individual strives to free itself from the organic system and to affirm its own individuality as a universal and yet this destruction in which sickness consists of the process of differentiation that is the proper element of life is bound to death: ‘With sickness, the animal transgresses the limits of its own nature: but the sickness of the animal is the becoming of spirit’. ‘Mit der Krankheit überschreitet das Tier die Grenze seiner Natur; aber die Krankheit des Tiers ist das Werden des Geistes’.
Death is here understood as the constitutive sickness of the animal individual and the individual insofar as it distinguishes itself from the species and differentiates itself as a singular form of life cannot endure and is destined to die to be reabsorbed in the species and that is why with sickness and death the animal ‘transgresses the limits of its nature’. On the one hand, with death the bounds of the natural individuality of his life are obliterated and on the other hand it is precisely in the process of sickness and death that the animal can assert its longing for a higher form of individuality and for this reason sickness and death are an important moment of the emergence of spiritual structures from nature. The phenomena of sickness and death are also accompanied by the voice as in the death cry the voice strives to rescue in the universal medium of the voice the disappearing singularity, the death lends gives expression exactly in the moment of the individual’s elimination to its longing to be recognized as such and it is for this reason that death is qualified in the ‘Jena System III’ of 1805–6 as the becoming of consciousness (Werden des Bewußtseins).
With the moments of sexual differentiation, cerebralization, expressive voice, reproduction, sickness and death, the recognitive and social dialectical structures of reason show themselves at the natural level and the animal is nontheless this structure only in itself and not for itself and the union of opposites manifests itself only in the contact of bodies or in the body of the child, the opposite determination falls outside of animal consciousness and is not yet reprised in its own simple unity which is to say that in the animal the union of opposites has not yet become the object of a reflexive knowing whose structure is itself dialectical and which will stabilize itself in institutional forms and yet this reflexive knowing that develops in human life through the recursive application to itself of the structure of Begierde (a recursive application to itself of Begierde) is only what makes explicit the fundamental structures that have already developed in the recognitive activity and emerging consciousness of the animal organism.
Coda: the recognitive consciousness. A proto-intentional self endowed with communicative capacities and self-feeling emerges from natural interactions and in the different steps of my reconstruction we observe this natural self at once possessing a pre-reflexive form of natural recognitive consciousness and this form of natural recognitive consciousness is presupposed by the reflexive consciousness that will develop in institutionalized which is to say spiritual forms of life. Recognitive social consciousness is therefore a structure with which man and woman is endowed as a natural being. The boot-strapping model of Spirit promulgated by Robert Pippin as a radical historical and artificial achievement is supported by the assumption that recognition does not involve any subject exercising some sort of faculty or the appeal to the actualization of some sort of human potential and in virtue of the present reconstruction of recognition giving cause not to make such an assumption then some consequences may arise in addition for the way one is to conceive the very notion of Spirit as something that does not float free of one’s naturalness.
Consciousness, as a negative structure is to begin with a form of animal life. Analyzing the philosophy of subjective Spirit in the Encyclopedia H. Hikäheimo endeavours to demonstrate that according to what he calls Hegel’s ‘unofficial account’ there is a form of ‘primitive intentionality’ which is to say of consciousness that animals share with uncultivated humans and he also contends that pre-normative recognitive attitudes are perhaps constitutive and distinctive of the animal nature of human beings insofar as they appear to play a role in the way normal human infants engage in the pre-linguistic communicative practice of pointing things to others as described by Michael Tomasello and interpreting this in the light of the Hegelian early theory of natural interaction then the form of primitive intentionality that Hegel ascribes to animals can be characterized in recognitive terms which present a possible procedure to see in continuity such a form of animal primitive intentionality and the recognitive capacities that seem to be constitutive of the human pre-linguistic practice of pointing.
It is the ideality of nature that is to say a negative relation to nature, a relation that exists as such within nature and manifests itself at first as Begierde.
‘The being of consciousness in general is, to begin with — when it posits in itself the reflection that was previously ours — that it is the ideality of nature; in other words it is at first in [a] negative relation with nature, and in this negative relation it exists as tied to nature itself within this relation; the mode of its existence is not a particular [or] a singular aspect of nature, but a universal [moment] of nature, an element of it’.
