Commentary on the Philosophy of Nature, Chapter 39
Retrospect and Transition
At the beginning stood the sentence that the philosophy of nature deals with the sphere in which the determinations fall apart. Now it can be said on what this was shown and what follows from it.
The falling apart is no deficiency of the presentation. It has a statable form. What Chapter 41 shows with Neuser for the syllogistic figure — that in the Logic the particular mediates, in nature the singular, and that for this reason the one extreme remains standing beside the other instead of being taken up into it — is the reason for the finding of Chapter 24: four steps where the Logic has three. It is the same reason for which nature is left to contingency and its forms are not derivable without gaps. The impotence to hold fast to the concept is therefore no excuse but a determination of the object.
On this hangs the boundary against two more comfortable readings. The one wants to compute nature out of the Logic; it founders on the impotence. The other takes the logical order for a classification imposed after the fact; it founders on the fact that the order can be tested — most clearly where Hegel himself does not sustain it and breaks off the syllogistic presentation of the chemical process (Chapter 20), and where his pupils turn it into a procedure of confirmation (Chapter 40).
What the volume owes natural science and what it does not. It owes any prediction. It does not owe the critique of false ontologizations — caloric, phlogiston, the theory of pores — nor the question which form predominates where. That is a judgment, not an assignment, and it can be contested.
The transition. Chapter 37 has indicated a direction in which a renewed doctrine of stages might lie. The transition Hegel himself carries out lies elsewhere and is more concise. Nature attains universality only as repetition: the individual perishes, the genus remains, and none of the singulars is ever the universal. With this nature is at its end, not because something would have to be added to it, but because it does not attain its own determination. What the animal lacks is to know itself as genus.
Spirit is the genus that knows itself. It is no new material but the same in another relation — and this is why Der Übergang aus der Natur (§ 381) begins not with a demarcation from the animal but with what the human being shares with it. Two threads of this volume expressly continue there. The inner purpose, of which it holds here that an organism need not know it, is there redeemed as drive: as the felt difference between what one is and what one could be. And the question of Chapter 29, whether a self-feeling belongs to the form of life, is there not answered but located — as the stage of feeling.
Part Two: The Reception
Four attempts to work with Hegel’s philosophy of nature — two from his school, two from the present. They are gathered here not for the sake of completeness, but because together they answer a question that Part One leaves open: What happens when one tries to carry this philosophy forward?
VI. The Disciples: Erdmann, Rosenkranz, and Michelet
Rosenkranz (1850), Erdmann (1858), and Michelet (1876) are the reworkings from Hegel’s own school, and they are instructive because they carry out the same programme differently. They are not treated here in order; the beginning is made by the shortest and densest of the three.