Frequently Asked Questions: Hegel's Philosophy of Nature
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Did Hegel Reject Natural Science?
No. He presupposed it and wanted to do something else.
The philosophy of nature reports, over hundreds of pages, the state of physics, chemistry, and biology of his time — Hegel read the specialist journals and corresponded with natural scientists. What he disputes is that description is already explanation: that one has understood what life is once one has classified organisms.
His claim was to develop the order of nature’s determinations conceptually — to show why matter follows upon space and time, and life upon matter. Whether this succeeds is another question.
Continue: Philosophy of Nature · Workshop Report on the Order
What About the Planetary Orbits?
The most famous accusation — and it does not survive scrutiny.
In Popper’s version it reads: Hegel had “derived the actual number of the planets from a philosophical argument, and had thereby proven a priori that there could be no planet between Mars and Jupiter — unfortunately for the philosophy of nature, an important new planet, situated between Mars and Jupiter, was discovered shortly before this happened.”
What was actually known in 1801. Piazzi observed the object on January 1, 1801, and was able to track it across nine degrees — two and a half percent of its orbit. He initially took it for a comet and only considered in passing that it might be the planet predicted by the Titius-Bode series. Whether it was a planet or a comet could not be decided with the data available at the time; the spectral analysis used today to distinguish the two did not yet exist.
Gauss calculated the orbit over the course of 1801 and communicated the result to colleagues by letter; he did not publish it until 1809. Olbers rediscovered the object on December 7, 1801 — before that, it was not even certain that it was still there. Lalande, too, did not regard Gauss’s calculation as proof, since it reacted sensitively to the smallest errors in the measured data.
Hegel’s habilitation thesis appeared in August 1801. At that point there was no discovered planet, but rather an object of unclear nature that no one had seen since February.
What Hegel actually wrote. The last two pages of his work give a numerical series for the distances of the planets — as a proposal, not as a derivation. His objection to the Titius-Bode series is twofold, and both parts are the opposite of what is attributed to him.
First, the series lacks empirical grounding — precisely at the point where it claims the most. The series requires a planet between Mars and Jupiter. When Hegel wrote, none had been discovered: there was a gap. He thus charges the series with exactly what has been charged against him for two hundred years — that it goes beyond experience.
Second, it lacks inner necessity. It is a numerical sequence that happens to fit without being able to give any reason for doing so.
The connection between the two is the real point: a series that was only empirically grounded, without conceptual necessity — and that, at the one point where it went beyond experience, contradicted the facts.
The series is regarded today as a numerical coincidence without physical content.
Later Hegel commented on this explicitly (Enz. §270, addition) and stated that the distances cannot be derived from the concept but must be taken from experience. This is precisely what escaped Popper — who accuses him of having overlooked something.
What he is actually doing. Here the accusation stands on its head. Hegel does not derive from the concept what experience would then have to confirm — he is looking for a series that fits the measured distances better than the existing one. Whoever deduces from concepts needs no measured values; whoever tests against them has taken the opposite path.
In doing so, he draws on a Platonic idea — the same one that moved Kepler: that the formulas in which nature can be described are not arbitrary. One can ask why exactly this ratio holds and no other — and the answer cannot be “by chance.”
This is no marginal notion but the same thought that the Logic develops under the category of Measure: a quantity belongs to the matter itself and is not indifferent to it. Water freezes at zero degrees, and that is not a convention.
What remains. Ceres is not a planet but a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt — astronomy has changed its status twice. Hegel’s series did not prevail, no more than the Titius-Bode series did. But that is the ordinary outcome of an attempt, and something quite different from what is attributed to him.
Continue: The Specific Quantum · Measure · Ceres and the Habilitation Thesis · The Distances of the Planets · Celestial Bodies
Did Hegel Want to Deduce the Writing Quill?
That is what Wilhelm Traugott Krug demanded, mockingly, and Hegel and Schelling answered just as mockingly.
The mockery struck a sore spot. If the philosophy of nature develops the determinations of nature out of the concept — where does that stop? At genera? At species? At this pebble?
Hegel’s answer: nature is the domain in which the concept does not prevail in pure form. It is “the idea in the form of otherness,” and the particular within it is contingent. Philosophy shows the order, not the specimen.
That is an honest drawing of a boundary — and at the same time the point at which Hegel’s system becomes permeable.
Continue: Krug · Zufälligkeit in the glossary
Did Hegel Deny Evolution?
Yes, and the passage is unambiguous. The Encyclopedia states that nature is “to be regarded as a system of stages … but not in such a way that one stage is naturally produced from another” (§249, Addition). The sequence of stages is conceptual, not temporal.
The reason is a product of its time. Cosmology around 1820 knew nothing of development — nature appeared eternal and ordered only in space. And Lamarck’s theory of development from 1809 struck Hegel as mechanistic: a series of chance occurrences from which no concept follows.
Today we know otherwise. The earth has a history, life has a history, and both are a continuous development.
Can the System Be Reconciled with Evolution?
We consider it possible — and by Hegel’s own means.
He develops three processes for life (§342): shape [Gestaltung], in which an organism articulates itself internally; assimilation, in which it appropriates what is external to it; and the process of the genus [Gattungsprozeß], in which it goes beyond itself and reproduces. The third is self-sublation: the individual passes away, while the genus persists and, in doing so, changes.
This is exactly what evolution describes. What Hegel develops as the logical structure of the living is the form of what Darwin describes as a process. The contradiction lies not in the structure but in Hegel’s claim that the stages do not arise out of one another — and this claim is not required by his structure but rather sets itself against it.
This is discussed in more detail in the chapter on the transition to the philosophy of reality, which also shows that the same three processes are found outside biology: in theories that differentiate themselves, prove themselves empirically, and renew themselves through paradigm shifts; in institutions; in cultures. This is not a metaphor but the same structure in different domains.
Continue: Darwin and the Challenge of Chance · Animal Life · The Process of the Genus · Workshop Report on Order
What Is Left of the Philosophy of Nature?
Less than of the other parts, and more than its reputation suggests.
Almost everything concrete is outdated: the chemistry, the physiology, the geology, the astronomy. Anyone looking there for knowledge finds the state of things as of 1820.
What has remained useful is the question of transitions — where physics stops and chemistry begins, where chemistry stops and life begins. That these boundaries are not mere convention but say something about the matter itself is a thought that present-day emergence theories also pursue, without naming Hegel.
Our own ordering of nature is an attempt in this direction; what succeeds in it and what does not is set out in the workshop reports.
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