On Hegel’s ‘Science of Logic’ : A Realm of Shadows — part fifty.
‘If you can’t give me poetry, can’t you give me ‘poetical science?’’ wrote Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, (née Byron, 1815–1852), then in her thirties, to her mother Anne Isabella Noel Byron, 11th Baroness Wentworth and Baroness Byron, (née Milbanke, 1792–1860).
Will do.
Well, actually we can have both. Although there has been something of a notable opposition between science and poetry, and science and philosophy.
Sonnet — ‘To Science’
by Edgar Allan Poe, (1809–1849)
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
________
‘And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes — how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multi-coloured universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world. Were I to trace its entire relief with my finger, I should not know any more. And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but that are not sure. A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations’.
- Albert Camus, (1913–1960), ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’
Thankfully there is none of that in Hegel. He presents us with a truly poetical science. Ada would have been smitten I am sure.
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Emil Votoček, Organic Chemist-Composer (1872–1950). ‘Although he was regarded as a learned and respected professor, he was often hot-tempered and irritable. His research laboratory was known as ‘Devil’s Island’, which represents the appearance and the mood in the laboratory. He lectured in both inorganic and organic chemistry and wrote textbooks in both fields. K. Preis and he wrote the inorganic text with Jaroslav Heyrovský. In the organic text he introduced a new classification of organic chemicals dependent upon whether a compound was derived from the original hydrocarbon by substitution on one, two, or more carbon atoms. He also wrote a laboratory manual and a book of exercises in organic chemistry’. — Leopold May, ‘The Lesser Known Chemist-Composers’ Past and Present’, 2008.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831). ‘The Science of Logic’.
Chemism.
This is the shortest chapter of the Logic and so I can get through this with just one article. John Burbidge thinks that this chapter is not only short but obscure, as ‘Hegel did not have time to sort out all the details’. Chemism’s immediate course is simple and is completely determined by presupposition.
‘In objectivity as a whole chemism constitutes the moment of judgment, of the difference that has become objective, and of process. Since it already begins with determinateness and positedness, and the chemical object is at the same time objective totality, the course it follows next is simple and perfectly determined by its presupposition’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Chemism (see previous article) portrays this. There, the Chemical Object strives toward an other object (which is to be viewed as the notional Subject). This other is completely presupposed by the Chemical Object (though, for us, the notional Subject is derived and therefore objective). Hegel admits the name chemism is unfortunate. It is not to be taken as referring only to chemistry. It also governs sex, (I bet I have your interest now), love, friendship and the weather.
‘Regarding the expression ‘chemism’ for the said relation of the non-indifference of objectivity, it may be further remarked that the expression is not to be understood here as though the relation were only to be found in that form of elemental nature that strictly goes by that name. Already the meteorological relation must be regarded as a process whose parts have more the nature of physical than chemical elements. In animate things, the sex relation falls under this schema, and the schema also constitutes the formal basis for the spiritual relations of love, friendship, and the like’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
The steps in Chemism are so many stages by which externality and conditionedness are sublated and from which the Notion emerges as a totality determined in and for itself.
‘But these various processes, which have demonstrated themselves to be necessary, are equally so many stages by which externality and conditionality are sublated, and from which the concept emerges as determined in and for itself, a totality unconditioned by externality. In the first process, what is sublated is the externality of the mutually non-indifferent extremes that constitute the whole reality, or the distinction between the implicitly determinate concept and its existing determinateness. Sublated in the second process is the externality of the real unity, union as merely neutral. Or more precisely, the formal activity sublates itself in bases that are equally formal, neutral determinacies whose inner concept is now the absolute activity that has withdrawn into itself and now realizes itself internally, that is, posits the determinate difference within itself and through this mediation constitutes itself as real unity; this is a mediation which is thus the concept’s own mediation, its self-determination and, considering that in it the concept reflects itself back into itself, an immanent presupposing. The third syllogism, which on the one hand is the restoration of the preceding processes, sublates on the other hand the last remaining moment of indifferent bases: it sublates the whole abstract external immediacy that becomes in this way the concept’s own moment of self-mediation. The concept that has thus sublated as external all the moments of its objective existence, and has posited them in its simple unity, is thereby completely liberated from the objective externality to which it refers only as an unessential reality. This objective free concept is purpose’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Neutral = indifferente.
