Abstract
In this essay I argue that Hegel’s system includes no ontology of nature, either in any traditional sense, or in any specifically Hegelian sense, of “ontology.” What Hegel provides instead is a philosophy of nature in which specifically natural activities generate specifically natural differences and identities out of themselves. I make my case first by considering the meaning of “ontology” Hegel inherited from Wolff and Kant. I show that Hegel rejected this sense of ontology for his own philosophy, in part because of his recognition of the success of the Kantian critical project in making traditional ontology impossible. I then argue that although Hegel sometimes characterizes his own Objective Logic in ontological terms, he also restricts that characterization in a way that makes it inapplicable to his treatment of apparently natural categories in the Logic itself, and to his Philosophy of Nature. Against this anti-ontological background I examine a small portion of Hegel’s concrete treatment of natural phenomena and kinds: his discussion of the nervous system in higher-order animals. Through its self-formation and the contribution of its nervous-system activity to its overall life, the animal does not implement differences, identities, or logical structures borrowed from elsewhere, but itself produces the differences and identities through which it is constituted. The self-determination Hegel articulates in his study of the nervous system gives us a good example of his typically “on-the-ground” approach, which is strikingly different from the “top-down” approach more common in the ontological tradition.
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Notes
- 1.
Hegel was an enthusiastic student of mathematics and science in his youth; he was sent to a tutor in these subjects prior to the Gymnasium in Stuttgart, where he also studied them formally, as he did in Tübingen; he studied them independently in Berne and Frankfurt while working as a tutor, arriving in Jena with a developed position on mathematical models in natural science, the topic of his dissertation; he taught mathematics in Jena and Nuremberg; he gave the philosophy of nature the central position in his Encyclopedia, revising it significantly in each new edition; he lectured on philosophy of nature in Heidelberg; he continued to follow developments in physics, chemistry, biology, and foundations of the calculus while teaching in Berlin; and he lectured on the philosophy of nature six times over 12 years in Berlin. For more detailed references and discussion of his education, see:
Spiegel (2001, 14, 19–39, 46); Petry (2003, 145–155); Franz (2005); Ziche (1994, 7–56); Petry (1998, 253–266); Ferrini (1997, 237–259); for his teaching activities in Nuremberg, see Grotsch (2006, 878–884); for his teaching activities in Berlin, see Nicolin (1977, 114 ff.); for his late interest in mathematics, see Wolff (1986, 197–263); for his personal library of relevant texts, see Neuser (1987, 459–500).
- 2.
Further references to Hegel’s works will be to section or paragraph number (where available), followed by ‘A’ (for Anmerkung) or ‘Z’ (for Zusatz), where appropriate (e.g., Hegel 2004, §253A); when no section or paragraph number exists, reference will be to page number of the English translation followed by ‘W’ and volume and page number of the Werke (Hegel 1986) – e.g., (Hegel 2004, 3/W9:12). Some translations are modified.
- 3.
For the purposes of this paper I take Hegel’s mature system to consist in the Science of Logic (published starting in 1812) and subsequent texts. Other periodizations may be more appropriate for other purposes.
- 4.
“Ontologia seu philosophia prima est scientia entis in genere, seu quatenus ens est.” Compare Baumgarten, used by Kant in his lecture course: “Ontologia (ontosophia, metaphysica… metaphysica vniuersalis, architectonica, philosophia prima) est scientia praedicatorum entis generaliorum” (Baumgarten 1743, §4). Meier’s German translation of Baumgarten renders this as: “Die Ontologie… ist die Wissenschaft der gemeinern oder abstractern Prädicate des Dinges” (Baumgarten 2004, §4).
- 5.
(Metaphysik Mrongovius);(Metaphysik L 2 ). All references to works by Kant, except references to the Critique of Pure Reason, which will use standard A/B pagination, will be made by volume and page of the Akademie edition. “Being” here translates “Wesen,” otherwise often rendered as “essence.” Note also Kant’s switches between singular (“being”) and plural (“beings”). The ambiguity between being and essence is taken up by Hegel in ways I cannot pursue here; see, e.g., the Science of Logic: “ens comprises within itself both being and essence, a distinction for which the German language has fortunately preserved different expressions.” (Hegel 2010, 42/W5:61).
