On Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature’ : A Free Reflex of Spirit — part twenty seven.
‘On the Move’
by Karin Boye, (1900–1941).
The satiated day is never the greatest.
The best day is a day of thirst.
There is probably purpose and meaning in our journey
but it is the pathway there, which is worth our while.
The greatest aim is a night long rest,
where the fire is lit and the bread broken in haste.
In the place, where you sleep but once,
sleep becomes safe and the dream full of song.
Move on, move on! The new day is dawning.
Endless is our great adventure.
‘I rörelse’
Den mätta dagen, den är aldrig störst.
Den bästa dagen är en dag av törst.
Nog finns det mål och mening i vår färd -
men det är vägen, som är mödan värd.
Det bästa målet är en nattlång rast,
där elden tänds och brödet bryts i hast.
På ställen, där man sover blott en gång,
blir sömnen trygg och drömmen full av sång.
Bryt upp, bryt upp! Den nya dagen gryr.
Oändligt är vårt stora äventyr.
====
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831). ‘Philosophy of Nature’. ‘Physics.
Continuing with ‘Jena System III’ there are two subsections in ‘Total Process’, the first is the ‘Mechanic of the Iridescent Fire or the Forming of the Physical Body’ and the second is the ‘Chemistry of the Physical Singular Body or of Iridescent Fire’, the first section is a description of how the earth crystal is formed whereby the earth crystal is itself the iridescent body in virtue of the earth itself producing coloured-things and the physical shape of the world is described through the kinds of qualities that are produced by the caloric earth. For instance Hegel contends: ‘Das Metall hat die Farbe an ihm, als dem Lichte noch schlechthin angehörend, das noch in seiner reinen Qualitat; noch nicht aufgelöst ist, als Glanz; eine elastische Farbe, die unmittelbar erst mit der Bestimmtheit, ist, — der Bestimmtheit, die noch einfach der Natur des Lichts noch nicht widerspricht’.
These qualities convey light or iridescence and the concern with colours and their relationship to the earth is principally in virtue of their influence upon animals, it is not merely that we perceive them as secondary qualities of things but there is also a vital relationship between colour and animal behaviour, whether it be the colourful anemone or the alternating chameleon or even the spotted leopard the animal uses its colour in foraging, hunting, or protecting itself and colour becomes part of sentience and is painted into the fabric of life.
This relationship belonging to animals’ interests is noted in the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ chapter ‘The spiritual animal kingdom and deceit, or the matter in hand’ where it is explained that the animals live with the four elements and they adopt these sensible qualities so that they might fulfil their appetites.
‘This intrinsically real individuality is at first again a single and specific one. The absolute reality which it knows itself to be is, therefore, as it will become aware, an abstract, universal reality lacking filling and content, merely the empty thought of this category. We have to see how this Notion of intrinsically real individuality characterizes itself in its moments, and how its Notion of itself enters into its consciousness’.
‘The Notion of this individuality, which as such knows itself to be all reality, is to begin with a result: it has not yet set forth its movement and reality, and is posited here immediately as a simple in-itself or implicit being. Negativity, however, which is the same as that which is manifested as movement, is present in the simple in-itself as a determinateness; and [mere] being, or the simple in-itself, becomes a definite range of being. Accordingly, individuality appears on the scene as an original determinate nature: original, for it is implicit; originally determinate, for the negative moment is present in the in-itself and this latter is thus a quality. This limitation of being, however, cannot limit the action of consciousness, for here consciousness is a relation purely of itself to itself: relation to an other, which would he a limitation of it, has been eliminated. The original determinateness of the nature is, therefore, only a simple principle, a transparent universal element, in which the individuality remains as free and self-identical as it is unimpeded in unfolding its different moments, and in its realization is simply in a reciprocal relation with itself; just as in the case of indeterminate animal life, which breathes the breath of life, let us say, into the element of water, or air or earth, and within these again into more specific principles, steeping its entire nature in them, and yet keeping that nature under its own control, and preserving itself as a unity, in spite of the limitation imposed by the element, and remaining in the form of this particular organization the same general animal life’.
- ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’
The natural faculties and talents of humans are also characterised as having a tincture of spirit as though humanity’s innate abilities reflect the colours of the earth’s elements.
‘First of all, then, the originally determinate nature [or natural predisposition] of individuality, its immediate essence, is not as yet posited as active, and as such is called special capacity, talent, character) and so on. This peculiar tinge of Spirit is to be looked on as the sole content of the End itself and as the sole reality. If we thought of consciousness as going beyond that, and as wanting to give reality to a different content, then we should be thinking of it as a Nothing working towards Nothing. Further, this original essence is not merely the content of the End, but is in itself the reality as well, which otherwise has the appearance of being a given material of the action, of being a reality found to begin with, which is to be shaped by the action. That is to say, action simply translates an initially implicit being into a being that is made explicit; the being-in-itself of the reality opposed to consciousness is reduced to a mere empty show. This consciousness, then, when bringing itself to act, does not let itself be led astray by what is merely the show of a given reality, and equally it has to avoid floundering about in empty thoughts and Ends, and has to hold on to the original content of its essence’.
- ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’
Natural philosophy is influencing the consideration of Spirit.
Most of the ‘Mechanic of Iridescent Fire’ deals with the noble metals such as gold and silver that are of interest both for their unique physical properties, higher specific gravity yet relatively low melting point, and in virtue of their being produced by the combination of ideal elements interacting with light, magnetism, and electricity. For instance Hegel contend: ‘Einige Metalle halten die chemische Differenz unter [–oder] innerhalb der Gestalt; und sind magnetisch; –theils an die Lufft gebracht, oxidiren die sich nicht sogleich, theils gestrichen; –es ist mehr also blosse Erwärmung, weniger als Oxidation, und selbst als Elektricität, die zum Funken übergehen kann’. The veins of such metals demonstrate an early grand smelting of the elements in their cosmic interaction with the sun and this smelting process resulted in divisions in the earth’s crust which can be separated into four kinds, flint, clay, talc, and chalk, and these four earth types combine earth, air, fire, and water, and these are the original types from which the organic earth evolved.
The second subsection the ‘Chemistry of the Physical Body’ moves to the ideal element of water by way of preparation for the concept’s advance to life and life begins in sea water, the chemical interaction of most concern here being that of how oxides are formed by fire in water and the chemical reaction by which oxidation occurs will account for the continuing dissolution of the earth’s crystal, the formation of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere by which plants and animals breathe, and the specific biological mechanics used by a living system. Different oxides, and how they are formed, are examined, the motive for which becomes evident enough upon approaching the issue of how galvanization occurs whereby the concern here is to produce an image of the organic as a chemical system that balances the oxides and puts them into neutrality and this neutrality presents the solidity of the earth’s formations. The chemicals represent simplicity but as they are dissolved in sea water the electrical bonds of the chemicals break apart bringing forth the galvanizing process.
Galvanism is the phenomenon most closely associated with the cause of sentient life and albeit it was discovered in 1780 by Luigi Galvani, (1737–1798) it was Johann Ritter, (1776–1810), was the one who understood how the process worked in living tissue. Ritter’s Law, which deals with the flow of electrical current in muscle tissue, is named after him and for Hegel galvanization occurs in nature through oxidation and what we observe in Galvani’s original experiments with a dead frog is just the same reaction as what occurs in inorganic nature, the frog’s muscles contain the same chemicals and react to the electrical charge just as the chemicals react in sea water and the difference lies in the complexity and solidity of the frog’s leg but the process is not of a different kind. ‘Galvanischer Proceß; er ist weder nur electrischer Proceß, noch der chemische Proceß überhaupt, so daß alle andern eigentlich galvanische wären; er ist eine besondere Weise der Existenz des chemische Processes…’.
Galvanism and Ritter’s experiments are also cited in the Phenomenology as contributing to how the understanding of two worlds, one sensible and one intelligible and Hegel seems to be citing directly Ritter’s ‘Beyträge zur nähren Kenntniss der Galvanismus’ wherein is explaining how the world is divided into an unconditioned portion or what appears purely intelligible and the conditioned portion or what appears empirically.
‘The law is thereby present in a twofold manner: once, as law in which the differences are expressed as independent moments; and also in the form of a simple withdrawal in to itself which again can be called Force, but in the sense not of a Force that is driven back into itself, but Force as such, or the Notion of Force, an abstraction which absorbs the differences themselves of what attracts and what is attracted. In this sense, simple electricity, e.g., is Force; but the expression of difference falls within the law; this difference is positive and negative electricity. In the case of the motion of falling, Force is the simple factor, gravity, whose law is that the magnitudes of the different moments of the motion, the time elapsed and the space traversed, are related to one another as root and square. Electricity itself is not difference per se, or is not in its essence the dual essence of positive and negative electricity; hence, it is usually said that it has the law of this mode of being, and, too, that it has the property of expressing itselfin this way. It is true that this property is the essential and sole property of this Force, or that it belongs to it necessarily. But necessity here is an empty word; Force must, just because it must, duplicate itself in this way. Of course, given positive electricity, negative too is given in principle; for the positive is, only as related to a negative, or, the positive is in its own self the difference from itself; and similarly with the negative. But that electricity as such should divide itself in this way is not in itself a necessity. Electricity, as simple Force, is indifferent to its law-to be positive and negative; and if we call the former its Notion but the latter its being, then its Notion is indifferent to its being. It merely has this property, which just means that this property is not in itself necessary to it. This indifference is given another form when it is said that to be positive and negative belongs to the definition of electricity, and that this is simply its Notion and essence. In that case, its being would simply mean its actual existence. But that definition does not contain the necessity of its existence; it exists, either because we find it, i. e. its existence is not necessary at all, or else it exists through, or by means of, other Forces, i.e. its necessity is an external necessity. But, in basing this necessity on the determinateness of being through another, we relapse again into the plurality of specific laws which we have just left behind in order to consider law as law. It is only with law as law that we are to compare its Notion as Notion, or its necessity. But in all these forms, necessity has shown itself to be only an empty word’.
- ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’
Ritter discovered how the electric current flows through the muscles but what is particularly important to understand is that the electrical current naturally flows through the body because of the neutrality of its chemical composition and the living organism makes its own electricity that it takes from the compounds that it breaths and eats. Life is thereby represented as a self-sustaining galvanization yet as Hegel remarks: ‘The galvanizing process is now the image of the organic process, but it is not yet the self; it still falls outside. It is the fire generating itself by virtue of itself and coming from the physical independent body which has the self in it’. The Self is implicitly in the natural chemical processes but it will only emerge on its own account when it is considered as a universal, that is to say as a distinct concept and not as something analysable into its component elements but this distinct concept belongs to the final chapter ‘Organism’ and we mustn’t get ahead of ourselves..
The difference between the ‘Chemistry of the Physical Body’ and the ‘Organism’ is the distinction between a lifeless and a living system, chemistry presents the unfolding concept in terms of its elements and simple processes but that tells us nothing concerning the actual subject in which the chemical interactions are occurring. Organic structures result from the inorganic process whereby the latter constitutes the necessary and sufficient conditions for the organism’s existence, and while the two are materially equivalent they are nonetheless formally distinct which can be seen at once in the treatment of the organic concept, the concept presents the Species as a logical category and as a category Species exists independently from its material manifestation, it is a biological entity but is also a formal representation, it is a natural kind that describes how living things belong to an endless continuum.
Hegel’s formal representation of the organism is a syllogism and it is the syllogism of the whole as a process of division which separates inorganic from organic nature and this occurs physically in the first appearance of life as an independent process wherein the determinate existence’ of an individual eats, respires, and reacts to its environment. The actuality of life develops beyond this point however and it ‘divides the organic process into two universal extremes, the inorganic nature and the species, and constitutes the middle term’. Life is in addition a process that unifies the universal with the actual and hence it can be observed primarily in the sexual relationship among the species members for in the sexual union the chemical basis of life is tied to the requirement of the species to perpetuate itself. This moment of unity is when the universal of life mediates inorganic nature and shows its power over the individual who seeks to fulfil his or her desires as a species member and the result of the sexual union is the other, namely the offspring who replaces the parents in the continuing cycle of living nature and the same syllogism appears in the Phenomenology.
Hegel in his Naturphilosophie gives a further elaboration on how the process develops from sexual union in order to show the completion of the circle by which Species endures whereby to put it simply there are three periods that constitute the series, the first being the theoretical, the organic realm is the unity of singularity and universality that will set the singular being free from the necessity of nature and it is here that we discover that self-consciousness presents the theoretical concept of the practical life, it is the unity of extremes that nonetheless maintains the distinction between Self as individual and Species as the universal natural kind. The individual through recognition (Erkenntnis) will think of itself as a free being and it will forget that it comes from nature and is in a continuum with its species hence the second section of the Phenomenology, ‘Self-Consciousness’, appears as a theoretical concept set between the first section, ‘Consciousness’, grounded in perceptions and natural concepts, and the third section, ‘Reason’, grounded in observations of natural differentiae and establishing analogical relationships for the purpose of taxonomy. From how the category of Species expressed in the movement from theoretical to practical sides of life is to be understood the section ‘Self-Consciousness’ presents the theoretical concept of sentient life evolving in terms of individuation. Life as a rational-empirical object is observed, marked, and differentiated in the section, ‘Reason’. ‘Self-Consciousness’ is also where the syllogism of life developed in the Naturphilosophie is repeated and this is where the individual identifies Self with self-consciousness separating him or herself from the species as a whole. The individual’s identity with the whole is thereby presupposed prior to the awareness of a singular being’s self-conscious identity and the account of the Self’s emergence in the Phenomenology would be obscure unless one looks at it as a recollection of the syllogism of life in the Naturphilosophie. The Phenomenology repeats the organic cycle and then moves beyond it to self-identification and the objectivity of self-consciousness lies in its connection to Species but the practical side of its concept, its true subjectivity, does not emerge explicitly until World Spirit appears in chapter six of the Phenomenology and this is foreshadowed in the Naturphilosophie.
The second period of Species in System III is when the individual ‘consumes itself[;]…it sublimates its own inorganic being, nourishes itself from itself, articulates itself within itself, and sunders its universality into distinctions’. Hegel has in his MS a diagram placed in the margin alongside of the second period that is an illustration of the cycle of the Species and it illustrates what occurs in the last part of the Naturephilosophie beginning with ‘Organism’. H. S. Harris has attempted to interpret the diagram to demonstrate that Hegel is discussing the movement of nature as the true infinity in the formation of Spirit. As chapter four of the Phenomenology explains this is the moment of self-consciousness when natural things are recognized as objects of appetite.
