Kommentar zur Naturphilosophie, Chapter 45
Winfield: Determination Applied to a Present-Day Object
Preliminary remark on the use of this author. Richard Dien Winfield carries Hegel forward rather than examining him — in three hundred pages there is not a single point where he corrects him. This makes him useful where he puts Hegel’s determinations to work on present-day objects, and useless where he derives natural history from them.
Two examples of the latter, so the boundary is clear. He holds a fully animate universe to be impossible because it would violate the second law of thermodynamics — which overlooks that organisms are open systems and maintain their order precisely by releasing entropy into their surroundings. And he claims that animals could only arise once plants existed, because they depend on them; from this he infers an order of evolution. Phylogenetically this is wrong: animals are closer to fungi than to plants, and both lineages trace back to single-celled ancestors.
The following section belongs to the first kind.
Richard Dien Winfield deploys Hegel’s determination of the organic against a widespread manner of speaking, and the objection holds: DNA is not a blueprint of the organism.[1]
The reasons are biological, not philosophical. First, DNA is not a design that exists prior to the organism and independently of it — it is itself a component of the cell, activated and divided by the life process. A blueprint is imposed on material already at hand; DNA is not.
Second, in a multicellular organism every cell carries the same DNA, and yet the cells have different structures and functions. A blueprint gives a thing one form; here, quite different things arise from the same stock.
What follows from this is precisely Hegel’s distinction: the end is immanent to the object, not set over against it. DNA is not the end that the organism serves as material, but a moment of the very connection that activates it.
This is the point at which the old determination shows, on a present-day object, what it can do — not as an anticipation, but as a tool against a manner of speaking that misses the matter at hand.
IX. The Overall Picture
Richard Dien Winfield, Universal Biology after Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, chap. 3. ↩︎