- 6.
See the Doctrine of Method in the first Critique, where he writes that “transcendental philosophy… considers only the understanding and reason itself in a system of all concepts and principles that are related to objects in general, without assuming objects that would be given (Ontologia),” and then designates the first of “four major parts” of “the entire system of metaphysics” with the name “ontology” (Kant 1999, A846/B874).
- 7.
Notably, Hegel credits Kant with an early but defective version of this replacement: “Critical philosophy indeed already made metaphysics into logic, but like later idealism, it gave the logical determinations an essentially subjective significance, out of fear of the object” (Hegel 2010, 30/W5:45).
- 8.
Readers of Heidegger will be intrigued to hear that the very Kantian-looking shift from Baumgarten’s “scientia praedicatorum entis” to the idea of an “objective” logic has its intermediate step in Meier’s translation of Baumgarten’s phrase “scientia praedicatorum entis generaliorum” as “die Wissenschaft der gemeinern oder abstractern Prädicate des Dinges”—though a Ding is not obviously the same as an Objekt, a Gegenstand, or a Wesen, and where Baumgarten uses res, Meier uses Sache; see Baumgarten (2004, §3).
- 9.
I have to skip over here what would be a valuable inquiry into the relation between nature, world, and cosmos in Hegel’s thought. In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel complains of those who “confuse” nature with the world (Hegel 2004, §247Z), and in the Logic he is at pains to differentiate the two (Hegel 2010, 405/W6:106).
- 10.
For instance, in the discussion of space, Hegel writes that “Space, as in itself the concept as such, contains within itself the differences of the concept” (Hegel 2004, §255).
- 11.
See also the note above on world and nature.
- 12.
Hegel goes on to say there that if we accept the quoted statement, “then it is conceded just as much that the determinations of thought” – that is, the determinations studied in logic – “have objective value and concrete existence.”
- 13.
Note, too, that according to Hegel all these determinations also surface in spirit, and so are not specifically logical or natural.
- 14.
In the Zusatz to that section, Hegel characterizes things thusly: “The philosophy of nature takes up the material that physics prepares for it from experience, at the point to which physics has brought that material, and transforms it, without laying down experience as the final warranting ground” (Hegel 2004, §246Z).
- 15.
In fact, although Hegel distinguishes the philosophy of nature from logic, he regards the Logic in general as presupposed for the Philosophy of Nature. Thus, one thing that differentiates the treatment of the concept of life in the Logic from the treatment of that concept in the Philosophy of Nature is that the latter can presuppose the former. Compare his explanation of why the Philosophy of Nature begins with space and time, and hence with quantity, whereas the Logic begins with quality: “Nature… does not begin with the qualitative but with the quantitative, because its determination is not, like being in logic, the abstractly first and immediate, but a being already essentially mediated within itself” (Hegel 2004, §254A).
- 16.
The organic realm includes the geological; see Hegel (2004, §§337–8).
- 17.
“It is first in the animal organism that the differences of shape are so developed as to exist essentially only as members, thereby constituting it subject” (Hegel 2004, §337).
- 18.
“The I originally comes into being for itself by means of this act, and it is only in this way that the I comes into being at all” and “This acting is precisely the concept of the I, and the concept of the I is the concept of this acting” (Fichte 1994, 42, 44).
- 19.
Frequencies of citation indicate that Hegel was most heavily influenced by Autenreith, Bichat, Richerand, and Treviranus. Hegel owned Bichat’s Recherches (Bichat 1799) and Richerand’s Nouveaux élémens (Richerand 1802); see Neuser (1987) on Hegel’s library. He clearly had access to Treviranus’ Biologie (Treviranus 1802–1822) as well as Autenreith’s Handbuch (Authenreith 1801–1803), both prominent textbooks in this period.
- 20.
