Commentary on the Philosophy of Nature, Chapter 37
Where the Question Stands Today
What can be said about life as such. If one asks what life requires in every conceivable form — not only the terrestrial kind — the inquiry leads to a list abstract enough not to be tied to carbon or DNA:
a boundary between system and environment; a regulated exchange of matter and energy across that boundary; the active maintenance or restoration of the system’s own organization; the coupling of different processes into a recursive whole; the storage and transmission of organization-relevant differences; reproducible variation; and evolution at the population level.
The first four coincide with Hegel’s three processes — self-differentiation, self-preservation, and, in the third, self-sublation. The last three are the addition biology has made since Darwin, and they are absent in Hegel.
Not on this list is what is often mistaken for it: DNA, cells of our particular kind, plants, animals, sexuality, nervous systems, reason. These are solutions that evolution found under specific conditions — possibly with counterparts elsewhere, but not derivable from the concept of life itself.
This distinction is what the doctrine of stages yields today: it separates what is an organizational problem from what is a solution to that problem. [KF]
With this the question from Chapter 5 has become answerable. There it was said that natural science has its own concepts of staged order — emergence, self-organization, autopoiesis, dissipative structures — and that Hegel’s contribution is not a result but a distinction. Which one can now be said: whoever speaks of self-organization claims that an order comes from the matter itself and not from outside. How one recognizes this is the question of the three moments and of whether they are distinguished (Chapter 32).
The staged concepts of natural science answer the same question better, so far as it concerns mechanisms that can be investigated. They do not answer it where what has to be decided is whether a case is present at all — and precisely there stood the borderline cases of Chapter 29.
With this the warning of Chapter 3 returns, now in the other direction. There it was a matter of Hegel himself not wanting to drag his concepts across the spheres; here it is a matter of our not being allowed to drag his concepts across the spheres either, when we hold them up to emergence and autopoiesis. Whoever transfers structures from one domain to another must say precisely what remains invariant.