The concept of life in German Idealism and its Aristotelian roots

ABSTRACT

The aim of this short essay is to sketch an introductory account of the concept of life in German Idealism and to argue that it is both a philosophically robust concept and a productive lens through which to view a range of systematic issues at the heart of Idealism. Here I am interested in why this concept features so prominently in the systematic accounts of the Idealists, from its role in logic and the philosophy of nature to aesthetics and ethics. To establish bearings and gain traction on this multi-faceted concept of life, I focus on its Aristotelian roots in the systems of Idealism. Broadly speaking, this idealist concept involves an inner purposiveness, which can be traced back to Aristotle’s hylomorphic account of the soul as a principle of life, but set to a wider range of systematic uses by some of the Idealists than Aristotle explicitly held of the soul.

KEYWORDS:

• Hegel
• Aristotle
• Kant
• Idealism
• life
• inner purposiveness
• soul
• hylomorphism

In the thought of Aristotle, the soul is the principle of life in virtue of which a living whole has its characteristic form of life.¹ For something to have a principle of life is for it to have an internal unified structure according to which it grows and sustains itself and in light of which it is susceptible to various kinds of decay.² To say that the eye is an organ, the function of which is sight, is to say that what makes the matter of an eye a living unity is its capacity to see: this capacity is the form by which an eye has its life function. A glass eye, a “dead” eye, and an eye in a painting are not living eyes; they are therefore not actually eyes, and bear the name only homonymously.³

The soul (psuchē) picks out the functional unity by which the material parts of a whole can be called a living unity of a specific kind. Thus, a plant has a soul in virtue of which it is generative, grows, regenerates, reproduces, and decays. The vegetative soul, in this understanding, is that by which a plant engages in photosynthesis or develops a root system. Similarly, a sensitive soul is that by which animals are capable of sensation and feeling, and a rational soul is that by which human beings are capable of thinking.⁴ The human soul or principle of life in Aristotle’s view includes the vegetative and sensitive along with the rational as three parts of the human soul.

Matter without its characteristic organizing principle is not alive. A dead plant, animal, or human being is a corpse. Its matter no longer comprises a unity determined by an animating form. Given the absence of this animating form, decay sets in (or it must be acted upon externally to retain the semblance of the former living unity, as in the case of taxidermy). So, the soul is that by which the matter can be called a living whole: it is that by which the matter is generated and bound together in an internally purposive set of relations for the sake of the whole and its characteristic function.⁵ The characteristic function is the capacity of the soul to actualize its potential; its actualized potential is the activity (energeia) appropriate to the kind of living whole it is (entelecheia).⁶ In this way, the Aristotelian soul as the principle of life for a given form of life also becomes the normative standard for a thing to be considered flourishing according to its kind. A flourishing animal or person is just that which has actualized its potential, attaining those excellences corresponding to the kind of life activity appropriate to its species. Of course, external goods are also relevant: an otherwise healthy developing tree, deprived of water, will suffer; and humans deprived of friendship, education, etc. will likewise suffer substantial obstacles to flourishing as the kind of life form they are.

Immanuel Kant adopts a variation of Aristotelian teleology in his account of natural ends in the third Critique, but limits such teleological ideas of natural life forms to the status of regulative ideas of the reflecting power of judgment.⁷ This means that, in Kant’s view, to recognize purposive life forms of organisms is not to cognize a real principle of life in nature. Instead, the teleological principle, by which we judge an organic life form/organism according to an idea of the whole as a natural end, is a merely regulative principle for cognition. It cannot determine cognition of nature. To be regulative for experience means that it can rightly guide reflections, scientific methodologies, and bolster theories of nature, but it cannot be claimed to be an objectively valid truth of organic wholes.⁸ Put technically, the understanding must resist relying on such an idea as a determinate concept for experience. The purposive form whereby a material whole is treated as if it were cause and effect of itself is helpful, but can never be a genuine cognition of nature.⁹

Although Kant restricts the use of teleological judgments of nature in this way, he goes further and applies the basic principle of purposiveness to the transcendental faculties of the mind in a highly original way.¹⁰ Kant takes inner purposiveness to be both the unifying form of the transcendental faculties in free play¹¹ and also the form of reflecting judgment grounding the indeterminate but synthetic, universally valid uses of the subjective power of judgement about the beautiful and the sublime.¹² Instead of taking inner purposiveness to be merely the form of material wholes in life, he applies the fundamental idea of the Aristotelian principle of life to the faculties of the mind as a constitutive principle of the subjectively valid, reflecting power of judgment.¹³ This becomes the basis of his account of the hylomorphic relation of the faculties of the reflecting power of judgment, which he identifies as standing in a relation of perpetual productive play between the “free productive power of the imagination” and the “lawful determination of the understanding according to concepts.” He also suggests a further significance of this purposive power of the mind as a bridge between the domains of nature and freedom, or (which is the same) between the domains of theoretical cognition and morality.¹⁴

