Commentary on the Philosophy of Nature, Chapter 40
The Contradiction from Which the Sequence of Stages Follows
Erdmann’s centerpiece, and the clearest formulation of the thought to be found anywhere in the school:
“It is reason and yet is outside itself […] This contradiction, that nature is reason without being rational, can […] also be formulated as follows: that it shows us the absolute, but not in absolute form.”
And from this the sequence of stages — not as a classification, but as a solution:
“Nature will therefore only be correctly grasped when a series of ever more successful attempts to resolve that contradiction is demonstrated in its appearances, or, what amounts to the same thing, a sequence of stages in which nature approaches the point where reason exists in rational beings.”
This is a ground for transition that Hegel fails to supply. Why does the series continue? Because a contradiction demands resolution — and each stage is a less unsuccessful attempt. [KF]
The Two Paths — and the Rejection of Overreach
Erdmann distinguishes empirical and speculative natural science by direction: one works toward the ground, the other toward the consequence. His image for this is precise:
“the two paths relate to each other as dropping a perpendicular onto the surface of a sphere and continuing the line found in the direction of the center, relates to drawing a radius from the center out to the periphery. These lines can never cross, provided they are drawn straight; rather, in time — though patience is needed for this — they will meet.”
And the sentence that limits the claim: “it would be presumptuous if speculative natural science, or philosophy of nature, were to deny the name of science to the empirical kind, or natural description.”
This is the counter-position to Michelet, formulated eighteen years before him: both paths are scientific, neither has priority, and they meet only in time.
The Transition to Life — More Precise Than in Hegel
Erdmann states what the chemical process fails at, and does so in a single sentence with two grounds:
Because it “depends on the accidental coincidence of substances, does not proceed enough from within, but likewise, because it is extinguished in an instant, is in the end not, i.e., is not process enough, reason therefore searches further for such a process as is also process at its end.”
Not enough from within and not process enough — these are two testable deficiencies, and life is determined as that which remedies both: a process “where a thing has not merely given itself a form once and for all, but constantly gives it to itself anew, or reproduces it.”
And in this connection he calls the crystal “a foreboding […] of life” — because in its case one speaks of growing and of specimens, and this, he says, is no accident.
Where he makes the same mistake as the others. In physics, Erdmann too orders processes by spatial dimension: magnetism “as a linear force has only one dimension, electricity as a surface force two,” until in the chemical process crystal formation shows “how all three dimensions are governed by inner states […].”
This has a phenomenological occasion — the magnet is represented by an axis, charges distribute themselves over surfaces — but no categorial force. Magnetic fields are not one-dimensional, and a chemical process is not higher simply because it claims three dimensions. The spatial metaphor registers appearances and is unnoticedly elevated into their explanation — the same pseudo-deduction that Michelet later expands. [KF]
Where Erdmann Stands in 1858 — A Year Before Darwin
The most remarkable passage concerns the history of the earth, and it was written before the Origin of Species:
“In luxuriant but also unrestrained productive power the earth has brought forth its parasites, plants and animals; they have perished and have perhaps thereby supplied the material from which alone something more perfect could arise, which in turn was again thrown into the crucible of destruction, in order to supply the material for something still better.”
And, likewise before Haeckel: “At least the animals now living pass through, in their embryonic life, the states that in the extinct animals were those of maturity.”
And at the same time it is no theory of evolution — this must be set alongside it, because Erdmann says so himself:
“whereas here, by contrast, only the individual specimens have their history, are generated and die off, while the wholes or generalities, the genera and species remain unchanged, and can at most, under the influence of some foreign power, degenerate or improve, become refined or stunted.”
With this, development falls apart into two unconnected claims: the earth brings forth ever more perfect forms in succession — but the forms themselves do not change. What remains is a sequence of separate productions, not a relation of descent.
And it contradicts his own initial determination. Erdmann had determined nature by immutability and concluded from this that a fieri in the domain of natural laws would make every natural science impossible. But his history of the earth is irreversible. The distinction he would need — immutable laws, historical results — he does not draw: constancy of laws does not entail constancy of forms, for it is precisely unchanging laws that can produce irreversible processes. [KF]
Cell theory, too, is incorporated: “What first forms out of the slime, these are the true atoms of life, the cells” — with the difference from the crystal being precisely determined: the cell does not exclude the mother liquor but includes it, and is not an aggregation but a “real ultimate unity.”
And the Conclusion, Which Leads to the Next Volume
Erdmann ends where this volume ends and the one on spirit begins:
“the doctrine of the human being is therefore, just as on the one hand it was the last chapter of natural science, so on the other hand it is the first chapter of the science of spirit.”
With this determination of the transition: as the “I” awakens, “the human being falls apart from the world, the world, hitherto one and whole, splits into the two worlds of inner world and outer world, I and not-I.”