Kommentar zur Naturphilosophie, Chapter 47

Kai Froeb

What the Four Together Add Up To

The four paths can be ordered by two questions: What is to be saved, and what is experience allowed to change?

	What is saved	What experience is allowed to change
Rosenkranz	nature as a real system	contents; he himself rebuilds the architecture
Erdmann	the sequence of stages as the solution to a contradiction	both paths hold equally — but the kinds remain constant
Michelet	Hegel’s material philosophy of nature	contents, nothing else
Stekeler	the conceptual content	the range of the models
Winfield	the ontology of the organic	little; Hegel is carried forward

The pattern is clear. Whoever wants to carry Hegel forward lets experience correct contents — but none of the four lets it correct the categories with which things are ordered. Rosenkranz rebuilds the architecture, but for his own reasons; Stekeler shifts the question to the level of description; Winfield and Michelet hold fast.

Neuser and Petry do not appear in this table, because they are not trying to save anything. Their work stands prior to it: Neuser explains why Hegel’s nature is the sphere of externality and in which tradition of thought his procedure stands; Petry says where each individual claim comes from. What of this still holds today is not their question — and whoever wants to answer it cannot get around their work.

And here lies the task that remains open. If nature is what Rosenkranz says it is — a free creator who attempts whatever is possible at the time, unconcerned whether it will last —, then the system of its concepts, too, must be open and capable of revision. That is not a task of the system, but only its execution.

This volume does not attempt that. It examines what remains of Hegel’s philosophy of nature once one takes its substantive claims seriously and calls its errors errors — and it records where the four predecessors failed or evaded the question. That is less than a new philosophy of nature, and the condition for writing one.