It is clear that Aristotle already applies his conception of the soul to the mind itself, which leads him to identify a “rational soul” as the capacity for rational excellences, including theoretical wisdom (sophia) and practical wisdom (phronēsis). Kant’s application of this conception to the faculties of the mind is thus not strictly speaking original. What is new with Kant is the hylomorphic conception of the transcendental faculties of the mind such that the synthesis, content, and self-determination of thought itself takes on a hylomorphic relation within the mind such that concepts and judgments can be the matter determined by higher order judgments and concepts as the form or principle of life. On this self-reflexive model, the higher-order network of judgments form a whole of the self-conscious, self-determining life of the mind.

In more basic terms, and somewhat problematically for Kant, concepts are the form and intuitions the matter in determining judgments that unify the two to form a cognition. Concerning inner purposiveness as the form of judgment in the free play of the understanding and the imagination, Kant speaks of this hylomorphic play, productively playing itself out to an indeterminate end (or purposiveness without a purpose) between the faculties themselves. The suggestion is that the imagination and the understanding are in mutual formation through play, which is productive and constitutive for the judging subject, yet merely regulative and non-determinative for cognition. In other words, Kant is offering something like a transcendental (i.e. non-substantial) conception of Aristotle’s soul as a principle identifying a fundamental unity of the mind and its ability to determine its own conceptual form.¹⁵ This self-determining capacity he calls “heautonomy.”¹⁶ There thus emerges in Kant a conception of purposiveness at the very heart of the unity of reason and its transcendental forms of judgment.¹⁷

Here the adoption of Aristotle’s principle of life takes a uniquely critical and transcendental turn, which arguably becomes central to such core Idealist concepts as Wechselwirkung (mutual formation or reciprocal determination of the mind as both the living form and the determinable matter of its own determinations) in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre. Wechselwirkung is for Fichte a kind of dialectical, productive play of ideal movements determining the bounds of the self-conscious I and, thereby, the systematic ground of knowledge.¹⁸ This move, which resembles aspects of Kant’s heautonomy, is an attempt to ground claims to knowledge, against the fundamental challenges of skepticism (namely, infinite regress, vicious circle, and arbitrary assumptions) through an inner formal principle. This formal principle of the I serves as a kind of ideal alternative to Aristotle’s soul, though much would need to be said to make that connection explicit and compelling. It is also not clear how beneficial such a connection would be to understanding Fichte in particular. Here, I will suggest merely that Fichte’s aim, particularly in his 1794 Wissenschaftslehre, is to identify a self-grounding ground for a system of knowledge. This pure movement and inner purposiveness, by which the productive outward movement of the I is self-related to its own reflection and limitation, is arguably a kind of hylomorphic principle at the core of his thought, as a form of self-conscious life grounding claims to knowledge. Of course, the gap between Fichte and Aristotle is substantial, and this is not an attempt to close that gap.

In Hegel we see something altogether new. Hegel explicitly embraces Aristotle’s conception of the soul as the principle of life. He regularly and freely discusses the systematic failure in the thought of most of his predecessors, even those he praises and holds in high regard, such as Kant, Goethe, and Aristotle. In light of this, it is striking that Aristotle receives the highest and most consistent praise in Hegel’s system. My point is not that Hegel is an Aristotelian; this would be to miss what he takes himself to achieve. Hegel is not interested in a return to pre-critical (even Aristotelian) metaphysics; rather, he takes himself to be continuing Kant’s important work and advancing it in order to overcome the fundamental failures internal to Kant’s own undertaking. His Development of a self-grounding critique, or what he calls science of thought, however, will result in a closer alignment of his philosophy with Aristotle's than is possible for Kant's idealism.

