Commentary on the Philosophy of Nature, Chapter 23
Two Passages Where Hegel Anticipates Later Developments
Vittorio Hösle collects cases of this kind, and two of them hold up.
Light. Hegel rejects both theories of light current in his time, the emission theory and the wave theory alike, and does so as equally one-sided: “Neither of these two conceptions is appropriate here, for nothing empirical holds here” (§ 276 addition). The reasoning is poor — it amounts to dismissing the empirical question altogether. But the underlying finding is correct: quantum theory, too, proceeds from the one-sidedness of both conceptions, and wave-particle duality is the form in which it takes this up.[1]
Something can be learned here about the value of such anticipations: Hegel is right in what he rejects, and wrong in what he puts in its place. Whoever concludes from this that he foresaw quantum theory overstretches the point; whoever passes over the finding suppresses it. [KF]
Time. Hegel insists that time is not structured like space — it has a direction, while space has none. The dynamics of his day saw things differently: its equations are time-reversible. Only with the thermodynamics of irreversible processes was the anisotropy of time physically recognized — Ilya Prigogine argued for it in From Being to Becoming (1979), against the reversible conception of time held by dynamics.[2]
Here the anticipation carries more weight: Hegel holds fast to a distinction that later proved to be significant.