This consummates in Teleology, the portal to the Idea. Chemism’s path is, first, formal (merely potential) Neutrality, which Hegel identifies with Particularity. Second is Actualized Neutrality, which represents Individuality. The first two steps entail striving and stasis respectively. The final stage of Chemism is the unity of idealized striving and actual stasis — the Universality of the object. At this point, the externality on which the object depended becomes internalized.
The Chemical Object. The Mechanical Object, indifferent to determinateness, was a mere pointing toward some other object as its ground. It was therefore the Mechanical Process. The Chemical Object, however, is determinate. It ‘exhibits the inherent relationality of essence’, as Stephen Houlgate puts it. Law has communicated determinacy to the object. The Chemical Object is therefore Particular, conforming in general to the dialectical position it occupies within the realm of Objectivity.
The Understanding proposes that the Chemical Object determines itself (Law) and its other (external reality). What the Chemical Object must do is to sublate its external existence and become that real whole that according to its Notion it is.
‘The chemical object is distinguished from the mechanical in that the latter is a totality indifferent to determinateness, whereas in the chemical object the determinateness, and hence the reference to other, and the mode and manner of this reference, belong to its nature. — This determinateness is at the same time essentially a particularization, that is, it is taken up into universality; thus it is a principle — a determinateness which is universal, not only the determinateness of the one singular object but also of the other. In the chemical object there is now, therefore, a distinction in its concept, between the inner totality of the two determinacies and the determinateness that constitutes the nature of the singular object in its externality and concrete existence. Since in this way the object is implicitly the whole concept, it has within it the necessity and the impulse to sublate its opposed, one-sided subsistence, and to bring itself in existence to the real whole which it is according to its concept’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
In the chemical process ‘matter tries to negate its spatio-temporal self-externality’, explains J. N. Findlay. The Chemical Object represents a totality that is reflected into itself and out of itself. A chemical object is not comprehensible from itself alone, and the being of one is the being of the other.
‘On closer examination, the chemical object is at first a self-subsistent totality in general, one reflected into itself and therefore distinct from its reflectedness outwards — an indifferent basis, the individual not yet determined as non-indifferent; the person, too, is in the first instance a basis of this kind, one that refers only to itself. But the immanent determinateness that constitutes the object’s non-indifference is, first, reflected into itself in such a manner that this retraction of the reference outwards is only a formal abstract universality; the outwards reference is thus a determination of the object’s immediacy and concrete existence. From this side the object does not return, within it, to individual totality: the negative unity has its two moments of opposition in two particular objects. Accordingly, a chemical object is not comprehensible from itself, and the being of one object is the being of another. — But, second, the determinateness is absolutely reflected into itself and is the concrete moment of the individual concept of the whole which is the universal essence, the real genus of the particular objects. The chemical object, which is thus the contradiction of its immediate positedness and its immanent individual concept, is a striving to sublate the immediate determinateness of its existence and to give concrete existence to the objective totality of the concept. Hence it does still remain a non-self-subsistent object, but in such a way that it is by nature in tension with this lack of self-subsistence and initiates the process as a self-determining’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
It is therefore a striving to sublate the determinateness of its existence and to give concrete existence to the objective totality of the Notion. In psychoanalytic terms, it is desire. Chemism is therefore psychoanalytic. According to Lacanian theory, the human subject desires something that supposedly will complete it (the objet petit a). The objet petit a is some positive thing — a prize, a love object which we must have to complete our sense of self. The objet a, however, simply masks over a void which is constitutive of the hjuman subject.
The Chemical Object
The Chemical Process. The Chemical Object lacks self-subsistence. But it spontaneously tenses itself against this deficiency and initiates the process by its self-determining. It is tensed against itself but is just as much tensed against other Chemical Objects.
‘It begins with the presupposition that the objects in tension, as much as they are tensed against themselves, just as much are they by that very fact at first tensed against each other — a relation which is called their affinity. Each stands through its concept in contradiction to its concrete existence’s own one-sidedness and each consequently strives to sublate it, and in this there is immediately posited the striving to sublate the one-sidedness of the other and, through this reciprocal balancing and combining, to posit a reality conformable to the concept that contains both moments’.
