Commentary on the Philosophy of Nature, Chapter 15
What Mechanism Lacks — The Stone Falling from the Roof
The errors are counted; the question of what the whole division is driving at is thereby not answered. It reads: what does mechanism lack — and Hegel fixed the difference between mechanism and purpose in 1817 by an image that decides it: “Mechanism too brings something forth, but not as purpose, rather as blind contingency; its beginning is not the beginning and the ground of this activity, e.g. when the stone falling from the roof strikes someone dead.”[1] The same transcript stands in Der subjektive Begriff, on mechanism, and in Das Unrecht und seine Aufhebung, on punishment.
The stone produces a dead man, but nothing in its falling was directed toward that outcome. This is precisely the indifference at stake in mechanics: the effect occurs without the beginning having meant it.
The image serves the whole section. Wherever the philosophy of nature asks whether an order arises from the matter itself, this is the counter-case: an order that comes about without anything striving toward it.
Ibid., Good transcript, course of 1817: GW 23.1, p. 135. ↩︎