Commentary on the Philosophy of Nature, Chapter 46
Stekeler: The Reach of Forms of Explanation
Pirmin Stekeler reads Hegel’s philosophy of nature not as a rival to natural science but as a reflection on its reach — as philosophy of science, then, and one that works on its object rather than merely commenting on it.
The core claim: all laws are idealizations. They are idealizations because they are formal schematizations. Our conceptual grasp of nature is limited — not because our understanding is weak, but because nature, in its empirical particulars, does not follow the laws we set for it without exception.[1]
This can be shown with space, and Stekeler considers Hegel’s misgivings here “absolutely justified”: points exist only as intersections of lines, straight lines only as intersections of planes. Planes of infinite extension do not exist at all in real space — they exist only as idealizations of the surfaces of cuboids, on the basis of a formal “and so on,” as with laying bricks in a wall.
From this follows a task that no individual science takes on. Whoever applies a general schema to a particular case must de-schematize it — must liquefy the ideal again in order to see what is actually present in the case. This calls for judgment, and it is exactly here that Stekeler locates Hegel’s dialectic.
Two consequences bear on this volume.
First, it explains Hegel’s polemic against the mechanistic worldview differently from how it is usually read. He is not turning against mechanics but against its absolutization — against a mathematical metaphysics that makes the model of point-motion the pattern for all explanation. Stekeler, following Hegel, calls this a childhood of philosophizing: an enthusiasm for mathematical models that forgets they are models.
Second, it shows that Hegel’s demand was met — only differently than he thought. When the students of Johannes Müller, Helmholtz among them, established physiology as a science in its own right, they emancipated themselves from the too-narrow explanatory forms of mechanics. This is exactly what Hegel demanded, and it happened without him.
And the stakes are not merely historical. Stekeler applies this to present-day theories of cognition: whoever explains human cognition from a physiology of perception and a processing apparatus hardwired in the brain fails to notice that this very explanation is itself the consequence of a lack of natural philosophy — the consequence of forgoing the conceptual analysis of what one’s own forms of explanation can actually accomplish. He calls this provincial, and Hegel would speak of a finite standpoint.[2]
What is provincial here is not working within a limited field — everyone does that — but failing to recognize the limitation.
Reading the volume this way, then, one is not looking for statements about nature that are simply true or false, but for information about how far a form of explanation reaches. This question is not outdated.
The downside of this approach must be named. If every problematic claim can be read as a critique of models or of language, Hegel becomes immune to refutation. What then arises is a procedure that works in only one direction: whatever hits the mark is treated as far-sighted insight; whatever is false is declared a metaphor, a shorthand, or an example of its time.
Hegel also wanted to say what light is, not merely how one talks about light. This volume takes both seriously — the substantive claims, because they are made, and the reflection on forms of explanation, because it is the more durable part. Where a statement is false, it stands here as an error, not as a misunderstood metaphor.