— ‘The Science of Logic’
George Berg, Amateur Chemist-Composer (?1720–1775). ‘His more than 672 experiments in glassmaking were described in his ‘Experiment Book’. He was interested in learning chemistry, as it appears that he had no formal education in chemistry or glassmaking. Other objectives of the experiments were to prepare a clear glass melt, produce coloured glass, some of which would be imitations of natural gemstones, and make glasses for enamelling metals. He was able to make coloured glasses that could be ground and used to colour enameled wares. He made gem-like glasses, either for the carved or moulded ‘cameos and intaglios’ that imitated antique stones or for the more prosaic false stones set into buckles, jewelry, picture frames, or other small metal wares. The Falcon, Salpetre Bank, and Whitefriars glasshouses allowed him to use their muffle or wind furnaces. These furnaces were found in the workshops of goldsmiths, watchmakers, and other artisans who might regularly use enameling colours. He probably used a smaller version, a kiln, for most of his experiments. For some of his products, he calculated the proportional gravity ratio of weight of glass in air to its weight in water for some of his products in 1766. In 1765, Delaval suggested that proportional gravity or specific gravity was related to the colour of glass. Perhaps Berg did not find this helpful as he did not use it after this year’. — Leopold May, ‘The Lesser Known Chemist-Composers’ Past and Present’, 2008.
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Chemical Process
Chemical Objects therefore are in a relation of affinity. In this process each object strives to overcome the one-sidedness of the other object and establish its own reality conformable to its Notion — a reality in which both objects will play a part. Each wishes to posit the middle term which is the true implicit nature of each. Since each object has its being in the other, only external compulsion keeps them apart. But external intervention is needed to assure their transformation — a theoretical element in which the two objects can communicate. Water is the middle term in the material world. Language fulfils this role in the spiritual world. When the two objects communicate in this external theoretical element, they neutralize each other. Although Hegel is not clear on the matter, this reference to water or language as that on which the striving objects depend could stand for a reference to the overarching subjectivity within which objectivity plays out. It could be viewed as the ultimate outside ellipse in Abstract Neutrality.
In Abstract Neutrality, the relationship of the objects is mere communication — a quiescent coming-together.
‘The relation of the objects, as mere communication in this element, is on the one hand a tranquil coming-together, but on the other it is equally a negative relating, for in communication the concrete concept which is their nature is posited in reality, and the real differences of the object are thereby reduced to its unity. Their prior self-subsistent determinateness is thus sublated in the union that conforms to the concept, which is one and the same in both; their opposition and tension are thereby blunted, with the result that in this reciprocal complementation the striving attains its tranquil neutrality’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Abstract Neutrality
In communication, the real differences of objects are reduced to unity. Opposition and tension weaken. The chemical process is extinguished. The contradiction between the Notion and reality is resolved. The extremes of the syllogism have lost their opposition and have ceased to be extremes. The Understanding now proposes that the true nature of the Chemical Object is Neutral Product. In the Neutral Product, the ingredients can no longer be called objects, because they have lost their tension. It is an externally applied differentiation that rekindles it; conditioned by an immediate presupposition, it exhausts itself in it.
‘Chemism is itself the first negation of the indifferent objectivity and of the externality of determinateness; it is still burdened, therefore, by the immediate self-subsistence of the object and with externality. Consequently it is not yet for itself that totality of self-determination that proceeds from it and in which it is rather sublated. — The three syllogisms that have resulted constitute its totality. The first has formal neutrality for its middle term and for extremes the objects in tension. The second has for its middle term the product of the first, real neutrality; and for extremes the disrupting activity and its product, the indifferent element. But the third is the self-realizing concept that posits for itself the presupposition by virtue of which the process of its realization is conditioned — a syllogism that has the universal for its essence. Yet, on account of the immediacy and externality by which the chemical objectivity is still determined, these three syllogisms fall apart. The first process whose product is the neutrality of the tensed objects is extinguished in this product and is re-activated only by a differentiation that comes to it from outside; conditioned by an immediate presupposition, the process is exhausted in it. — The excretion out of the neutral product of the non-indifferent extremes, as also their decomposition into their abstract elements, must likewise proceed from conditions and stimulations of activity brought in from the outside. But the two essential moments of the process, neutralization on the one hand and dissolution and reduction on the other, since they too are bound together in one and the same process and the union blunting the tension of the extremes is also a separation into these, constitute on account of the still underlying externality two diverse sides; the extremes that are separated in that same process are other than the objects or matters uniting in it; in so far as the former proceed from it again as non-indifferent, they must turn outwards; their renewed neutralization is a process other than the one that took place in the first’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Dialectical Reason protests that the Neutral Product presupposes pre-neutral Chemical Objects which it has neutralized. It recollects that Neutrality is grounded in the history of desire. The capability of the former objects for tension and self-subsistence is therefore preserved. Neutral Product is therefore revealed to be mere formal unity. Speculative Reason reconciles these two positions. In the Neutral Product, tension is extinguished.