It is worth noting that Hegel lectured on Aristotle’s work nine times over the course of fifteen years, offering varying translations, particularly the De anima.¹⁹ At a key point in Hegel's system – namely at the outset of his encyclopedic Philosophy of Geist, which establishes the systematic place of ethics, art, religion, and philosophy within an absolute standpoint – Hegel writes:

The books of Aristotle on the Soul, along with his discussions on its special aspects and states, are for this reason still by far the most admirable, perhaps even the sole, work of true philosophical value on this topic [einzige Werk von speculativem Interesse über diesen Gegenstand]. The main aim [wesentliche Zweck] of a philosophy of Geist can only be to reintroduce [wieder einzuführen] a self-determining principle of life [Begriff]²⁰ into the theory of mind, and so reinterpret the lesson of those Aristotelian books.²¹

Aristotle’s conception of the soul is paramount to understanding Hegel’s Realphilosophie. Whatever the final analysis of the relationship between the nutritive, sensible, and rational souls, Hegel takes his own account of Geist to be an absolute whole that presupposes nutritive and sensible life as stages in the life growth of the whole.²² Geist as a rational, purposive whole is not a formal unity in contrast with the most basic form of material life, but rather the highest realization or actualization of nutritive wholes (such as a tree). This does not mean there is no meaningful distinction between kinds, but rather that that the purposive idea grounding the intelligibility of material wholes is subsumed in a higher, yet consonant kind of purposive whole: Geist. To this end, he writes, “for us, spirit has nature as its presupposition. It is the truth of nature, and, therefore, its absolute prius.”²³ As I have argued elsewhere,²⁴ we have to be careful when reading Hegel to attend to the place of these attributions. Within Hegel’s Realphilosophie, Aristotle’s conception of the soul is paramount.

It would be a mistake to too quickly interpolate this conception into his Wissenschaft der Logik, however.²⁵ The Logic is engaged in a deeply Kantian task of pursuing the inner necessity and universal validity of reason. It is an investigation into the self-emergent method(s) conditioning intelligibility. In my view – and I grant that this is a highly contestable point – the Logic aims to establish genuine metaphysics through its result (the Idea). The final three chapters of the Logic on the Idea (Idea of life, Idea of cognition, and Absolute Idea) are, alone, in my reading, those parts of the Logic that can be treated as metaphysics.²⁶ It is only after this has been accomplished (i.e. in the final three chapters of the Logic) that something like the Aristotelian idea of the soul can be admitted into a system of knowledge. This is why, I think, Hegel credits the logical principle of purposiveness to Kant in the teleological moment of the Logic, which directly precedes the concluding chapters on the Idea. To claim that Kant contributes inner purposiveness to philosophy is a striking attribution given the centrality of Aristotle’s purposiveness in his Realphilosophie.

Although this tribute to Kant would be surprising if we thought that Hegel was simply regurgitating Aristotle, it is less surprising when we remember that Hegel thinks that Kant’s critical philosophy marked an important turn in the development of self-consciousness toward a more adequate philosophical standpoint. Kant’s specific emphasis on synthetic a priori judgments as the vehicle for advancing cognition and reason is an important (though inadequate) step. In Hegel’s view, however, Kant failed to recognize the deeper inner purposiveness forming reason itself and unifying the parts of judgment and the forms of judgment into a living, systematic unity of self-consciousness. To this end, in the penultimate chapter of the Logic, on the “Idea of cognition,” Hegel writes:

Kant made the profound observation that there are synthetic principles [Grundsätzen] a priori, and he recognized as their root the unity of self-consciousness [als deren Wurzel die Einheit des Selbstbewußtseins], hence the self-identity of the concept. However, he takes the specific connection, the relational concepts [Verhältnißbegriffe] and the synthetic principles [synthetischen Grundsätze], from formal logic as given; the deduction [Deduction] of these should have been the exposition [Darstellung] of the transition of that simple unity of self-consciousness [Übergangs jener einfachen Einheit des Selbstbewußtseyns] into these determinations [Bestimmungen] and distinctions [Unterschide]; but Kant spared himself the effort of demonstrating this truly synthetic progression [wahrhaft synthetischen Fortgehens], that of the self-producing concept [selbst producirenden Begriffs].²⁷

A presuppositionless, pure science of thought reveals that intelligibility has a self-emergent purposive principle: the self-producing concept. This self-determining conceptual whole, which is most adequately summed up in the Idea as the result of the entire logical method, would be crudely and reductively likened to Aristotle’s soul. Nevertheless, the similarities to Aristotle's idea of the soul is readily visible in the idea of the logical method as a self-producing concept. What’s more, Hegel’s Logic ultimately affirms Aristotle’s fundamental conception of life and its insights regarding the soul as a principle of life (though with important modifications). He does this while holding that Kant is right to look to the pure forms of thought in order to distinguish dogma from genuine metaphysical necessity in judgment. Hegel is not interested in returning to pre-critical Aristotelian metaphysics. His Logic aims to establish, against the fundamental charges of skepticism – classically called the Agrippan Trilemma – the basis for claims to metaphysical truth.

