Commentary on the Philosophy of Nature, Chapter 22
The Four Elements — and Why They Are Not a Regression
Hegel takes up the Empedoclean elements again: air, fire, water, earth. This looks like pre-science, but even in 1830 it was not meant as chemistry. As Michelet later notes, what is meant are universal powers of nature: modes in which matter as such behaves.
Georg Werckmeister raises an objection against this that deserves to be taken seriously: the periodic table, too, does not order elements solely by the number of protons, but at the same time by properties — metals against non-metals, gases, earths. Hegel’s series likewise moves from the most abstract to the most concrete: gases (air), bases and acids (fire), salts and earths, metals.[1]
This blunts the objection but does not remove its core. That an ordering by properties is legitimate does not mean that Hegel’s ordering holds up — it does not, because the properties by which he orders things have turned out to be derived ones. The four elements remain the part of the philosophy of nature that has survived the least. [KF]
Georg Werckmeister, on the chemical process (hegel-system.de, v2233). ↩︎