Commentary on the Philosophy of Nature, Chapter 27
What the Organics Deals With
Pirmin Stekeler puts it in a sentence that opens the whole approach: “What Hegel calls organics is simply the same thing as biology.”[1] This is a relief: what is at stake are living beings, not some secret power of nature.
And he draws the boundary that needs to be drawn here: to speak of a self-forming of physical bodies is a metonymy. A non-living body is not properly a subject; but there are physical processes of self-preservation. Full subjectivity arises only in life processes — “life is, in itself, the preservation of form, and, for itself, autopoiesis.”
Mechanics conceived separateness as mere isolation, physics as individuality. Now comes the step both were heading toward: the center to which the parts relate lies within the very same body as the parts themselves.[2]
Neuser summarizes what follows from this: the organs have their center in the shared organism and are only what they are within it. The organism is the interplay of its organs: an interaction that takes place in and through parts.
What this can be pinned down on. Hans Jonas found the formula that Winfield takes up: an organism remains the same by not remaining materially the same. A stone retains its identity through the constancy of its material; an organism retains its identity through a process that continually exchanges its material.[3]
Organic identity, then, is not the identity of matter but the continuity of a self-renewing form. The organism is not a thing that additionally happens to have metabolism — it is the organized event of its metabolism.
The three stages are ordered according to how far self-activity is actually realized in them.
What the leap depends on. The objects of the preceding divisions exist for another. The planet orbits the sun, but not for itself; salt arises from acid and base, but has no relation to itself. Life relates to itself — its processes do not serve external purposes but its own preservation.
This also disposes of the suspicion of vitalism that occasionally attaches to Hegel. Stekeler states it precisely: the aliveness of a living being is something inward only insofar as it is the instantiation of a life process immanent to its species, the actualization of a species-form.[4] Dead natural things do not go “into themselves” to find a soul there — and living things do not do so either.
The “self” here is not a mystical addition but a structural quality: the way a connected whole is organized. Whoever reads it mystically misses the point; whoever dismisses it as a mere manner of speaking misses it just as much. [KF]