Chapter 10 - Hegel’s Theory of Animal Embodiment

Summary

With animal embodiment, the project of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature comes full circle: The opening selection of text on space and time end with twin terms – place and movement – and in animal embodiment we finally get the natural phenomenon that does justice to both. The animal body is the first physical body to have three properly distinguished dimensions, and it is only in virtue of those qualitative, organic dimensions that we can abstract away a three-dimensional Euclidean space in which such bodies are taken to appear and to move. Hegel divides his discussion of the animal into discussions of its formation, assimilation, and species-process, and the chapter adopts that categorization as its structure. As a first pass, it says that form (die Gestalt) gives us the special point 0 for time and the step from the plane to an enclosing surface for space; assimilation gives us the order of time and the step from line to plane for space; and the species process (Gattungsprozeß) gives us the linearity of time and the step from point to line for space. These combinations display the animal body as the spatio-temporal object par excellence, and thus the object by reference to which all spatiality and temporality is understood.