‘With this appeal to universal experience we may be permitted to anticipate how the case stands in the practical sphere. In this respect we can tell those who assert the truth and certainty of the reality of sense-objects that they should go back to the most elementary school of wisdom, viz. the ancient EIeusinian Mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus, and that they have still to learn the secret meaning of the eating ofb read and the drinking of wine. For he who is initiated into these Mysteries not only comes to doubt the being of sensuous things, but to despair of it; in part he brings about the nothingness of such things himself in his dealings with them, and in part he sees them reduce themselves to nothingness. Even the animals are not shut out from this wisdom but, on the contrary, show themselves to be most profoundly initiated into it; for they do not just stand idly in front of sensuous things as if these possessed intrinsic being, but, despairing of their reality, and completely assured of their nothingness, they fall to without ceremony and eat them up. And all Nature, like the animals, celebrates these open Mysteries which teach the truth about sensuous things’.
- ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’
This is where the first stage of life is fully conceptualized as individuality, hence the inorganic realm is sublimated within the singular self, and its existence is articulated only by his actions based on desires. The world becomes the place to hunt and feed no matter what else is found there.
This second period represents the existence of the troglodyte, for whom nothing in life is really separate from appetite. Self-recognition occurs at this point of the dialectic, since the individual knows himself through his desires and emotions, but there is no recognition of the other beyond the satisfaction of desire. We are observing still an asocial natural organism, an animal, which is indifferent to the lives of others, even of its own kind. The identity between the human and animal is frequently overlooked in the commentaries, for instance Emil Fackenheim excludes animal from human life when he asserts: ‘Animals are part of a larger whole in their activities of feeding, reproducing, and protecting….[A]nimals lack the power of self-making….To be genuine power of self-asserting, human desire must be not for this or that part of nature but rather for nature as a whole — a desire which, when acted out, does not express the natural whole but rather tears itself loose from it’. The contrast which Fackenheim is presenting is not what the Naturphilosophie demonstrates, rather humans are animals and have the same desires as other animals but they learn sociability and rationality based upon their interactions and since we learn to be self-makers we distinguish ourselves from the other animals.
The Self at this moment becomes a distinct subcategory within Species, a sentient but not entirely rational thing and as it learns to become rational and hence more sociable its world becomes articulated (gliedert) into distinctions of different kinds as they relate to the individual’s desires and most importantly the distinctions come to relate to other Selves for there is a friend, here is a foe, and so on and these articulations are still theoretical differentiations yet they will form the first rational distinctions of practical life in virtue of an individual learning to behave one way to a friend and another way to a foe. The troglodyte is not yet fully a rational animal it seems to lack self-understanding apart from natural tendencies, it lacks spiritual self-identification, and in the Phenomenology we can see how the troglodyte develops through its conflicts with others, either suffering thraldom or rising to lordship, but in the Naturphilosophie it remains a thing of nature, a sentient but not as yet spiritual being.
The third period of Species is the unification between the theoretical universal and the practical singular life and this turn towards unity constitutes ‘the whole organism’ and this is where the independence of the sexes emerges and gender identities are fashioned (perhaps I may relate this in a separate article to the current strange ideology that a man can be a woman just by thinking he or rather she is so). Each sex has its own being-for-self and neither is subservient to the other and when they are united sexually each is equal to the other in forming the biological unit of kinship and what is taking place in this period is that the individual per se is being sublimated in a group, the whole, comprising the Species, is divided into distinct parts, first the sexes and, then, into families and tribes, which, because they are distinct from each other, posit themselves in opposition to each other. In simpler terms the category of Self focused upon the individual is overcome and replaced by Family but the individuating distinctions are retained as proper natural differentiations within it. Hence each family member has his or her particular identity not simply as a Self but as a unit of the Family that forms the natural whole of the Self and only in terms of how the opposition is socially formed among families will equality and unity cease to exist and starting with the troglodyte husbands will govern wives, parents will govern children, and as societies develop masters will govern servants.
Oppositions and conflicts will result internally in the whole and these distinctions and conflicts are not due to nature in terms of the Species but the dissolution of natural equalities is due to social forces and culture and this third period comes to focus upon family or tribal unity which Hegel calls in the Phenomenology ‘the universal blood’.
