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Hegel's Philosophy of Nature: Overcoming the Division between Matter and Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Alison Stone
Alison Stone
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , Fall 2000 , pp. 725 - 744
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Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 2000

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References

Notes

1 All references are to English translations of Hegel's works, often amended, without special notice, in line with Hegel: Werke, 20 vols., edited by Moldenhauer, Eva and Michel, Karl Markus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969–72)Google Scholar. I refer to paragraph numbers where applicable, then volume and page numbers; Hegel's remarks are indicated “R,” additions “A.” The following abbreviations are used: EL = Encyclopcedia Logic, translated by Geraets, T. F., Suchting, W. A., and Harris, H. S. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991)Google Scholar; EN = Philosophy of Nature, 3 vols., edited and translated by Petry, M. J. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970)Google Scholar; PSS = Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, 3 vols., edited and translated by Petry, M. J. (Dordrecht: David Reidel, 1978)Google Scholar; and WL = Science of Logic, translated by Miller, A. V. (1969; reprint, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989).Google Scholar

2 A few scholars have attempted to reconstruct Hegel's overall view of natural development, but without recognizing his basic account of nature's progressive unification of thought and matter. See Kalenberg, Thomas, Die Befreiung der Natur: Natur und Selbstbewußtsein in der Philosophie Hegels (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1997)Google Scholar, and Stern, Robert, Hegel, Kant, and the Structure of the Object (London: Routledge, 1989)Google Scholar. Other commentators have studied individual sections of the Philosophy of Nature in detail, but this does not, per se, advance our grasp of Hegel's general theory. See, e.g., Burbidge, John W., Real Process: How Logic and Chemistry Combine in Hegel's Philosophy of Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).Google Scholar

3 For Hegel, “in the procedure of philosophic cognition, the object has not only to be presented in its conceptual determination, the empirical appearance corresponding to this determination also has to be specified” (EN, §246R, Vol. 1, p. 197).

4 Consequently, the prevailing view is that Hegel's theory comprises merely a flexible organizing framework for scientific results. M. J. Petry promoted this view in the Introduction to his edition of the Philosophy of Nature (1970). The same view is adopted in most articles in recent collections: see, e.g., Horstmann, R.-P. and Petry, M. J., eds., Hegels Philosophie der Natur: Beziehungen zwischen empirischer undspekulativer Naturerkenntnis (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1986)Google Scholar; Petry, M. J., ed., Hegel und die Naturwissenschaften (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1987)Google Scholar; and Petry, M. J., ed., Hegel and Newtonianism (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 For a related, though divergent, reading of the Phenomenology, see Forster, Michael N., Hegel and Skepticism (London: Harvard University Press, 1989), part 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Hegel both denies (WL, p. 843) and affirms (WL, p. 834) that logical thought effects a “transition” to nature. This inconsistency reflects his belief, explained below, that nature is a form of logical thought, not a fundamentally distinct entity.

7 For simplicity, I use a terminology slightly different from Hegel's own; what I call “consciousness,” he calls “consciousness as such,” locating it within a wider category of “consciousness” that also includes “self-consciousness” and “reason.”

8 The text of PSS includes lecture notes by Hegel's students Griesheim and Kehler as additions. References to Griesheim's notes are indicated (G).

9 For Hegel, consciousness's “knowing” the external object is equivalent to its thinking of it as external: “In that I posit this being as an other… I am knowing” (PSS, §413A, Vol. 3, p. 5).

10 In consciousness, “I … distinguish the two, myself and … the object” (PSS, §415A [G], Vol. 3, p. 285).

11 I read Hegel's Logic as describing the serial forms assumed by extra-human, objectively existing, thinking activity, following his statement that thought is not merely “a subjective activity, but rather … strictly universal and hence objective at the same time” (EL, §80A, p. 127).

12 Hegel, G. W. F., Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, translated by Knox, T. M. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), Vol. 1, p. 143.Google Scholar

13 This progression is rational, not temporal (Hegel condemns the idea of evolution at EN, §249R, A, Vol. 1, pp. 212–14).

14 Hegel equivocates here. He usually treats life as a mere “transition” between understanding and self-consciousness, not a fully-fledged stage, but at PSS, §423A (G), Vol. 3, pp. 311–13, he instead identifies understanding as merely transitional between perception and life. It is most helpful simply to suppose that consciousness contains four stages.

15 This correspondence is reinforced by Hegel's close association of “sensecertainty” with space and time in the Phenomenology; he criticizes this association in the Philosophy of Spirit, yet, obscurely, retains it (PSS, §418A [G], Vol. 3, pp. 299–303).

16 For a succinct account of Hegel's concept of the “singular” (or “individual”), see Kolb, David, The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger, and After (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 61.Google Scholar

17 “What is sensuous is not to be presented as being in the senses” (PSS, §418A “G”, Vol. 3, p. 299).

18 However, because the conceptions deployed in sensuous consciousness are so minimal, the ego retains particularly extensive non-conceptual access to its content; in this relatively refined sense, sensuous consciousness is “richest in content” because “poorest in thought” (PSS, §418R, Vol. 3, p. 19).

19 Robert B. Pippin locates the same argument in the Phenomenology chapter on “sense-certainty”: the sense-certain subject cannot know objects because, to know objects, one must be able to pick them out (Hegel's Idealism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], p. 119).Google Scholar

20 Hegel identifies naturally existing universals as “forms of the concept” (EL, §24A, Vol. 2, p. 59), or, more precisely, phases in the development of the concept (EN, §246, Vol. 1, p. 197). This equation of universals with forms of the concept can be observed at work throughout the Philosophy of Nature. (See also the extended discussion of universals and the concept at EN, §246A, Vol. l, pp. 197–205.)

21 Hegel describes the material body in questionably anthropomorphic terms, later claiming that it reaches an “acknowledgement” (Bekenntnis) of its inner deficiencies (EN, §262R, Vol. 1, p. 242). He speaks anthropomorphically because, for him, spirit is the most fully developed form of reality; less fully developed forms, such as natural entities, approximate inadequately to spirit, consequently receiving characterization in terms that apply to spirit.

22 “[T]he singularities … are all merely units, many units; they are one” (EN, §262A, Vol. 1, p. 243).

23 Hegel, G. W. F., Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction: Reason in History, translated by Nisbet, H. B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 48CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also EN, §262R, A, Vol. 1, pp. 242–43.

24 EN, §324R, Vol. 2, p. 167, refers to “the concept existing as particular bodies.” That “essential” bodies are forms of the concept is also evidenced in Hegel's later discussion of life (§337A, Vol. 3, pp. 10–11).

25 Kojeve, Alexandre, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, translated by Nichols, James H. Jr., (New York: Basic Books, 1969), p. 146.Google Scholar