Neutral Product
Lejaren Arthur Hiller Jr. (1924–1994). He was originally trained as a chemist, and worked as a research chemist for DuPont in Waynesoro, Virginia, (1947–52). He developed the first reliable process for dyeing Orlon and co-authored a popular textbook. He wrote an article on the Illiac (a digital computer) Suite for Scientific American, 1959, which garnered a lot of attention from the press, generating a storm of controversy. (It proposed that information theory makes possible the programming of a computer to compose music and the process by which the machine does so throws light on musical structure and on the methods of human composers). The musical establishment was so hostile to this interloper scientist that both Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians and the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians’ refused to include him until shortly before his death. Here is a passage from his article: ‘… meaning is as difficult to define in music as it is in every other kind of communication. But musical sounds are not, as words are, primarily symbols . of something else; the meaning of music is peculiarly dependent upon its own structures as such. The study of musical structures by information theory should open the way to a deeper understanding of the aesthetic basis of composition. We may be able to respond to Stravinsky’s injunction and cease ‘tormenting [the composer] with the why instead of seeking for itself the how and thus establish the reasons for his failure or success’. From the analytical standpoint, the aesthetic content of music can be treated in terms of fluctuations between the two extremes of total randomness and total redundancy’. (Striving attaining tranquil neutrality?)
However, the unity between Neutral Products and their ingredients is essential to the Notion. The two must exist together in a concrete way. Tension is still present, though its place is outside the neutral object. In Neutrality and Tension (End), the process of neutralization does not spontaneously rekindle itself. The existence of striving objects is only presupposed, not posited. They are a present memory, but not a presence. Tension exists in an ideal way, alongside the Neutral Product. This ideality implies that the Neutral Product is indeed divisible into the tensed parts that had existed prior to mutual neutralization. The neutral body is therefore capable of disintegration as is explained elsewhere.
‘As the reflective relationship of objectivity, chemism still has as its presupposition, not just the differentiated nature of the objects, but also their immediate independence. The process is the going back and forth, from one form to the other, while these forms still remain external to each other. -In the neutral product, the determinate properties which the extremes had vis-a.-vis each other are sublated. It is in conformity with the Concept, to be sure, but the inspiriting principle of differentiation does not exist in it, because it has sunk back into immediacy. Hence, the neutral product is something-separable. But both the judging [or dividing] principle which sunders the neutral into the differentiated extremes and gives the undifferentiated object generally its difference and inspiration vis-a-vis an other-and the process as a separation with tension, fall outside that first process… Addition. The chemical process is still a finite, conditioned one. The Concept as such is still just the inward aspect of this process, and it does not yet come into existence here in its being-for-itself. In the neutral product the process is extinct, and what stimulated it falls outside of it’.
- ‘The Encyclopaedia Logic’
The middle term that mediates Neutrality and Tension, Hegel says, is a Disjunctive Syllogism. Disjunctive Syllogism, it will be recalled, was Syllogism’s finale. In it, the middle term was just as much located in the extremes as in the middle. The Understanding concluded that Disjunctive Syllogism was the Mechanical Object. Disjunctive Syllogism is ‘a comprehensive operation [that] mediates by both distinguishing a concept into disjuncts and recognizing that they exhaust its full description’, explains Burbidge.
