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Two translations into English of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature have appeared in the same year a century after the other parts of the Encyclopaedia—the Logic and the Philosophy of Mind—had been translated. The Victorian translator passed by the Philosophy of Nature, unconscious that to omit the middle part of a systematic work must certainly conceal the sense of the whole. He finds it a sufficient explanation that “for nearly half a century the study of nature has passed almost completely out of the hands of the philosophers into the care of the specialists of science.” Revived for a few years by Schelling and then Hegel, Philosophy of Nature only recalled “a time of hasty enthusiasms and over-grasping ambition of thought which, in its eagerness to understand the mystery of the universe, jumped to conclusions on insufficient grounds, trusted to bold but fantastic analogies, and lavished an unwise contempt on the plodding industry of the mere hodman of facts and experiments.” This modest retreat of philosophy before the specialists is not thought to need explanation, even though it was not only from the seeming extravagance of Schelling and Hegel but from the general preoccupation of philosophers since Bacon and Descartes with natural philosophy.
- Type
- Critical Notices/Études critiques
- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , September 1972 , pp. 379 - 399
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1972
References
3 The Logic of Hegel, translated from The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences by Wallace, William, Oxford. 1873Google Scholar. Of this a second edition appeared in 1892 and Wallace's translation of the Philosophy of Mind in 1894. The quotation is from Wallace's preface to the Logic, p. xi.
4 Wallace, , Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy, Oxford. 1894. Pp. 81–87Google Scholar. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 439. foil., outlines the sense in which he thinks a Philosophy of Nature would be possible. In this he is far closer to a Kantian view than to Hegel; e.g. the “question of the operation of Ends in Nature is one which, in my judgment, metaphysics should leave untouched”; “Such a philosophy of Nature… would… abstain wholly and in every form from speculation on genesis.”
5 Hegel and the Sciences. A conference sponsored by the Hegel Society of America and the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science. Boston University, Dec. 4–6, 1970. The proceedings of the Conference, not yet published, include papers on the connections of formal and dialectical logic; some from the side of the history of science and philosophy of science. The only paper that could be said to be about the interpretation of the Philosophy of Nature from an Hegelian standpoint was J.N. Findlay, The Hegelian Treatment of Biology and Life.
6 See Section IV below.
7 P. viii.
8 Petry, Vol. 1, p. 88.
9 Petry, Vol. 1, p. 18; generally pp. 21–40.
10 Philosophy of Nature (tr. Miller), p.l.
11 Whereas Findlay (see part IV below) has a definite view of the Hegelian philosophy, it is impossible with Petry to sort out two quite different positions: (1) Hegel's method in natural philosophy is a purely formal scheme, which can be regarded as not different in any fundamental way from the formalism of Schelling which is his principal object of attack in the Philosophy of Nature; (2) his method is fundamentally the same as Newton's—that of the mechanistic science of the modern period—with, in both cases, a theologically inspired teleology lurking behind the phenomena. The former position is, to Hegel's mind, a falling below the Cartesian philosophy and the beginnings of modern science to a kind of scholasticism no longer acceptable to a more enlightened age. The latter is not merely formal. Quoted is Geschichte der Philosophic, pt. 2, p. 178. Berlin 1844. On the interpretation of logic and experience in the science of the modern period Phanomenologie des Geistes, p. 175 foll. ed. Hoffmeister. Hamburg. 1952.
12 Vol. 1, p. 83.
13 Vol. 1, p. 363; Vol. III, pp. 228–9.
14 Vol. III, pp. 299–300.
15 Petry, Vol. 1, p. 344. Hegel, tr. Miller, pp. 66–67. Hegel regarded Kepler's laws as a physical explanation of gravitation and as adequate to the phenomena “in the main characteristics” but for perturbation, in which he sees “the really material addition made by Newton to Kepler's laws”. This principle is important because “it rests on the proposition that attraction, so-called, is an effect of all the individual parts of bodies as material”. This taken into account, it becomes possible to see in planetary motion primarily the ‘notion’ in its mechanical or immediate objective form. What seems of the highest importance to Hegel is “that the proof of Reason in regard to the quantitative determinations of free (viz. celestial) motion can only be based on space and time as determinations of the Notion, i.e. on moments whose relation (but not an external one) is motion”. It would follow from this that, e.g. light or nature as electromagnetic should not have place in the explanation of gravitation. Miller's tr. p. 68 on the above.