‘Sein Sein überhaupt ist zuerst, wie es in sich selbst die Reflexion setzt, die bisher die unsrige war, daß es die Idealität der Natur ist, oder ist zuerst in negativer Beziehung auf die Natur; und in dieser negativen Beziehung existiert es al bezogen auf die Natur selbst innerhalb derselben, und die Weise seiner Existenz ist nicht eine Besonderheit, eine Einzelnheit der Natur, sondern ein Allgemeines der Natur, ein Element der Natur’.
- ‘The Jena System III’
Further advancements of reflexive consciousness may be interpreted as reorganizations and institutional stabilizations of that recognitive consciousness that had already emerged within natural life yet advances at a more complex level for which there is systematic relevance, insofar as it assists in the development of a theoretical model of use today in aiding in the confrontation with some issues arising within contemporary theories of recognition for upon contemporary theories situating recognition exclusively within the historical sphere they finish up being either circular or introducing recognition merely as a self-explicating presupposition and this way the deeper embodied structure of recognition is lost and the phenomenon tends to be reduced to a historically nuanced notion of rational normativity which is at odds with Hegel’s notion of Spirit which delves much deeper but in addition leads to a type of strong anti-naturalistic social ontology.
A critical analysis of the main dogmas, anthropological discontinuity, strong constructivism, opposition between social normativity and naturalness, of contemporary anti-naturalism in social ontology and social theory have been developed by Stéphane Haber and similar presuppositions are shared by contemporary readings of Hegel that stress the autonomy of objective Spirit from natural processes and understand recognition in merely normative terms, J.P. Deranty endeavouring to demonstrate how current pragmatist interpretations of Hegel’s Spirit understand it in a merely rationalistic, disembodied way since they disassemble recognition form its genetic function and the appreciation of the naturalistic strands of Hegelian anthropology as well as the appreciation of the nexus between nature recognition and second nature furnish the means for a justification of an embodied Hegelian account of sociality and human agency and along the lines of a materialist appropriation of Hegel E. Renault offers a reading of Hegel’s pragmatism in some continuity with John Dewey’s naturalism.
Such a consequence is not however inherent in the very notion of recognition as if assuming recognition as the basic structure of the social world would direct one inevitably to understand sociality as a disembodied free-floating realm but ion the contrary it is due to a particular understanding of it, an understanding of recognition that one is not obliged to commit oneself to, indeed recognition and here an exegetical reading of Hegel can assist could be more profitably reconstructed as a phenomenon emerging from nature and gaining a foothold in it and in this manner the role of recognition as the basic structure of the social and historical world of Spirit cannot be gainsaid but rather reinforced because one can break away from the hyper-rationalistic and anti-naturalistic consequences of the self-explicating bootstrapping model of recognition and of sociality.
As we are at present concerned with the second part of the three part ‘Philosophy of Nature’ which is to do with ‘Physics’ why this digression into recognition and life which perhaps has more relevance in the third section, ‘Organics’? Because what we are propounding here is an Idealist theory.
‘Since we started from the first immediate unity and returned through the moments of formation and of process to the unity of both these moments, and thus hack again to the original simple substance) this reflected unity is different from the first. Contrasted with that immediate unity, or that unity expressed as a [mere] being, this second is the universal unity which contains all these moments as superseded within itself. It is the simple genus which, in the movement of Life itself, does not exist for itself qua this simple determination; on the contrary, in this result, Life points to something other than itself, viz. to consciousness, for which Life exists as this unity, or as genus’.
- Phenomenology of Spirit’
This is not existentialism with its absurdity and I mean that in its pejorative sense and not its existentialist sense in which life just exists by itself with absurd meaningless processes occurring and then consciousness enters stage left and wonders what is this all about? What is going on? Now I have this thing called life what am I supposed to do with it. And things get more complicated … But for an Hegelian Idealist by the time you can even start talking about processes consciousness is already on the scene. One cannot get away from consciousness. And so is everything reducible to physics or physical processes? Clearly not.
Recognition (die Anerkennung). In the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’, in the section on ‘Self-Consciousness’, which I have just quoted from, it is contended that self-consciousness can only occur when one encountering oneself in the responses of another human being who sees us as like him or herself, self-conscious that is, one must be recognized by that other and further the desire is not for recognition from certain people but to be affirmed as what we are by all hence ultimately satisfaction is attained by universal recognition indeed the desire for recognition is of such importance one is willing to risk death in order to gain recognition from others and our willingness to risk our lives for ideals like recognition is what makes us distinct from other animals (or does it?), the Phenomenology presents a picture of what is the first and most primitive form in which human beings sought recognition from one another, the master–servant dialectic whereby two self-consciousness individuals struggle to be recognized by the other, and if one yields to the other he becomes the servant (Knecht) and the victor is the master (Herr) and the master is recognized by the servant but not vice versa, to the master the servant is subhuman, an individual who valued mere life over honour or recognition nonetheless the servant’s recognition is not satisfying to the master in virtue of it being the recognition of an inferior and neither is satisfied.