Preservation of Tension
By calling the new object a Disjunctive Syllogism, Hegel implies that the object is both unified and disrupted. It is disrupted in the sense that moments can still be identified. But the Chemical Objects no longer strive to sublate themselves in neutrality. Rather, the parts are indifferent to each other and sustain themselves in unity. An abstract indifferent base exists on one side, against which the energizing principle stands.
‘The more precise immediate connection of the extreme of negative unity with the object is in that the latter is determined by it and is thereby disrupted. This disruption may at first be regarded as the restoration of the opposition of the objects in tension with which chemism began. But this determination does not constitute the other extreme of the syllogism but belongs to the immediate connection of the differentiating principle with the middle in which this principle gives itself its immediate reality; it is the determinateness which the middle term, besides at the same time being the universal nature of the subject matter, possesses in the disjunctive syllogism, whereby that object is both objective universality and determinate particularity. The other extreme of the syllogism stands opposed to the external self-subsistent extreme of singularity; it is, therefore, the equally self-subsisting extreme of universality; hence the disruption that the real neutrality of the middle term undergoes in it is that it breaks up into moments that are not non-indifferent but, on the contrary, neutral. Accordingly these moments are, on the one side, the abstract and indifferent base, and, on the other, this base’s activating principle which, separated from it, equally attains the form of indifferent objectivity’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
The energizing principle thus attains the form of indifferent objectivity. According to Burbidge, Chemism has three processes: differentiated objects are combined into a neutral product by way of a neutral medium; a negative activity breaks apart a neutral product into its elements; elements are distributed among objects, thereby differentiating them’. The Chemical Object is now exhibited as a negative unity with discernible extremes d, e, f and as a real unity g. To the extent parts of the whole are discernible, they are liberated from chemical tension.
‘These elemental objects are therefore liberated from chemical tension; in them, the original basis of that presupposition with which chemism began has been posited through the real process. Now further, their inner determinateness is as such essentially the contradiction of their simple indifferent subsistence and themselves as determinateness, and is the outward impulse that disrupts itself and posits tension in its determined object and in an other, in order that the object may have something to which it can relate as non-indifferent, with which it can neutralize itself and give to its simple determinateness an existent reality. Consequently, on the one hand chemism has gone back to its beginning in which objects in a state of reciprocal tension seek one another and then combine in a neutral product by means of a formal and external middle term; and, on the other hand, by thus going back to its concept, chemism sublates itself and has gone over into a higher sphere’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
This result counts as the positing of the presupposition with which Chemism began. It will be recalled that the Chemical Object was the pure striving to join with its other. That there was an other was merely presupposed. Now the other has been discovered and acknowledged.
Neutrality and Tension (End)
Transition of Chemism. Even ordinary chemistry shows examples of chemical alterations in which a body imparts a higher oxidation to one part of its mass and thereby: reduces another part to a lower degree of oxidation, in which lower degree alone it can enter into a neutral combination with another different body brought into contact with it, a combination for which it would not have been receptive in that first immediate degree.
‘Even ordinary chemistry shows examples of chemical alterations in which a body, for example, imparts a higher oxidation to one part of its mass and thereby reduces another part to a lower degree of the same, at which degree alone it can enter into a neutral combination with another differing body brought into contact with it, a combination to which it would not have been receptive at that other first immediate degree. What happens here is that the object does not connect with another in accordance with an immediate, one-sided determinateness, but, in accordance with the inner totality of an original relation, posits the presupposition which it needs for a real connection and thereby gives itself a middle term by virtue of which it unites its concept with its reality in conclusion; it is a singularity determined in and for itself, the concrete concept as the principle of the disjunction into extremes whose re-union is the activity of that same negative principle that thereby returns to its first determination, but returns to it objectified’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
This describes what chemists call disproportionation. An example: 2HC10(2) ► HCIO + CIO (3). ‘Here we do not have one object immediately directed towards another, but intermediate steps are taken with an eye to the whole picture. The totality of the initial ratio (or concept) generates the conditions it needs to establish a real connection with something else, thereby bringing its ‘concept’ to reality’, explains Burbidge. Another example postdating Hegel’s time involves dielectrism. According to G. R. G. Mure, the consequent change in electrical charge at the point from which or towards which the shift has occurred serves to initiate chemical reaction with another molecule, and so to produce a fresh compound’.
