Kommentar zur Naturphilosophie, Chapter 20
The Escalation from Magnetism to Chemism
Here lies the yield of this section, and Neuser has captured it precisely: in magnetism, we still have the external relation of bodies to one another — one acts upon the other. In the chemical process, by contrast, the bodies transform internally.[1]
A finding concerning the syllogistic figures. Hegel demands that the chemical process be presented as a triad of interlocking syllogisms — and then does not carry it out. He himself says why: “To examine this more closely would be a very delicate undertaking and would at the same time lead us too far. Every chemical process would have to be presented as a series of syllogisms, in which what was first the extreme becomes the middle, and the middle is posited as extreme.”[2]
Werckmeister soberly notes that the author evades the delicate undertaking. This is more than a mere oversight: precisely where the figures would have to be carried through on a real object, Hegel breaks off — and what remains is the indication that it could be done.
Anyone who takes the syllogistic figures to be a tool of analysis has here the case in which their inventor himself does not use them. [KF]
And the limit of chemism shows why the series continues: the product of the reaction is passive. Salt cannot return of its own accord to acid and base — it needs an external impulse. Chemism displays transformation, but not self-preservation. That is precisely what life alone achieves, and this is why life stands at the end of the series.
An observation about Hegel’s entire procedure depends on this: he does not start from static objects that might act upon one another, but from the interactions and the possibilities of action inherent in matter itself.
Here logical determination and natural finding touch one another. The Logic states that in chemism one member is what it is only through the other ([[kleine-logik:15]], optional). Physics shows what one can observe from this: the bodies emerge from the relation changed.
And the doctrine of measure supplies the second determination that this section requires. Where quantitative change turns into qualitative change — at the melting point, at the boiling point, in the fixed combining ratios of chemistry — this is the nodal line from [[kleine-logik:3]] (optional). Hegel rediscovered this structure in Berzelius’s series of oxidation states, and it still holds true today: states of aggregation do not pass into one another continuously. [KF]