Commentary on the Philosophy of Nature, Chapter 30
Gaia, Ecosystems, Viruses — the Borderline Cases
The determination of the Earth as a “geological organism” (§§ 337–342) is the point at which the philosophy of nature reaches furthest into the present — and at the same time the point where the transfer is most likely to be overextended.
James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis holds that the Earth is a self-regulating system that maintains its own conditions for life. Hegel anticipated this insofar as he treats the Earth not as an aggregate but as a nexus of processes that condition one another. He calls the sea a “living process, always on the point of breaking out into life.”
Testing with the three moments (developed in Teleologie) yields a clear finding: self-preservation is uncontroversial — the system regulates itself. Self-sublation is present in the long run, through coevolution. Self-differentiation into a center is absent.
Whoever takes Gaia to be an organism thereby exceeds the criterion; whoever takes it to be a mere aggregate of physical processes falls short of it. Hegel’s own determination captures it more precisely than his choice of words suggests: it is the ground and the general form of life, not alive in the sense of a subject.
The same holds one step lower, for ecosystems. When wolves were reintroduced in Yellowstone in 1995, the deer populations declined, the vegetation along the banks recovered, the beavers returned, and the rivers changed their course. A system that rebuilds itself in this way evidently preserves itself. But it articulates itself only into trophic levels and niches, not toward a centre — the same finding as with Gaia, on a smaller object.
And one question remains open that reaches beyond this volume. Hegel determines the life-process by felt lack — the organism suffers hunger, it does not register a deviation. Whether a self-feeling thereby belongs to the form of life, or whether it is a further dimension, the three processes do not decide; they grasp the form. The question becomes sharpest with technical systems, and there it is treated by Teleologie. Within the system itself it continues in Das Erwachen und die Empfindung (§§ 398–402): as the stage of feeling, §§ 402 to 407. [KF]
And a borderline case from the other side: the viruses. They have self-sublation — they reproduce and evolve — but no self-preservation, since they lack metabolism. They are incomplete life, life only through other life. Where Gaia and the ecosystem lack self-differentiation, these lack self-preservation.
Herein lies the yield of the three processes, and it is greater than an answer: they say not merely that something is a borderline case, but at which moment it lies. The question whether the earth lives is thereby not decided but made decidable. [KF]