Chemism in a sense has returned to its beginning. Striving exists, and neutrality results. But striving survives. ‘Here we are concerned primarily with the logical relation between simply self-identity and identity in and through difference as the categories of Essence are aufgehoben, and exemplified in mechanism and chemism respectively’ says Errol E. Harris. Charles Taylor remarks that the Chemism chapter is ‘pretty heavily indebted to chemical speculations of the time as they were taken up in contemporary philosophies of nature. Hence this chapter is both hard to follow, and unconvincing.’. Yet what it establishes is what should be very familiar — the unity of stasis and striving, or, to say the same thing, the unity of identity and difference.
Chemism by this return into its Notion sublates itself and has passed over into a higher sphere. Teleology (or End) represents the realm in which stasis and striving coexist side by side. Indeed, the whole point of the Logic was to provide for the coexistence of stability and striving.
Chemism is generally dialectical — the first negation of indifferent objectivity and of the externality of determinateness.
‘Chemism is itself the first negation of the indifferent objectivity and of the externality of determinateness; it is still burdened, therefore, by the immediate self-subsistence of the object and with externality. Consequently it is not yet for itself that totality of self-determination that proceeds from it and in which it is rather sublated. — The three syllogisms that have resulted constitute its totality. The first has formal neutrality for its middle term and for extremes the objects in tension. The second has for its middle term the product of the first, real neutrality; and for extremes the disrupting activity and its product, the indifferent element. But the third is the self-realizing concept that posits for itself the presupposition by virtue of which the process of its realization is conditioned — a syllogism that has the universal for its essence. Yet, on account of the immediacy and externality by which the chemical objectivity is still determined, these three syllogisms fall apart. The first process whose product is the neutrality of the tensed objects is extinguished in this product and is re-activated only by a differentiation that comes to it from outside; conditioned by an immediate presupposition, the process is exhausted in it. — The excretion out of the neutral product of the non-indifferent extremes, as also their decomposition into their abstract elements, must likewise proceed from conditions and stimulations of activity brought in from the outside. But the two essential moments of the process, neutralization on the one hand and dissolution and reduction on the other, since they too are bound together in one and the same process and the union blunting the tension of the extremes is also a separation into these, constitute on account of the still underlying externality two diverse sides; the extremes that are separated in that same process are other than the objects or matters uniting in it; in so far as the former proceed from it again as non-indifferent, they must turn outwards; their renewed neutralization is a process other than the one that took place in the first’.
-’The Science of Logic’
Dialectical Reason always manifests the same fault it attributes to the Understanding — a reliance on immediacy. Accordingly, Chemism is still infected with the immediate self-subsistence of the object and with externality. But now externality has been overcome; there is a merger of subject and object, which is the End (or purpose) of all the Logic. End is pre-Idea, which still suffers from a division — but strictly an internal division. The externality of the object has been sublated.
Sir Edward William Elgar, Amateur Chemist-Composer, (1857–1934). His interest in science, prompted by new technology of the gramophone, led him to be the first major composer to record one of his own works in 1914. He conducted his composition, Carissima, in his first recording at the Gramophone Company on the ‘His Master’s Voice’ label, generally referred to as HMV. The company’s London studios were located on an upper floor to minimize the effect of traffic noise and vibrations. The music was played with only a few instruments that could be clustered close enough to the recording horn…. One of his other interests was chemistry. At his Hereford house, Plas Gwyn, he set up a small laboratory in the basement. His manuscript of the Prelude to The Kingdom, dating from January 1906, bears the stains of his chemistry experiments. In August, 1908 he moved his laboratory to part of an outhouse. It was called The Ark because of the nesting of doves in the shed, and it had a telephone link to the house. … Hydrogen sulfide (H2S), known from alchemical times and variously named sulphur water or ‘Holy Water’, stinking sulphurous air, hepatic air, and — by Lavoisier — as ‘unknown combination’, became recognized as an important reagent for inorganic qualitative analysis. Elgar was one, although an amateur chemist, who produced a device to generate this important reagent, which he knew as sulphuretted hydrogen’. — Leopold May, ‘The Lesser Known Chemist-Composers’ Past and Present’, 2008.
Some further thoughts on Chemism.