And so the dialectic proceeds with the transformation of the servant’s consciousness as it seeks recognition and freedom through other means and released from physical labour by the servant the master loses himself in pleasure and becomes dissipated while the servant fares better through actually developing as an individual and achieving greater self-knowledge through labour. It is the servant creates culture, including science, (physics for instance) technology and the arts while the master merely stagnates and Stoicism, Scepticism and the Unhappy Consciousness are forms in which the servant endeavours and fails to win freedom and recognition of a kind through thought alone. All of human history can be understood as the struggle for universal recognition finally achieved through membership in the modern state which affirms the freedom and dignity of all of its members which is to say only when the distinction between masters and servants is annulled are freedom and universal recognition are achieved.
‘A self-consciousness exists for a self-consciousness. Only so is it in fact self-consciousness ; for only in this way does the unity of itself in its otherness become explicit for it. The ‘I’ which is the object of its Notion is in fact not ‘object’; the object of Desire, however, is only independent, for it is the universal indestructible substance, the fluid self-identical essence. A self-consciousness, in being an object, is just as much ‘I’ as ‘object’. With this, we already have before us the Notion of Spirit. What still lies ahead for consciousness is the experience of what Spirit is this absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousnesses which in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence: ‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’. It is in self-consciousness, in the Notion of Spirit, that consciousness first finds its turning-point, where it leaves behind it the colourful show of the sensuous here-and-now and the nightlike void of the supersensible beyond, and steps out into the spiritual daylight of the present’.
- ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’
A new way of looking at things opens up for us.
Well, to get back to this excursion into Hegel’s first philosophy of nature the direct evidence about the philosophy of nature in 1801/2 is as it happens not quite so sparse and indirect as the evidence about his logic and metaphysics and I will finish this part with a look at the Hegelian concept of true physics before proceeding in future parts with the dialectical concept of matter as real gravity, an identity which is a unity, of opposites, and an infinitely opposed identity, a completely relative identity being the principle physical theme of the ‘Dissertation on the Orbits oJ the Planets’ first exploring the solar system therein then examining the concepts of mechanism, chemism, and organism.
The true Physics. Hegel had inadequate chance of developing his theory of nature for the public and one might suppose that he did not develop it systematically during this period or at least that he did not do so in any detail but this is not the case. ‘The System of Ethical Life’ is manifestly part of a continuous systematic account of the real Idea and is an outline of real Spirit and it does not merely logically presuppose an account of nature as the real body of that Spirit but refers back to that account as something already completed and Hegel used his ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ lectures and whatever other notes he had gathered together to write up a systematic account of nature as a series of Potenzen or potencies that evolve logically as totalities through the reciprocal subsumption of concept under intuition and intuition under concept and ‘The System of Ethical Life’ delivers some insight into how this logical process operated in physical nature yet it is not feasible to organize the remaining scattered data completely in this manner for this period only the philosophy of real Spirit can be expounded systematically in the form that Hegel gave it.
The fact that there is no sign of Potenz logic in the ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ fragments indicates Hegel did not appropriate and adapt this instrument of persuasion from Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s, (1775–1854), conceptual store until 1802 nor do the Potenzen appear in the Difference essay other than in the illustration of Schelling’s System abd Schelling explains Potenz logic in his dialogue with a friend which is to say Hegel, ‘On the Absolute Identity-System’ in the first issue of the Critical Journal and that dialogue can be viewed as marking their concurrence that both would present the finite side of the system, the theory of empirical cognition and human action, as a chain of Potenzen in future. It was basic to Schelling’s outlook that ‘in the Absolute itself there is no Potenz’ because the Absolute itself exists only as the sum of all Potenzen and so the absence of Potenz-language in the fragments of Hegel’s early logic is not significant given that ‘Logic is the extended science of the Idea as such and similarly the presence of pure logical categories and the absence of Potenz-language in the ‘Divine Triangle’ fragment is to be expected given that the fragment is part of the resumption of all finite science into the original unity of the pure logical Idea and the Potenzen belong to the real order of things both conscious and unconscious. (I will get to the Divine Triangle later and without any salacious humour such as James Joyce might come up with, see my article ‘The Geometry of the Absolute’ for Anna Livia’s divine triangle in ‘Finnegans Wake’. The absence of Potenz-language in Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz’s, (1805–1879), report about the treatment of nature in this manuscript may be a reflection of his dislike for Schelling’s terminology).