16 Petry, Vol. 1, p. 142.
17 Foreword, p. viii.
18 Petry, Vol. 2, p. 17. The German reads: “Als das abstrakte Selbst der Materie ist das Licht das Absolut-leichte, und als Materie ist es unendliches Aussersichsein, aber als reines Manifestieren, materielle Idealität untrennbares und einfaches Aussersichsein.”
19 The German: “Die Allgemeinheit, nach welcher das Tier als einzelnes eine endliche Existenz ist, zeigt sich an ihm als die abstrakte Macht in dem Ausgang des selbst abstrakten, innerhalb seiner vorgehenden Prozesses (356). Seine Unangemessenheit zur Allgemeinheit ist seine ursprüngliche Krankheit und (der) angeborne Keim des Todes. Das Aufheben dieser Unangemessenheit ist selbst das Vollstrecken dieses Schicksals. Das Individuum hebt sie auf, indem es der Allgemeinheit seine Einzelnheit einbildet, aber hiermit, insofern sie abstrakt und unmittelbar ist, nur eine abstrakte Objectivität erreicht, worin seine Tätigkeit sich abgestumpft (hat), verknöchert und das Leben zur prozesslosen Gewohnheit geworden ist, so dass es sich so aus sich selbst tötet.” Text of Nicolin and Pöggeler, Hamburg. 1959.
20 Apart from an earlier general work on Hegel, Findlay's views may be found in The Discipline of the Cave (1966), The Transcendence of the Cave (1967), Ascent to the Absolute (1970); all Allen and Unwin, London. Available to the writer were also not yet published papers on Hegel's Physics and Organics given at Milwaukee and at Boston in 1970. Quoted words from Ascent to the Absolute, p. 47, and Foreword to Miller's translation, p. ix.
21 Foreword, p. xxiv.
22 Quotations from Ascent, p. 137, pp. 261–2. Hegel on the Sceptics in Geschichte der Philosophie, pt. 1, pp. 473–517. Berlin. 1840. Neoplatonism as the positive result of Scepticism, Ibid. pp. 516–7.
23 Discipline of the Cave, pp. 80–81; Ascent, p. 145.
24 Michelet's view of the Hegelian philosophy and his account of the dispute mentioned may be found in his Geschichte der letzten System der Philosophie in Deutschland von Kant bis Hegel, Vol. II. pp. 601–801. Berlin, 1838 (reprinted Hildesheim, 1967)Google Scholar.
25 In proposing to transform the Hegelian philosophy into revolutionary praxis Marx in fact gives it a one-sided subjective character. Nature is simply life or the reality of self-consciousness: e.g. “die Gesellschaft ist die vollendete Wesenseinheit des Menschen mit der Natur, die wahre Resurrektion der Natur, der durchgeführte Naturalismus des Menschen und der durchgeführte Humanismus der Natur”. [Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte; Marx, , Werke, Darmstadt, 1962, Vol. 1, p. 596Google Scholar.] This unity is for self-consciousness not as idea but in ‘praxis’ or the process of realizing it. This scheme differs from the Stoic (as interpreted by Hegel) only in that the economic realm is not turned over to a servile class but, thanks to subsequent economic development, workers can also be freed. There remains, however, in Marx's communism exactly the difficulty Hegel pointed to in the Hellenistic philosophies, viz. that between the rational and the natural in man the connection is external and invincibly contingent—the charge which the Sceptics brought against the dogmatic sects. Marx recognizes that this is the case: “Der Unterschied zwischen persönlichem Individuum und zufälligem Individuum ist keine Begriffs Unterscheidung, sondern ein historisches Faktum”, Deutsche Ideologie, Werke, ed. cit., Vol. 2, p. 82. Epicurus and liberalism: “Bei Epikur ist… die Atomistik… als die Naturwissenschaft des Selbstbewusstseins, das sich unter der Form der abstrakten Einzelheit absolutes Prinzip ist, bis zur höchsten Konsequenz (viz. its explicit opposition to the universal)… vollendet”, Dissertation, ed. cit. Vol. 1, p. 69.
