Chapter 7 - Hegel’s Syllogism of Analogy and Organic Conception of Cosmic Life

Summary

While dismissing what he regards as empty, extrinsic use of analogy in the spurious play of contemporaneous philosophies of nature, Hegel acknowledges the importance of analogy and appreciates its role in many empirical scientific discoveries. In the Logic, Hegel provides a speculative-rational criterion to distinguish between superficial and well-grounded analogies, for both inorganic and organic bodies, using an example of his “syllogism of analogy” drawn from celestial mechanics. Hegel’s point is that, from the standpoint of philosophical science, what empirical science may view only as “parts” of a complex form are essentially mutually related as interdependent moments of one whole. This chapter discusses the role of analogy in Hegel’s Absolute Mechanics, accounting for his view that the structural or constitutive form of the organism already begins to appear in the ‘ideal’ point of unity which governs the movement of free, independent bodies in the solar system, and for his reappraisal of the solar system as manifesting a thoroughgoing unity (Physics). Finally, this chapter argues for the thesis of a sufficient legacy of Kant’s analogical theory of the arrangement of the heavenly bodies in Hegel’s self-sublating finite mechanical account of the starry vault in his Philosophy of Nature.