Commentary on the Philosophy of Nature, Chapter 14
What Mechanism Lacks — The Stone Falling from the Roof
In 1817, Hegel fixed the difference between mechanism and purpose on an image that settles the matter: “Mechanism, too, produces something, but not as a purpose, rather as blind chance; its beginning is not the beginning and the ground of this activity — for example, when a stone falling from a roof kills someone.”[1]
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. ↩︎