26 Ascent, pp. 115–7.
27 For the difference between the Neoplatonic and the Cartesian or modern standpoint, as Hegel saw it, Geschichte der Philosophic, part 3, introduction. On the tendency of Neoplatonic thought to break down the limited world of the ancients, e.g. the controversy between John Philoponus and Simplicius on the difference between celestial and terrestrial matter; on which Sambursky, , The Physical World of Late Antiquity, London, 1962Google Scholar. Ch. VI.
28 For the Neoplatonic method, Geschichte der Philosophie, part 3, p. 47 foll. (Berlin, 1840); and for its limits, ibid. pp. 57–60. On its relation to the Sceptics one may compare Sextus Empiricus, Contra Mathematicos, 310–12. (ed. Fabricius, Leipsig. 1840, pp. 358–9), to which Hegel refers (o.c. p. 513), with Plotinus, Enneads, V, 5, 2.
29 Hegel, o.c, part 3, p. 242. What was needed, he says, was not the further refinement of medieval logic but rather to discard the most of it, and to let the sciences go naively their own way. The old difficulties intrinsic to the finite or sceptical (= inquiring, suchende) sciences remained, but, as solved in principle in the presupposition of Cartesian science (viz. the substance in which thought and extension are one) they did not as before paralyse interest in empirical inquiry for itself.
30 e.g. Encyklopädie, section II.
31 “Now although the empirical treatment of Nature has this category of universality in common with the Philosophy of Nature, the empiricists are sometimes uncertain whether this universal is subjective or objective; one can often hear it said that these classes and orders are only made as aids to cognition. …when, however, the universal is characterized as law, force, matter, then we cannot allow that it counts only as an external form and subjective addition”, and the following, Philosophy of Nature, tr. Miller, p. 10. T he scientists must waver between one attitude and the other. If they try to resolve the conflict by excluding metaphysics, all the difficulties of pre-Cartesian science recur. If they hold instead to the rational side, their idea of nature becomes a dead abstraction. It is best for the scientist if he has an intuition of t he concrete unity to guide his theory, and stay with that. For to go farther logically a very different grasp of his method would be necessary.
32 Philosophy of Nature, tr. Miller, pp. 10–11.
33 The briefest comment on this difficult question would be that (a) the apparent evolution of species is easily accommodated within the Hegelian Philosophy of Nature; (b) to reduce it to a temporal progression from simpler to more complex is the influence of an abstract logic that takes from nature the sheer contingency and inexplicable variety of its forms; (c) the result, humanly considered, of this abstract consideration of nature is an abstract self-consciousness that cannot in the manner of the Greeks humanize or raise to logical simplicity its natural content.
34 “My aversion from theism, even when qualified as ‘panentheism’ is… constitutional”. Ascent, p. 91. “Hegel certainly tried hard… to mislead his readers into believing that he held something like Christian theism, a doctrine that is not through and through teleological, that explains things by their origin rather than by their ultimate goal”, o.c. pp. 141–2. Findlay is quite right as opposing “late nineteenth century Anglo-Saxon idealists with their belief in a single, seamless ‘Reality’, the subject of all judgments, all of whose nuances were ‘internally related’” who “sought absolute unity where it is not truly to be found, in the phenomena of this dirempted, alienated sphere”; whose “absolute reality… assumed the painful form of… a sort of cosmic British Empire, with members bound together by strict Victorian causal determinism, beribboned with a few superadded links of sentimental teleology”, Transcendence of the Cave, p. 212.