See Coleman (1971).
- 21.
For example: “Thus a rabbit survived more than three-quarters of an hour after decapitation and prevention of hemorrhage… these experiments were made on rabbits aged three, ten, up to 14 days at the most death occurring earlier in older rabbits.” Hegel is not always enthusiastic about the vivisections, noting later in the same passage that “Treviranus… has carried out a large number of experiments especially on frogs’ hearts; but they have yielded nothing except details of the way in which he tortured these animals” (Hegel 2004, §356Z).
- 22.
See Hegel (1977, 10/W3:22–3): “… everything turns on grasping and expressing the true, not only as substance, but equally as subject.”
- 23.
Immediately after asserting that animals are distinguished by containing “a relation to an other which is immediately posited as mine” in sensing “a particularized state of itself,” Hegel adds that “Thus spirit has consciousness only as self-consciousness: in other words, in being related to an external object, I am at the same time for myself” (Hegel 2004, §357aZ).
- 24.
Furthermore: “The organic individuality exists as subjectivity insofar as the externality proper to shape [Gestalt] is idealized into members and the organism in its process outwards preserves inwardly the unity of the self” (Hegel 2004, §350).
- 25.
“Consequently the process whereby the plant differentiates itself into distinct parts and sustains itself, is one in which it comes forth from itself and falls apart into a number of individuals… A further consequence is that the difference of the organic parts is only a superficial metamorphosis and one part can easily assume the function of the other” (Hegel 2004, §343).
- 26.
“In the plant we distinguish roots, stems, branches, and leaves. But there is no more familiar fact than that each branch and twig is a complete plant which has its root in the plant as in the soil; if it is broken off from this plant and put as a slip into the ground, it puts out roots and is a complete plant” (Hegel 2004, §345Z).
- 27.
See, for instance, the Encyclopedia Logic: “The single members of the body are what they are only through their unity and in relation to it. So, for instance, a hand that has been hewn from the body is a hand in name only, but not in actual fact, as Aristotle has already remarked” (Hegel 1991, §216Z). Compare from the Philosophy of Nature: “If a finger is cut off, it is no longer a finger, but a process of chemical decomposition sets in” (Hegel 2004, §350Z). Using such examples opens Hegel to objections involving various lower forms of animal life that appear to be divisible (e.g., earthworms). Hegel’s response here is simply to regard them as lower animal forms precisely because they are plant-like in this respect; see, e.g., Hegel (2004, §353Z). Similarly, a plant that cannot be grown from cuttings is simply less like a typical plant than one that can (Hegel 2004, §345Z). What Hegel requires is not a sharp division always followed in all natural things (something he thinks nature cannot provide due to its essential “impotence” – see, e.g., Hegel [2004, §250A]) but a conceptual distinction visible in exemplary cases.
- 28.
Hegel discusses “the” animal at a high level of generality and abstraction, and it is clear that he takes the human body as the exemplary case of animality: “In the perfect animal, in the human organism, these processes are developed in the fullest and clearest way; this highest organism therefore presents us in general with a universal type, and it is only in and from this type that we can ascertain and explain the meaning of the undeveloped organism” (Hegel 2004, §352Z).
- 29.
Compare: “It is only as this self-reproductive being, not as a mere being, that the living creature is and preserves itself; it only is, in making itself what it is” (Hegel 2004, §352).
- 30.
“Each abstract system permeates, and is connected with, them all, each displays the entire structure; therefore, the systems of nerves, veins, blood, bones, muscles, skin, glands, etc., are each an entire skeleton; and this gives interconnection to the organism, for each system is dominated by the others with which it is interlaced and at the same time maintains within itself the total connection” (Hegel 2004, §355Z).
- 31.
“The motor nerves mostly start from the spinal cord, and the sensory nerves from the brain… But in general the nerves are concentrated in the brain, from which they ramify into every part of the body” (Hegel 2004, §354Z); see later in the same Zusatz for a number of citations of contemporary work on the anatomy of the nervous system. At that time biologists had not fully demonstrated how the relevant anatomical differences (e.g., between afferent and efferent nerve fibers) were tied to their functional differences (e.g., between the function of conveying stimuli from the sensory organs to the brain and the function of controlling muscle contraction or relaxation from the brain).