Rosenkranz explains: ʻThe theme … he had nursed for a long time. Excerpts from Kant’s writings on mechanics and astronomy, from Kepler, Newton and others, are already to be found among his papers much earlier. He wrote the Dissertation first in German. Then he put it together more briefly in Latin. These manuscripts and a mess [Wust] of calculations belonging to them are still preserved.ʼ In a letter to Karl Hegel of May 1840, he was more precise about the German MS. Apparently it contained only two-thirds of the Latin text (Kimmerle, Hegel-Studien, iv. 148) but it would have been more discursive and some of the excerpts that Rosenkranz mentions, may go right back to the Gymnasium years at Stuttgart and Heinz Kimmerle points out that Hegel could hardly have written the Dissertation in German, and then turned it into Latin between the end of August and the beginning of October 1801. His willingness to submit a thesis at short notice indicates clearly enough that translation was the only problem he faced and he could have written the German version during his first months at Jena before starting on the Difference essay yet in light of his evident preoccupation with the Verfassungsschrift or document on the Constitution in these months it is more likely that he brought it with him from Frankfurt. Evidence of Hegel’s interest in the philosophy of nature during 1800 can be found in absolute Entgegensetzung gilt and it is not clear that Hegel intends any direct reference to the theory of the heavens there but the doctrine of Spirit as an enlivening law makes a bridge between the ʻSystem-Programmeʼ and the Dissertation. The phrase ʻbelebendes Gesetzʼ in the light of the opposition between ʻbegreifenʼ and ʻbelebenʼ in the Frankfurt fragments for instance Positiv wird ein Glauben genannt confirms a continuum between the law of gravity in the heavens and the law of the free community on earth.
Schelling’s term Potenz merely replaces the Kantian term synthesis which Hegel is still employing at this stage and Potenz-language does not feature in Hegel’s first system of the heavens the Dissertation of August 1801 but that does not mean he was not up with it for he presented his brief Latin treatise ‘On the Orbits of the Planets’ to the Faculty at Jena in October 1801 after hurrying to complete it hence the draft he had ready to hand and penned it at Frankfurt. ‘Absolute Ethics according to Relation’ starts with ʻEbenso wie im vorigen muss dies eingeteilt werdenʼ and the explanation that follows shows that the backward reference is not to the two-page prospectus that is the only preamble for this part of Hegel’s undertaking and in the ‘The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy’ he indicates that each finite science of the Absolute has to start with the intuition or identity that is least dichotomous and ‘at the objective pole’ this is ‘matter’. The dialectical concept of matter as ‘real gravity’, an identity which is a unity, of opposites, and hence ‘an infinitely opposed identity, a thoroughly relative identity’ is the principle physical theme of the Dissertation yet as a matter of fact there is something even more fundamental that we need to take into account in order to understand Hegel’s theory. Matter as gravity is the physical self-positing of the aether which is the indifferent identity of the divine life, the creative power that expresses itself in all forms of real existence, whether conscious or unconscious, extended or intelligent and in all forms of its manifestation it is infinitely self-opposed which is to say that it has both a subjective and an objective pole and even as matter it ‘intuits itself, though it is only when we reach the conscious or spiritual level that we can say it ‘intuits itself as itself’.’ This active self-intuition of matter is apparently its self-positing as light hence light is a logically primitive aspect of physical reality, one of the elementary concepts in terms of which the theory is framed and it is not quite as primitive as gravity since all bodies are indifferent foci of gravitational force, the self-positing of the aether everywhere in the ideality of space, the otherwise empty extension in which these foci of gravity move, and all the independent foci are self-lighting centres and yet in the full displaying of matter, light and darkness are sundered as bodies and the self-lighting bodies cast light upon dark bodies which must therefore be gravitationally dependent because they are only reflective.