‘This simple infinity, or the absolute Notion, may be called the simple essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal blood, whose omnipresence is neither disturbed nor interrupted by any difference, but rather is itself every difference, as also their supersession; it pulsates within itself but does not move, inwardly vibrates, yet is at rest. It is self-identical, for the differences are tautological; they are differences that are none. This self-identical essence is therefore related only to itself; ‘to itself implies relationship to an ‘other’, and the relation-to-self is rather a self-sundering; or, in other words, that very self-identicalness is an inner difference, These sundered moments are thus in and of themselves each an opposite of an other; thus in each moment the ‘other’ is at the same time expressed; or each is not the opposite of an ‘other’ but only a pure opposite; and so each is therefore in its own self the opposite of itself. In other words; it is not an opposite at all, but is purely for itself, a pure, self-identical essence that has no difference in it. Accordingly, we do not need to ask the question, still less to think that fretting over such a question is philosophy, or even that it is a question philosophy cannot answer, the question, viz. ‘How, from this pure essence, how does difference or otherness issue forth from it?’ For the division into two moments has already taken place, difference is excluded from the self-identical and set apart from it. What was supposed to be the self-identical is thus already one of these two moments instead of being the absolute essence. That the self-identical divides itself into two means, therefore, just as well that it supersedes itself as already divided, supersedes itself as an otherness. The unity, of which it is usual to say that difference cannot issue from it, is in fact itself one of the two moments; it is the abstraction of the simplicity or unitary nature over against the difference. But in saying that the unity is an abstraction, that is, is only one of the opposed moments, it is already implied that it is the dividing of itself; for if the unity is a negative, is opposed to something, then it is eo ipso posited as that which has an antithesis within it. The different moments of self-sundering and of becoming self-identical are therefore likewise only this movement of self-supersession; for since the self-identical, which is supposed first to sunder itself or become its opposite, is an abstraction or is already itself a sundered moment, its self-sundering is therefore a supersession of what it is, and therefore the supersession of its dividedness. Its becoming self-identical is equally a self-sundering; what becomes identical with itself thereby opposes itself to its self-sundering; i.e. it thereby puts itself on one side, or rather it becomes a sundered moment’.
- ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’
And the essence of action within the unit is blood kinship or blood relation.
‘Because the ethical order is Spirit in its immediate truth, the sides into which its consciousness sunders itself also fall into this form of immediacy, and individuality passes over into this abstract negativity which, being in its own self without consolation and reconciliation, must receive them essentially through a real and external act. Blood-relationship supplements, then, the abstract natural process by adding to it the movement of consciousness, interrupting the work of Nature and rescuing the blood-relation from destruction; or better, because destruction is necessary, the passage of the blood-relation into mere being, it takes 00 itself the act of destruction. Through this it comes about that the dead, the universal being, becomes a being that has returned into itself, a being-far-self, or, the powerless, simply isolated individual has been raised to universal individuality. The dead individual, by having liberated his being from his action or his negative unity, is an empty singular, merely a passive being-for-another, at the mercy of every lower irrational individuality and the forces of abstract material elements, all of which are now more powerful than himself: the former on account of the life they possess, the latter on account of their negative nature. The Family keeps away from the dead this dishonouring of him by unconscious appetites and abstract entities, and puts its own action in their place, and weds the blood-relation to the bosom of the earth, to the elemental imperishable individuality. The Family thereby makes him a member of a community which prevails over and holds under control the forces of particular material elements and the lower forms of life, which sought to unloose themselves against him and to destroy him’.
- ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’
Mutual recognition (Erkenntnis) has already occurred among the various kinds of individuals for they know themselves both as individuals and as parts of the whole, they know themselves both as subjects of appetites and objects of desire, but the essence of life remains for them the preservation and protection of the family and the tribal members acknowledge the divisions and their respective roles, they accept them not because they are naturally right but for the sake of the family and at this stage is the point of Anerkenntnis, the acknowledgement of social roles and divisions that constitutes naturally formed self-consciousness. Erkenntnis means cognition the awareness both of objects and the self and it occurs when we recognize things or people categorically, it first appears in chapter two, ‘The Thing and Its Properties’, of the Phenomenology, Anerkenntnis means acknowledgement or acceptance, it involves a practical judgement. It first appears in chapter four, ‘Self-Certainty’, of the Phenomenology, the terms are often mistranslated.
Hence from this perspective the division of labour has already been established and so the independent actions of both sexes occur in reciprocity to each other and the values of social life that was a matter of indifference in the second period are also made explicit and each individual is both a family member and a separate person belonging to a clan but also seeking his or her own vocation and the natural kind of the individual is in this period explicitly determined through custom and mores or what in chapter six of the Phenomenology is called the ‘ethical life’ (Sittlichkeit) but each individual retains the natural drive to be her own self, which is part of her biological membership in Species. The natural members of the tribe become divided according to the distinctions of Family in the third period comprising ethical life, some will be citizens, free men, while others are not, children, slaves, and in many societies women, and only in the social division belonging to Family are there both servants, Knechten, and masters, Herren and Nature does not make this division, it is not a natural distinction in Species, in terms of the genders the males tend towards the social universal, defined by legal rights and freedom and the females tend to identify themselves with blood kinship defined through religious duties and the latter constitute the ethics of natural law so each individual is bound to its division and remains set there until Spirit as a distinct category emerges fully through social praxis and world history and yet the organic cycle is not yet done it still moves on.
