Commentary on the Philosophy of Nature, Chapter 31
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 carries more weight. Hegel’s concept of the genus (Gattung) is itself conceived as unchanging. In the 1829 lecture course: “Individuals die off. This flower exists only now. This oak has perhaps stood for 1,000 years: but these 1,000 years are only now; the universal is the genus: oaks, flowers.”[3] And: “Individuals are born and pass away; the genus is what persists in them, what recurs in everything.”
Self-sublation is thus conceived within the genus: the individual perishes, the species remains. In Darwin, the species itself changes. Anyone who adopts this structure must alter the concept of genus — from a constant against which passing-away is measured, to something that changes precisely through that passing-away.
This speaks against the convenient claim that Hegel anticipated Darwin. It does not speak against adopting the structure — only, that adoption is not free of cost. [KF]