If this is right, this means that the inner purposiveness that emerges throughout Hegel’s Logic will have much in common with Kant’s principle of purposiveness as the form of judgment, and Fichte’s principle of Wechselwirkung grounding the identity of the I whereby theoretical and practical knowledge are made possible.²⁸ In other words, Hegel is engaged in the deeply Idealist project of establishing the purposive conditions of reason for knowledge. Only in the conclusion of the Logic – that is, with the emergence and establishment of the Idea, which is the resultant “whole” of the Logic and also what emerges through the teleological conditions of intelligibility – does Hegel finally shift to “adequately” grounded metaphysical ideas. Subsequently, and throughout his Realphilosophie, he identifies such ideas as presupposing the Logic’s establishment of the Idea. With the Logic presupposed, Hegel takes himself to be able to embrace key insights from Aristotle’s conception of the soul as the principle of life without falling back into pre-critical, “dogmatic” metaphysics.

If this is right, then it is through a logical conception of purposiveness that Hegel’s Logic successfully establishes the basis for genuine metaphysics and so grounds his Realphilosophie against the Agrippan Trilemma. For this to be possible, the method of the Logic must be self-emergent as a self-determining inner necessity, much like an acorn sprouting and showing itself to be the emergence of an oak. In this purposive method, however, the Logic must retain its status as a “pure science,” meaning that the method depends on no presuppositions and proceeds only according to its own inner necessity from a presuppositionless starting point. Thus, even its own purposiveness cannot be presupposed but has to be proven from within itself. Much of how this self-emergent method of the “self-producing concept” proceeds is what gives Hegel’s Logic its peculiarly foreign (by most philosophical standards) and repetitive, yet life-like structure. If it does not retain this scientific status, it de facto falls prey to the very Agrippan Trilemma it sets out to answer while also overcoming the perceived failings of Kant’s two-aspect transcendental view of reason. This also means, however, that the Logic occupies a “non-real” and thereby “lesser” significance in one sense than the rest of his system, even though the rest of the system depends on it for its status as “scientific,” or genuinely metaphysical.

I will note just two of the unique applications Hegel makes of a purposive form of life as an adequate conception, or “truth,” of a whole. First – and perhaps surprisingly, though not when taken in light of his admiration of Goethe,²⁹ his friendship with Hölderlin,³⁰ and his substantial appreciation of the fine arts – Hegel departs from Kant and Aristotle by treating a work of fine art as if it has a principle of life. He sees art as a kind of living, organic whole:

The beautiful, on the other hand, exists as purposeful in itself, without means and end showing themselves separated as different aspects of it. The purpose of the limbs, for example, of an organism is the life which exists as actual in the limbs themselves [Das Schöne dagegen existiert als zweckmäßig in sich selbst, ohne daß Mittel und Zweck sich als verschiedene Seiten getrennt zeigen].³¹

On Hegel's view, excellence in fine art is not identified by a form of purposiveness as it was for Kant. It is not, as Aristotle held, a craft in which the matter is formed by the external idea of the artist as is the case for artifacts like buildings or clocks.³² Instead, the artwork is to be understood as “purposeful in itself,” where this means that its part-whole structure has an animating form that makes it formally like an organic whole. More directly, Hegel writes:

For only in this event does the content, as art requires [verlangt], become by means of the manner of its presentation an organic whole [die Art seiner Darstellung din organisches Ganzes] which gives in its parts the appearance of close connection and coherence and, in contrast to the world of mutual dependence [Abhängigkeit], stands there for its own sake and free on its own account [frei für sich nur um seiner selbst willen dasteht].³³

There is not space here to say more about why Hegel understands artworks as organic wholes, or why this facilitates their centrality to the formation of self-conscious life. Instead, my point here is merely that Hegel takes this fundamental conception of life to structure every aspect of his system of self-consciousness.