It continues anew for the individual who is begotten as the child of the family and we see how it moves and changes its appearance in the Phenomenology in the ‘Spirit’ chapter, section A, ‘True Spirit’, and the phenomenological account of the organic cycle continues and furthers the description of the natural process which the Naturphilosophie omits and Hegel demonstrates how the cycle works for two generations in chapter six. The first generation constitutes the cycle where passion and blood ties oppose each other, Nature does not discriminate between the genders in the blood ties hence in the first generation the pathos of Oedipus in his incestuous relation with his mother Jocasta is presented and Nature also does not discriminate with the passions, the struggle for life can pit son against father, and sexual desire might draw son to mother. It is only in the ethical order, which transcends nature that spiritual understanding and the ethical taboos occur, only here does patricide and incest create the sufficient condition of pathos that will lead to the wife-mother’s death and ultimately to the son-husband’s redemption through suffering.
The second generation will not repeat the same cycle in virtue of the family members having internalized the organic divisions within themselves and at the same time having overcome them, a sister, for instance, Antigone, will not sexually desire her brother, for instance, Polynices, the love of the sister for her brother becomes a pure ethical relationship and the organic divisions are still present of course, in nature incest between brother and sister is not uncommon, brothers will struggle and kill each other, yet implicit in nature is Spirit and what we observe in the second cycle is that while brothers still kill each other it is not nature but honour and duty that motivates them and while sisters love their brothers and their love is reciprocated neither gender desires the other carnally because they identify their organic unity exclusively with ethical obligations and these individuals unlike the troglodytes are genuine spiritual beings.
This second generation shows the pathos of Family, the ‘universal blood’, which is divided by first war and then by the contest between human and divine laws and it is the second generation that has moved beyond the essence of life as a simple organism into the realm of Spirit, that the suffering of the second generation is immediately connected to the sin and guilt of the first is important to demonstrate that the blood tie is sacred and its pollution is carried over to the second generation in order to be resolved by it but notwithstanding the blood tie the second generation acts differently than the first and organism has evolved away from the blood taboos to a fuller ethical recognition of the other as kin to whom one owes obligations even if he or she has committed a crime or even if he is dead and the brave youth for whom the female principle has desire, the oppressed principle of destruction, comes into the daylight and has value, it is now the natural force that appears as the accident of fortune.
‘For the community is a nation, is itself an individuality, and essentially is only such for itself by other individualities being for it, by excluding them from itse1fand knowing itself to be independent of them. The negative side of the community, suppressing the isolation of individuals within it, but spontaneously active in an outward direction, finds its weapons in individuality. War is the Spirit and the form in which the essential moment of the ethical substance, the absolute freedom of the ethical self from every existential form, is present in its actual and authentic existence. While, on the one hand, war makes the individual systems of property and personal independence, as well as the personality of the individual himself, feel the power of the negative, on the other hand, this negativity is prominent in war as that which preserves the whole. The brave youth in whom woman finds her pleasure, the suppressed principle of corruption, now has his day and his worth is openly acknowledged. Now, it is physical strength and what appears as a matter of luck, that decides on the existence of ethical life and spiritual necessity. Because the existence of ethical life rests on strength and luck, the decision is already made that its downfall has come. Just as previously only the Penates succumbed to the national Spirit, so now the living Spirits of the nation succumb through their own individuality and perish in a universal community, whose simple universality is soulless and dead, and is alive only in the single individual, qua single. The ethical shape of Spirit has vanished and another takes its place’.
- ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’
In this development the natural force represented in the male gender is raised into the ethical realm and becomes the force of destiny and Nature reaches beyond Organism even as it remains within it, but in terms of the system of science we could not witness nature’s evolution into Spirit unless the stage was already set in his account of Organism and Species in natural philosophy. In the Naturphilosophie as the first cycle of Organism closes with the family members a second cycle begins that focuses upon ethical individuation and the individual who exists abstractly and sees him or herself separate from nature has her own vocation to follow. The process can be seen to unfolding when for instance, Antigone acknowledges her religious duties and the male such as Polynices, pursues his self-interests in seeking state-power and the shift from the syllogism of the whole to its conclusion becomes the starting point for another syllogistic struggle that will not finish until the account of the sickness and death of the individual.
In System III three terms of a syllogism are presented that are representations of the individual’s conditions of life and the first one represents the unity of the individual and the species and this is the major term of the syllogism and it has its own progression the point of which is to show that the elliptical earth with its process of becoming and decay towards death presents the logical pattern governing all individual lives and in this period the individual’s body becomes the focus of reflection, it shows that the individual as continuity with its natural kind, its race, physiognomic structures, and so on, assimilates both the plant and animal within it and in this first stage the individual is only his or her body, an organized structure of life, sprung from the earth, composed of an array of biological systems, recognized by others from his or her facial, bodily, and bone structures. This creature lives by assimilation, that is to say, by digesting other things, it is a dissolved fluidity of absorbing both organic and inorganic nature and the individual is purely an animal who is recognizing and feeding off his or her world.