Chemismus, from Chemie (chemistry) and ultimately from the Arabic al-kimiya, alchemy, means, analogously to Mechanismus, (see previous article), (a) the arrangement and interaction of things on chemical principles, and (b) the doctrine that the world as a whole operates on chemical principles. Hegel uses it in sense (a) only. An object in a mechanistic system might in principle exist, he believes, even if it were detached from the system and thus unrelated to other objects. But chemical substances or stuffs are intrinsically related by their opposition to and affinity for each other. An acid essentially stands in contrast to a base or alkali, and could not exist in isolation. When an acid and a base combine, they neutralize each other to form a salt, losing the properties each previously had. The compound can be broken up again by a process external to it. Hegel was especially interested in the phenomenon of elective affinity (Wahlverwandtschaft), (see my article Interlude: Alexander Scriabin and the Philosophy of Desire), which he considers earlier in Logic under the heading of ‘Measure’ and also in the Encyclopaedia:
‘These neutral bodies, entering again into mutual relation, form the chemical process in its complete reality, for it is real bodies such as this which constitute the sides of this process. Water is the abstract medium of neutrality, and these bodies need it in order to be mediated. As both sides are neutral on their own account however, they are not mutually differentiated. It is here that the particularization of universal neutrality occurs, together with the particularization of the differentials of bodies which are activated into mutual chemical opposition. This has been called elective affinity, and is in fact the formation of further particular neutralities through the break-up of those already present. The most important advance towards a simplification of the details of elective affinity, is the law discovered by Richter and Guyton Morveau, which states that neutral compounds undergo no alteration in regard to their state of saturation when they are mixed in solution and between the acids there is a mutual exchange of bases. It is on the basis of this law that the particular relationships between acids and alkalies have been graded according to the specific quantity of each alkali needed to saturate each acid. If one takes a certain acid, and grades the alkalies according to the quantities in which they have to be applied in order to saturate it, the grading will be the same for every other acid. The only factor which changes is the quantitative unit of the acids combining with this constant series of alkalies. The acids also have a constant grading relative to the various alkalies. Elective affinity itself is moreover merely an abstract relation of acid to base. The chemical body in general, and especially the neutral body, is at once a concrete physical body with a definite specific gravity, cohesion, temperature etc. The strictly physical properties, and the changes which they undergo in the process enter into relationship with the chemical moments of this process, and so modify its action by impeding, hindering, or facilitating it. Berthollet, while fully recognizing this grading of affinity has, in his well-known’ Statique Chimique’, brought together and investigated the circumstances which produce an alteration in the results which have often been attributed exclusively to the one-sided condition of elective affinity. He writes, ‘The superficiality which has been introduced into science by these explanations, has in general been regarded as a progress’.’
- ‘Philosophy of Nature’
The elements in a compound have an affinity that binds them together. But the affinity of elements for each other varies in strength. Thus if a compound consisting of x and y encounters a substance z, the affinity of x and z may be stronger than the affinity of x and y. Then the original compound will break up, forming a new compound of x and z, and leaving y free. In his novel ‘Elective Affinities’ Goethe applied this idea to human relations: each of two lovers prove to have a stronger affinity for another person than for each other. For Hegel, like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, (1749–1832), chemism is exemplified not only in the relations of chemical substances, but also in the sexual relations of living creatures and in human love and friendship. And, as it happens, though Poe and Camus will not like this, love may indeed literally be chemistry. Let’s get chemical.
One might expect Hegel to proceed in the Logic from chemism to internal teleology, just as in the Encyclopaedia chemistry is followed by organic life.
‘This division of the universal and self-external organism, and this merely punctiform transitory subjectivity, raises itself by virtue of the implicit identity of its Notion, to the existence of this identity, which is the vitalized organism, the subjectivity which constructs its members within itself. This subjectivity excludes from itself the purely implicit organism of physical nature in its universal and individual forms, and confronts it. But at the same time, it has these powers as the condition of its existence, and the stimulus as the material of its process. Addition. The deficiency in this display of organic being, and in immediate organic being in general, consists in the Notion’s still being immediate. Here the Notion is merely internal fulfillment within the element of indifference, but its moments are physical realities which are not intro-reflected, and which do not form a unity in the face of this indifference. As the universal fulfilment pervades these moments however, it returns into self; their indifference is the one-sided moment which draws itself together into negativity as an individual. Substance divides itself into absolute opposites, not only into differences. Each of these is a totality, for it is intro-reflected, indifferent to the other, and essentially a unit. This unity is not only essential however, for the reality of these opposites is itself this oneness or negativity i.e. their existence in itself constitutes the process’.
