Commentary on the Philosophy of Nature, Chapter 32
The Question of Evolution
The passage is usually quoted in truncated form, and the truncation misses the point. § 249 reads in full: “Nature is to be regarded as a system of stages, one arising necessarily from the other and being the nearest truth of the stage from which it results, but not in such a way that one would be naturally generated out of the other — rather, this happens in the inner idea which constitutes the ground of nature.”
Both halves belong together. Hegel does not dispute the arising as such, but a particular conception of it: temporal generation. And he says explicitly what he opposes — “the so-called emergence, for example, of plants and animals out of water, and then the emergence of the more developed animal organizations out of the lower ones,” which has been “relegated into the darkness of the past” in order to make it appear clearer.
The lectures show the same thing. There it says: “The stages must necessarily arise out of one another” and “the differences in nature necessarily arise out of one another.”[1] The dispute is not about the arising itself, but about whether it should be grasped conceptually or temporally.
The first reason is time-bound — but not out of ignorance. Stekeler notes that Hegel knew the evolutionary ideas of his time: the doctrines preceding Charles Darwin go back to his grandfather Erasmus, and then to Lamarck and Cuvier.[2] Hegel even emphasizes — long before Charles Darwin and with knowledge of Erasmus — the temporal and historical character of the development of terrestrial life.
What he rejects, then, is not the idea itself but its execution at the time. Lamarck’s doctrine of 1809 struck him as mechanistic — a series of accidents from which no concept follows. This objection hit the theories of his day. Darwin’s mechanism of 1859 is built differently and has the structure of self-sublation: heredity preserves what has held up; variation generates difference out of the existing stock itself; selection enforces what proves viable.
The second reason weighs more heavily, and it does not lie in the philosophy of nature. Hegel’s concept of genus is itself conceived as unchangeable: “The individuals are born and pass away, the genus is what remains in them, that which recurs in everything.”[3] Self-sublation is thereby conceived within the genus — the individual perishes, the species remains —, whereas in Darwin the species itself changes. What follows from this for Hegel’s Logic, and what the adoption costs there, is developed by Teleologie.
For this volume something else follows from it. The question is not whether the Logic can grasp evolution, but whether the doctrine of stages of the philosophy of nature can be held without a mobile concept of genus. It can — but only because Hegel does not ground the order of the shapes in their descent at all, but arranges them by increasing centralization (Chapter 28). The order survives the change in the concept of genus; the reason for which Hegel rejects temporal generation does not survive it. [KF]