The second or minor premise can be explained as how individuals decide on how to represent their own lives in a species and central to this moment is the individual who is biologically and consciously focused upon self-fulfilment (Selbstgefühl), the biological attribute is evident in what drives the individual will have, we all desire food, air, and water for our self-preservation, and we need sex for our biological fulfilment as well, this latter alas not so easy to obtain as food, air and water but maybe that is just me. We are moved according to our biological program governed by the major premise and this is evident in the stages of life that we pass through in order to reach adulthood and the distinction that steps beyond the biological program is that each individual has to define how to achieve self-fulfilment, we have to reason practically and in order to fulfil ourselves we consciously decide to act in a specific manner and the way we act shapes our ethical character, and this natural propensity as the minor term is not self-sustaining however for the drive to fulfil ourselves is only a movement that consumes itself.
The last period which closes the cycle of individuality is the conclusion of this syllogism which allows the individual to realize that he or she is an actual singular being joined with the universal but he or she is self-consciously acting as his or her own maker and here the individual’s identity with the species is that he or she can become his or her own natural kind as he or she finds her completion in-and-for-his or herself and the concept which all along has moved natural life to reach this point is finally self-actualized. The individual has reached the extreme point of universality, he or she is complete to his or herself and in the Phenomenology this extremity is named in the ‘Reason’ chapter, section C, subsection a, die Sache selbst, or the ‘fact of the matter itself’ and it constitutes the facticity of rational self-consciousness where the individual thinks of him or herself as self-made acting independently of all others following only the subjective maxims of prudence but as such he or she is also deceiving him or herself concerning both his or her social and religious connections and obligations and this category includes both the self-fulfilment of animal life as a spiritualized being and the resultant self-deception that the person is complete unto him or herself as a singular entity.
This extremity of the concept is to be understood as a natural condition of Species and constituting a conceit of the emerging World Spirit and humanity in this person may see itself a demigod on earth, the creator of all laws, the lord of the plant and animal world, and each individual can feel this way in his or her own stubbornness and independence. In the Phenomenology this conceited individual when he or she obtains ultimate state power is named ‘Lord of the World’ and acts as a totally self-absorbed ethical egoist who represents him or herself as the spirit of the world and whenever this conceit occurs it consumes itself in mad frenzy or shall suffer defeat and often death by another’s hands. The concept of human conceit and its subsequent frenzy is explicated in the Phenomenology in ‘The Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit’. Hegel first uses ‘Lord of the World’ in reference to the Roman Emperor, Commodus, who was murdered by his guards, the epithet comes from the English historian, Edward Gibbon, ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’, but Gibbon applies the appellation to the Emperor Valentinian and not Commodus, cf, ‘Theodosius…replied…”I am the general of Valentinian, the lord of the world, who has sent me…’. Napoleon is another instance of the ‘Lord of the World’. In a letter to Friedrich Niethammer Hegel points out that he predicted Napoleon’s defeat in chapter six in the section ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’.
Hegel notes in the margins of the Naturphilosophie that the movement leading to facticity begins for a child when the parents die and as the child attains his independence the blood ties and its ethical obligations are sublimated, the transition is repeated in the Phenomenology in ‘True Spirit’ whereby an account is given in which in the second generation of the family the citizen is forged by tearing apart blood kinship and the social self seeks to transcend the natural self and as a practical condition this occurs when the individual as citizen emerges from the family, when self-fulfilment is acknowledged as a right in the ethical world and when subjective freedom to enjoy life is obtained, and all these aspects of subjectivity occur as moments in the condition of ethical life.
The singular species member seeking only individual self-fulfilment does not yet acknowledge a spiritual vocation nonetheless he or she stands at its threshold as a biological and egoistical creation, a substance that is purely subject, but because he or she participates in the universal the individual acts necessarily under the dictates of nature; the human animal exists for its species and the extreme self-centeredness of the individual seeks purpose in the world only through self-satisfaction but the higher demands of ethical life grounded in individual’s relation to its family and tribe appears as a divine law yet not fully understood or accepted by him or her and the Naturphilosophie informs us that the pure egoistical subject is a necessary part of being a species member nonetheless it is not sufficient for the life of a moral subject.
So, the ‘Spiritual Kingdom of the Animals and Deception: the Fact of the Matter Itself’, and the spiritual qualification marks the chief difference in the movement of Spirit from the account in the Naturphilosophie and the Phenomenology shows the overcoming of the mere natural tendencies of an organism. Hegel’s systematic view is that the spiritual dimension overcomes egoistical self-determination tied simply to carnal self-fulfilment and ‘Spirit’ begins in the Phenomenology, ‘Absolute Knowing’ with law-giving reason, yet this is just what is missing from the biologically determined self-seeking individual and pure egoism formed and motivated only through its biological impetus fails to acknowledge the validity of the divine laws and it has not yet sublimated its facticity, and the response to the problem of facticity is law-giving and law-testing reason which concludes chapter five of the Phenomenology.
