Commentary on the Philosophy of Nature, Chapter 17
Why This Part Is the Weakest
What comes now is individuality: the body that no longer merely lies beside others but has a quality that distinguishes it from them — weight, heat, sound, chemical affinity (Chapter 19). It is at the same time the part in which Hegel most often goes wrong — for a reason which belongs here first.
Vittorio Hösle names it, and it is one from the history of science: the phenomena Hegel deals with here were only satisfactorily understood in the late nineteenth century — think of thermodynamics and electromagnetism.[1] Hegel works on objects for which the concepts did not yet exist, using the material available to him.
This explains two things: why most of the misjudgments are found here — and why most of the lecture material is found here as well. He never came to rest with this material. On magnetism alone, the transcripts of the first lecture course contain more than a hundred and fifty passages.
Vittorio Hösle, Hegels System, chap. 5 (cited here from the Italian edition Il sistema di Hegel, note 76 to chap. 5). Of the philosophy of nature, Hösle treats only space and time as well as life, and justifies this by their special standing. ↩︎