Chapter 5 - The Non-truth of Mechanism

Summary

Hegel intends to prove two different claims about purposive connections in his Logic: (1) that teleology is the truth of mechanism and (2) that inner purposiveness is the truth of the external reference-to-an-end. I devote this chapter to the analysis of the first of these arguments. To this end, I introduce Hegel’s concept of ‘mechanism’, whose main ingredient is the idea that mechanisms are determined as causes merely from without. This feature disqualifies mechanisms as self-sufficient explainers. I compare Hegel’s understanding of this shortcoming with Hume’s and Kant’s misgivings about the cognition of causal relations. For Hegel, mechanical causes are in themselves apparent and the relations they maintain with other causes are in themselves contingent. It is this essential contingency of the ‘necessary’ that makes Hegel judge mechanical relations to be untrue. Mechanical objects with indeterminate causal powers appear essentially as means and, hence, hypothetically subordinated to self-determining causes.