The root yet not the blossom of ethics as a natural law is explained in the Naturphilosophie, in the last section ‘Organism’ there is an examination of the animal kingdom and the cohesion of its living systems which refers back to the true infinite or divine attribute from which the cycle of the Species has emerged. One feature of it concerns the blood which involves a chemical exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide but it is more than the liquid that fills our veins, it is the root of ethics in natural law, it is
… individual life itself. It has been said that the [digestive] fluids are inorganic because they are secreted and that life belongs uniquely to the fixed parts [e.g., the stomach, gall bladder, and spleen]. However, although such distinctions are inherently senseless, the blood does distinguish life into parts. The blood is not life but the living being, the subject as such, in contrast to Species or the universal. The delicate people of flowers, the Hindi, consumed no animal, and the Jewish lawgivers forbad the consumption of animals’ blood, because the foundation of animal life is blood. It is the universal substance, in which all parts dissolve; it is the essence of all. It is the absolute movement, the natural life of the subject, or its process, which is not moved but is movement’.
- ‘Jena System III’
The association of blood with the basis of subjective life oversteps its biological importance and brings us to its significance for the concept of Spirit. Hegel argues that
‘The heart moves the blood and the movement of the blood again moves the heart; it is a circle, a perpetuum mobile….Precisely because blood is itself the principle of movement, it is the spring point, which is neither inconceivable nor unknown, which if taken in another sense it would indicate something else, namely, a cause that always affects another….It is the subject as well as the will that begins movement. It is to be represented as my moving, precisely because it takes its quantified form alongside my ego — representations of me as an ego — not as a thing…. The self or its form is unity, that is, the universal ground; its movement constitutes the blood’.
- ‘Jena System III’
Blood stands for a specific feature of the biological existence that has a self and will, it stands for the natural self and its ties to others seen more clearly in the Phenomenology in the discussion of the true infinite and its predicates at the end of the inverted world and when of Antigone acting on behalf of her blood relations against the state’s legal authority in ‘Ethical Life’ and in both cases blood indicates the substance of emotional and ethical ties which are never dissolved. Blood is both pure egoism the self-springing will and yet also indicates a necessary relationship to another, it is to be understood that one of the properties of the true infinite which is what has been unfolding in the biological cycle is this blood kinship and upon this basis the system of ethical life expressed as natural law is fashioned and the connection to ethical substance is made.
And so the end of the Naturphilosophie, preparing for the transition to the ‘Philosophy of Spirit’ of 1805–6 and there is a close connection between the development of his natural philosophy and specific sections of the Phenomenology and for the latter to be understood completely the former must be comprehended and Hegel is committed to incorporating into his system natural science that informs us of how the real or earthly condition of humanity develops and from it Spirit arises and no true system of philosophy would be possible without understanding the natural conditions, the concept of philosophy requires us to understand, appreciate, and accept natural investigations, an understanding of Hegel’s commitment to natural philosophy and science is essential to the understanding of his philosophical project, and furthermore the common error that he is merely an idealist who has no appreciation of nature and material causation or worse that he was opposed to scientific constructions can now be corrected. There is an understanding and appreciation of biology, chemistry, and physics, and they are seen as necessarily contributing to systematic philosophy, a treatment coloured both by Schelling’s idea of nature and by the pre-Kantian natural theologies which also influenced his contemporary intellectual community but the point to note is that one cannot understand Hegel’s concept of philosophy without appreciating his commitment to science and the natural conditions from which Spirit arises.
Dedicated to my lovely One, my unique One. Species is the universal natural kind indeed but it is the unique individual of our species that I recognise out of all our kind, you my adorable One, I rejoice in your unique and free creativity, and in how I feel free with you like no one else, I’ll never find another you.
There’s a new world somewhere
They call the promised land
And I’ll be there someday
If you could hold my hand
I still need you there beside me
No matter what I do
For I know I’ll never find another you
There is always someone
For each of us, they say
And you’ll be my someone
Forever and a day
I could search the whole world over
Until my life is through
But I know I’ll never find another you
It’s a long, long journey
So stay by my side
When I walk through the storm
You’ll be my guide, be my guide
If they gave me a fortune
My pleasure would be small
I could lose it all tomorrow
And never mind at all
But if I should lose your love, dear
I don’t know what I’d do
For I know I’ll never find another you
But if I should lose your love, dear
I don’t know what I’d do
For I know I’ll never find another you
Another you, another you
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Coming up next:
Recognition emerges out of nature.
To be continued.
It may stop but it never ends ……
