Commentary on the Philosophy of Nature, Chapter 28
Plant and Animal
The three life processes — shaping [Gestaltung], assimilation, and the genus process — form the framework of both stages; logically developed, they appear in [[kleine-logik:19]] (optional) as self-differentiation, self-preservation, and self-sublation. They differ in how far apart their moments have come to stand.
In the plant, they coincide. In shaping itself, it simultaneously multiplies the individual: a cutting is a new specimen. “In the plant these three processes of the one life-process are of a simple nature,” and “the subjective One is submerged in quality.”[1]
In the animal, they separate. It has organs that carry different processes; it moves toward what it assimilates; and the genus process is an act of its own, not a byproduct of growth.
This is its own criterion in application, and it holds for every transfer: the question is whether the moments are present and whether they are distinguished. [KF]
An error shared by both camps. Stekeler writes: “no fauna without flora” — and Winfield turns this into an outright necessary sequence of evolution. As an ecological shorthand for the dependence of heterotrophic organisms on primary producers, the statement is intelligible. Phylogenetically it is false: animals are not descended from plants; they stand closer to fungi, and both lineages trace back to single-celled ancestors. Primary production, moreover, can also be carried out by bacteria and archaea.
The sequence plant — animal is an ordering by increasing centralization, not a line of descent. Whoever translates it back into natural history turns a conceptual ordering into a false claim — and that is the same type of error Hegel avoids at § 249. [KF]
Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Natur, on § 267: GW 24.1. ↩︎