Such is the thought-context within which the Dissertation must be studied and like the Dissertation itself its origins must be looked for in the Frankfurt period not in the latest publications of Schelling and in light of Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin’s, (1770–1843), interest in the elliptical orbits of the planets perhaps Hegel’s lengthy struggle against Newton’s mechanical philosophy of the heavens was undergone under his influence. The Dissertation is perhaps all that survives of System I but the ‘System- Programme’ shows that the original context of Hegel’s speculation about natural philosophy was Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s (1762–1814), question: ‘how must a world be constituted for a moral entity?’ He wished to construct a moral theory of the world of human experience as a whole, ‘a complete system of all Ideas or of all practical postulates (which is the same thing)’. The Fichtean inspiration of this determination to reorganize the Critical Philosophy upon the foundation provided by the Idea of the Ego as a free being, is evident enough yet Hegel’s conception of the result of this reorganization is at some distance from Fichte so even in the ‘System-Programme’ there is an indication of an assault upon Fichte’s concept of nature in the Difference essay.
‘The first Idea is naturally the Vorstellung of my self as an absolutely free essence’ he explains and natürlich› here means not just of course but in the course of nature for he proceeds to discourse upon the simultaneous origin of self and world and from there he ‘steps down into the fields of physics’ but even were such an interpretation of natürlich rejected the identification of Idea and Vorstellung taken with the project of ‘giving wings to our backward physics, that advances laboriously by experiments’ indicates that Hegel’s use of Ideas here albeit it is practical and hence only a postulation involves an a priori synthesis of concept and intuition and the unified Vorstellung of my freedom in my world is the intellectual intuition of the original Idee because it is ‘the only true and thinkable creation out of nothing’. And what is postulated practically on the basis of this Fichtean intuition is not an intellectual reality beyond the range of experience but merely a speculative interpretation of experience and this is the formal reason why he has to develop an organic philosophy of Nature yet the sense of the ἑν ϰαι παν as a living whole was always the real basis of the rejection of the moral opposition between soul and body, reason and sensibility, an antithesis that made the instrumental conception of nature as a pure mechanism appear sufficient to Fichte.
The philosophical physics that Hegel anticipated in 1797 was a synthesis of Ideas provided by philosophy with data provided by experience and creativity is the hallmark that he stresses and he proceeds to treat of human affairs for ‘only what is Gegenstand of freedom, is called Idea’ and his abrasive assault upon the clockwork theory of the State where indeed he contends that ‘there is no Idea of a machine’ clearly indicates that he would not have been prepared in 1797 to speak of ‘celestial mechanics’ either and the physical world that is ‘created out of nothing’ is a city in the heavens in which the members ‘proceed through the aether in the manner of Gods’, as Hegel puts it at the beginning of his Dissertation.
The physics that rests upon creation out of nothing will not resolve the orbits of the planets into a parallelogram of forces but will rather interpret the whole system as self-positing like the Ego and the Idea that replaces mechanical composition is that of ‘living force’ and the reason for adopting this mental make up as opposed to a mechanical-compositive one is that freedom interpreted as creativity guided by the sense of beauty is the moral ideal of our existence within the stable frame of nature and that stable frame is to be regarded as animate rather than as mechanical since how we think of it is an image of the way in which we think of thinking and the romantic enthusiasm of the ‘System-Programme’ for a world in which there will be perfect freedom of expression is that which determines the equally striking insistence in the Dissertation on maintaining classical modes of speech about the heaven of the newest astronomy.
Such a connection between the ‘System-programme’ and the Dissertation goes slightly further than the explicit evidence of the text warrants and the concept of ‘living force’ is not referred to in the Programme yet because Hegel’s ‘winged physics’ will not have Newtonian mechanical forces at its foundation it is a reasonable projection to make but we must not assume a connection between the ‘System-Programme’ and the Dissertation without considering the intervening ‘System Fragment’ for in the ‘System fragment’ of mid-1800 Hegel appears to say that Nature is strictly a ‘reflective’ concept: ‘Nature is a positing of life, since … reflection has made life into nature by positing [life under reflective categories] … Nature is not itself life, but a life fixated by reflection, even though it may be treated in the worthiest manner.’