Second, Hegel treats ethical life in general according to this same fundamental conception of inner purposiveness. For example, in the Philosophy of Right, he writes,

The method whereby the concept, in science, develops out of itself and is merely an immanent progression and production of its own determinations is likewise assumed to be familiar from logic. [ … ] This dialectic, then, is not an external activity of subjective thought, but the very soul of the content [eigene Seele des Inhalts], which puts forth its branches and fruit organically [die organisch ihre Zweige und Früchte hervortreibt].³⁴

His actualization thesis, which is central to his ethics, adopts much from Aristotle’s conception of energeia (which Hegel translates as Tätigkeit) and entelecheia (which he translates as Wirksamkeit).³⁵ Similarly, forms of government, such as the “constitution” of a state, are best understood, he will argue, through their “organic function.”³⁶ The standpoint for understanding the growth, decay, failures, and successes of a constitution and its state are through appeal to that underlying purposive “life” form, which is not separate from the actualized instantiation of it. A constitutional state is to be judged, critiqued, and improved in light of precisely the same kind of broad normative standard by which we identify disease, health, or need in an animal or any other internally purposive whole.

He will, likewise, call institutions, cultures, and even reason in history internally purposive wholes. To be such a whole is no claim to linear progression of history or betterment in society. Growth and decay, formation and destruction, become intelligible in and through these wholes, precisely because of the kinds of internally purposive, living wholes that they are. Hegel’s widespread application of this conception of life to diverse kinds of wholes is not a romantic flourish, or inexactitude, or the result of a mystical monism; it is the result of the underlying ground in the logical idea, which had (within his system) shown itself to be the imminent form of intelligibility, which grounds itself through its own inner method of self-determining in and for itself. It is this essential method of life, this purposive method, that structures, and emerges in, every aspect of life, whereby reason is justified in laying claim to knowledge. This knowledge thus becomes, just as it did for Aristotle, the normative ground for assessing the adequacy/excellence of the individual living being or whole.

Within the philosophy of nature of each of the Idealists, a conception of life as an inner purposiveness is central to distinguishing the kinds, yet also in uniting those kinds into a broader holism of nature and reason. For example, Schelling, in his philosophy of nature, hypothesizes a unifying and purposive organizing principle which gives rise to both the inorganic and organic structure in nature as a whole.³⁷ Though not directly influenced by Aristotle, Schelling can be productively read in the context of corresponding principles of organic unity of his contemporaries. Influenced by Plato’s conception of unity,³⁸ he goes further than Aristotle (or indeed any of the Idealists) with his application of purposiveness to nature as a whole.³⁹ Nevertheless, his variation is helpfully read in the context of the wide-reaching Aristotelian roots among the competing systems of his contemporaries. In short, the concept of life is centrally formative for the Idealists, though it takes on a different meaning in each of their systems. As a result, a complete study of this concept within Idealism requires a close analysis of each variation of idealism independently and in its entirety.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Alfredo Ferrarin, Naomi Fisher, Chris Frey, Anton Kabeshkin, and Ian Drummond for their helpful feedback on this paper. I am grateful to acknowledge the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (Potsdam/Berlin) and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (JGU Mainz) for their support of my work.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gerad Gentry

Gerad Gentry works on the mereology of purposiveness in aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics, with special emphasis on Kant and Hegel. He is a member of the philosophy faculty at Lewis University, associate to Germanic studies at the University of Chicago, DAAD visiting Professor of Philosophy at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (fall 2021) and Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung research fellow at Potsdam and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2020-22).

Notes

1 All citations of Aristotle are to the Barnes translation of the Complete Works of Aristotle. All citations of Kant are to the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften edition of Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften. All citations of Hegel are to the Nordrhein-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste edition of Hegel’s Gesammelte Werke.

2 Aristotle, De anima II.4, 415b26–8.

3 Aristotle, Meteorology IV.12, 390. For a helpful account of Aristotle’s “homonomy principle” drawn from several of Aristotle’s works, see Frey, “Organic Unity and the Matter of Man,” 168–71.

4 For more on these three parts of the soul in Aristotle and their relation to Hegel’s thought, see Ferrarin (2007), 249.

5 As Frey argues, ensouled matter is not the same for Aristotle as unified matter of an inorganic artifact according to its form (169). A House has matter identifiable a part from the specific form that unites the whole. By contrast, with a living, organic whole, the matter is generative through the principle of the whole, such that it does not make sense to speak of the matter as something external on which the soul as form is impressed. Such artifactual hylomorphism is not a living hylomorphism and can be called an organic unity only homonymosly (198, 202).