- ‘Philosophy of Nature’
But as we will see what he describes is rather external teleology, primarily the human agent intervening in mechanical and chemical systems to realize his purpose.
‘Purpose is the Concept that has entered into free existence, and is-for-itself, by means of the negation of immediate objectivity. It is determined as subjective, because this negation is initially abstract, and so at first it merely stands opposed to objectivity. But this determinacy of its subjectivity is one-sided vis-a-vis the totality of the Concept; and this one-sidedness holds for the purpose itself, since all determinacy has posited itself in it as sublated. So, for the purpose too, the presupposed object is only an ideal reality, one that is null and void in-itself. As this contradiction between its identity with itself and the negation and antithesis that is posited in it, the purpose itself is the sublation, the activity which negates the antithesis in such a way that the purpose posits it as identical with itself. This is the realising of the purpose, in which the purpose has sublated the distinction between the two, i. e., subjectivity and objectivity, since it makes itself into the other of its subjectivity and objectifies itself. It has concluded itself with itself alone and has preserved itself’.
- ‘The Encyclopaedia Logic’
[He goes on to say: ‘On the one hand, the concept of purpose is called redundant; but, on the other hand, it is quite rightly called a concept-of-reason-and it has been set up in contrast to the abstract universal of the understanding which relates itself to the particular only by subsuming this particular which it does not have in itself.-’. cf the quote from Hiller above: ‘From the analytical standpoint, the aesthetic content of music can be treated in terms of fluctuations between the two extremes of total randomness and total redundancy’].
The reasons are these: (a) The simpler form of teleology needs to precede the more complex internal teleology. (b) The logical development follows a pattern: in mechanism and chemism the concept is wholly internal (and thus wholly external) to the objects; in external teleology (but not internal teleology) a gap opens up between the concept (i.e. the purpose) and the object; the closure of this gap by the realization of the purpose leads on to the Idea, in which the immanence of the concept in the object is first exemplified by Life, with its internal teleology. In the Logic, Hegel argues that mechanism, chemism and teleology are all applicable in their appropriate realms. But they are not simply gleich gültig (equally valid, with a pun on gleichgültig, indifferent): teleology is the truth of mechanism and chemism. Teleology presupposes a mechanically and chemically ordered environment, but in a higher sense mechanism and chemism presuppose teleology: since teleological systems are self-determining and self-explanatory in a way that mechanical and chemical systems are not, the universe must culminate in teleological systems (minds) and must itself form an overarching teleological system in which mechanism and chemism play a necessary, but subordinate part.
Alexander Porfiryevich Borodin (1833–1887). A doctor and chemist by profession and training, Borodin made important early contributions to organic chemistry and he regarded medicine and science as his primary occupations, only practising music and composition in his spare time or when he was ill. As a chemist, Borodin is known best for his work concerning organic synthesis, including being among the first chemists to demonstrate nucleophilic sustitution as well as being the co-discoverer of the aldol reaction. Borodin was a promoter of education in Russia and founded the School of Medicine for Women in Saint Petersburg where he taught until 1885.
Dedicated to my lovely One, to whom I am so attracted, with whom I am forever reacting, through whom my outpourings have their source, and if you have the chemistry that must needs lead on to biology. Science, don’t we just love it?
If you love me
You will give your heart
Why should we be apart?
If you love me
If you love me
Baby, you will know the truth
I wasn’t born to lose
And I love you
Affinity and communication
That makes reality
Understanding is the first thing
It means so much to me
If I love you
I will find the key
If it’s meant to be
’Cause, ’cause I love you, alright
Oh, affinity and communication
That makes, that makes, that makes reality
Understanding is the first thing
It means so very much to me
If I love you, baby
I will find the key
And if it’s meant to be, yes it is
And I love you, yes I do
And I love you, baby
I understand you
Coming up next:
Teleology.
To be continued …..