Abstracting this fragment from the continuum that can be demonstrated to exist between the ‘System-Programme’ and the Difference essay it appears nearly as sceptical about the possibility of any speculative science as Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, (1743–1819), and only Religion provides us with real positive contact with the Absolute and hence reflection with its negative infinity of the causal regress and the moral progress is to be laid aside for: ‘Philosophy must cease with religion’ and it seems to cease as in so many critical religious minds at the sceptical extreme but even within the bounds of the fragment we can observe that this impression is incorrect as a practical ‘science of life’ is possible and one can liberate oneself from reflection since experience furnishes an intuitive religious bridge between the finite and the infinite as life: ‘the living [self]’s being-only-apart [in a system of ‘dead’ parts, i.e. a mechanism] is sublated in religion, the bounded life lifts itself up to the innite [life].’ And upon this elevation taking place a ‘science of life’ can be constructed in fact and quite unlike most mystics Hegel was prepared to provide a blueprint for our social existence.
He positively desired to unite God with Nature as fixated in the reflective ideal of it as ‘one unique organized divided and united whole’ and the incarnation of God in the whole of Nature is Hegel’s them, and he dismisses the noumenal grace of Immanuel Kant and Fichte’s rational faith as a phenomenon of the age having at bottom the same significance as the grace of dependence upon an absolutely alien essence which cannot become man that is to say the God of Abraham and Moses or if it were to have become man hence to have been in time would remain an absolutely specific being, only an absolute unit, even in this union that is the God of positive Christian faith.
Let us pray then to God or the Absolute to deliver another kind of grace without surrendering the possibility of a speculative physics that is a necessary part of Hegel’s projected religion in which the Incarnation of God is universally realized and comprehended and his assault upon the categories of reflection is simply intended to drive home the lesson that all genuine science is part of ethics.
The condemnation of Nature as a reflective fixation is preccisely parallel with the condemnation of State, Constitution, and so on as mechanical concepts in the ‘System-Programme’ and just as that assault does not imply that a true science of politics is impossible so too this one does not imply that a speculative science of nature is impossible for it is Kant’s ‘Critique of Teleological Judgement’ that is the most worthy misfire of reflective philosophy and not Schelling’s ‘Von der Weltseele’ nor need we have any doubt that Hegel was still prepared to designate this organic science philosophy of nature just as he refers to the State as an organism both before and after 1796. It is theoretically reflective philosophy that ‘ceases with religion’ and speculative philosophy as conceived in 1800 and perhaps already by 1796 starts with it and from the reflective point of view this speculative philosophy is all practical postulation yet such false seeming is finally dissipated when speculation comes around in a circle to religious experience as its climax.
And such is precisely the view discoverable in the Difference essay developed along lines for which the ‘System-Programme’ provided the first rather crude and primitive outline and just as Hegel was already logically and psychologically prepared to adopt Hölderlin’s Fichtean philosophy of Identity before he ever went to Frankfurt so too he was prepared to move from his subjective postulational standpoint to Schelling’s doctrine of an intuited identity of subject and object by the time he went on to Jena and the continuity between the ‘System-Programme’, the ‘System Fragment’, the Dissertation, and the Difference essay demonstrates that Hegel accepted the Fichtean doctrine of the primacy of the practical but from the offset he rejected Fichte’s instrumental view of nature and the ‘System fragment’ further demonstrates that this rejection is logically connected with his rejection of practical faith that is of the postulates of the Author of Nature and of the rational soul’s immortal existence in the noumenal world atnd o prove the identity of God and Nature was from the beginning an essential objective and this essentially ethical context of Hegelian philosophy of nature explains the greater antipathy to Newton than Schelling ever displayed the reason why he found it more difficult to accommodate the concept of mechanism than Schelling ever did.
Dedicated to the lady for whom my love is infinite, the answer to my prayers.
Life is a mystery
Everyone must stand alone
I hear you call my name
And it feels like home
When you call my name,
it’s like a little prayer
I’m down on my knees,
I wanna take you there
In the midnight hour,
I can feel your power
Just like a prayer,
you know I’ll take you there
I hear your voice
It’s like an angel sighin’
I have no choice
I hear your voice
Feels like flying
I close my eyes
Oh God I think I’m fallin’
Out of the sky
I close my eyes
Heaven help me
When you call my name,
it’s like a little prayer
I’m down on my knees,
I wanna take you there
In the midnight hour,
I can feel your power
Just like a prayer,
you know I’ll take you there…
=====
Madonna, ‘Like a Prayer’:
Coming up next:
A brief excursion through the solar system.
It may stop but it never ends ….