- 32.
Each of these systems contains elements performing sensory (afferent) and motor (efferent) functions, and thus also contains anatomical differences corresponding to those functions: “The motor nerves mostly start from the spinal cord, and the sensory nerves from the brain; the former are the nervous system in its practical function, the latter are that system as receptive of determinations, and to this the sense organs belong” (Hegel 2004, §354Z).
- 33.
Hegel also calls the visceral sensory system “unregelmäßig,” where this lack of regularity equates to indeterminacy in the sense of lack of fixed determinacy, or lack of internal differentiation. The “dullness” here is thus compatible with a wide phenomenological range of intensities.
- 34.
Note that the contrast between the visceral and somatic systems is drawn in physiological-anatomical-functional terms, not in phenomenological terms. There is no claim here about what sensation or some kind of sensation “is like,” or about “how it feels to be alive.” Such a phenomenological characterization, if possible at all, would require that we adopt a view from “inside” the animal’s subjective sensory or perceptual states. It would therefore require that we had already explained the possibility of such subjectivity, and that we had the concept of a qualitatively differentiated yet unified subjective experience available for our explanation. But in the philosophy of nature we do not have experience at all, only the activity of animals (where that activity exhibits structural isomorphism with the schema of self-conscious subjectivity).
- 35.
The ganglia “are found therefore throughout the body, though principally in the parts belonging to the internal structure, especially in the abdomen… Through their interconnection they form the so-called sympathetic nerves” (Hegel 2004, §354Z); quoting Autenreith, Hegel cites his claim that this sympathetic nerve made up of the ganglia divides “indeterminate” from “determinate” sensation: “It is remarkable that in the stomach, one could almost say at its upper opening, the development of the eighth nerve descending directly from the brain stops, its place being taking by the sympathetic nerve, so that there is here, as it were, the boundary of a more distinct sensation” (Autenreith 1801–1803, §587).
- 36.
In keeping with the unsettled state of empirical research at the time, Hegel does not further specify the nature of the connection-and-separation of these systems, except to say that while “there is controversy as to whether these ganglia are independent, or whether they originate in the brain and spinal cord,” they have “at the same time their own place in the nervous system, and are distinct from the nerves of the cerebro-spinal system both in function and structure” (Hegel 2004, §354Z). In the same Zusatz, he cites Richerand on the link between ganglia, sensation, and autonomic versus voluntary systems: “Richerand therefore says: ‘Through the sympathetic nerves, the internal organs are withdrawn from the dominance of the will’” (Richerand 1802, vol. i, Proleg., CIII). Hegel discusses the connection between the nervous system and the will in numerous passages, for instance in Hegel (2004, §351Z, §355Z).
- 37.
Immediately after asserting that animals are distinguished by containing “a relation to an other which is immediately posited as mine” in sensing “a particularized state of itself,” Hegel adds that “Thus spirit has consciousness only as self-consciousness: in other words, in being related to an external object, I am at the same time for myself” (Hegel 2004, §357aZ).
- 38.
See Hegel (2004, §§369-70; §§368-9 in the Miller translation).
- 39.
“In thinking things, we transform them into something universal; but things are singular, and the lion as such does not exist” (Hegel 2004, §246Z).
- 40.
Hegel uses various registers to express the sense in which the species as a universal is present within or guides the activity of the individual animal, for instance: “The species is in an implicit, simply unity with the singularity of the subject whose concrete substance it is” (Hegel 2004, §367); “The species is therefore present in the individual as a straining against the inadequacy of its single actuality” (Hegel 2004, §368).
- 41.
Hegel (2004, §247Z).
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Rand, S. (2017). Hegel’s Anti-ontology of Nature. In: Kuperus, G., Oele, M. (eds) Ontologies of Nature. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 92. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66236-7_5
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