6 Aristotle, De anima II.1, 412a27–8.

7 See Kant’s account of the inner purposiveness of natural ends, 5:367–7.

8 For Kant’s discussion of the regulative validity of the idea of purposiveness applied to organic wholes as natural ends, see the second introduction 20.218 and KU 5:360–1; for more on Kant’s regulative idea of purposiveness for teleological judgments, see Zuckert, 91–129.

9 It is worth noting that Kant’s discussion of the soul as a regulative principle of reason in his first Critique bears less in common with the Aristotelian principle of life than his conception of purposiveness in the third Critique. For more on Kant’s conception of the soul, see Kraus, 272 and n. 6.

10 I am emphasizing the third Critique here due to space constraints, but there is an important connection with Kant’s hylomorphic conception of conceptual form, intuitional matter, and the possibility of concepts and judgments themselves serving as the matter for further judgments. For a thorough and compelling account of Kant’s transcendental hylomorphism, see Pollok, 117–93. See also Engstrom’s account of the understanding and sensibility in Kant’s theory of cognition as the form and matter of a single whole, 3–4.

11 Inner purposiveness here is distinguishable from external purposiveness in that the end is the concept of the whole itself and it is not an objective unity, but rather a “formal purposiveness,” which is a subjective principle of unity as formal ground of the “heautonomy” of the judging subject (20.225).

12 20.221. This purposiveness of the faculties of the mind “depends on the relation in which we would place the imagination: namely, that it entertain the mind by itself in free activity” (5:270), and its free activity in aesthetic judgments is the result of its function “as productive and self-active (as the authoress of voluntary forms of possible intuitions)” (5:240). For more on the free-play of the faculties as a law, see Förster, 127–8; Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 49, 187–8. There is, of course, the additional and more commonly discussed conception of purposiveness in the third Critique as the form of the beautiful object: “Beauty is the form of the purposiveness of an object, insofar as it is perceived in it without representation of an end” (5:236).

13 5:346. “A general ground for the subjective purposiveness of nature for the power of judgment” (5:346). Zuckert gives a helpful objectivist account of purposiveness without a purpose as characterizing the judging activity (305), and an account of purposiveness as the principle describing the harmony of the faculties (279); compare with Hannah Ginsborg’s empirical account of transcendental purposiveness, and my summary of Ginsborg’s account (Gentry, 115–7).

14 20:202, 5:353.

15 Katharina Kraus gives a helpful account of the soul in Kant’s theory of personhood, arguing that it is a regulative coherence norm of the mental whole conditioning self-knowledge (272–6). She suggests that it serves in this way as a kind of context for intelligibility in lieu of a cognizable metaphysical substance underlying the unity of the mental powers. I agree with Kraus here and would go further: the third Critique begins to blur the line as a result of the newly introduced self-determining (heautonomy) of the mind, a new kind of universal authority parallel to autonomy and spontaneity. In the case of heautonomy, the authority of reason is in its self-reflexive subjectively valid, universal determinations of the judging subject itself (i.e. self-formation). This shift in the third Critique is picked up by the post-Kantian idealists and becomes one of the major influences in their own variations of Idealism.

16 20:225, 5:186. Pollok, 279–85.

17 For a similar view, see Ng, 61–62.

18 Fichte, 135, 142–4, 279.

19 Ng,Hegel’s Concept of Life, offers one of the very finest accounts of Hegel’s conception of life and its centrality to his system of philosophy. For my review and critique of Ng’s account, see Gentry, “Hegel’s Concept.” Concerning the systematic role of Aristotle in Hegel’s philosophy, I know of no resource more thoroughly and superbly executed than Ferrarin, Hegel and Aristotle. For Ferrarin’s account of Hegel and Kant (2019), see the symposium reviews Clinton Tolley and Tobias Rosefeldt and his response (2020).

20 There is a particular challenge translating this last line. I have translated Begriff here as “self-determining principle of life” for two reasons. First, “Begriff” in the context of this passage directly references Aristotle’s soul, hence a formative principle of life. Second, the location of Begriff/Concept here at the outset of the Philosophy of Spirit is not the Begriff of the Logic or of the Philosophy of Nature, but rather a higher conceptual adequacy that contains the other two as sublated in its own method and actuality. That is a key part of the systematic story of the Encyclopedia as a whole. So, the term occupies a unique space in this passage that is challenging to translate. Wallace translates Begriff here as “unity of idea and principle,” §378. Alternatively, one might translate it directly as concept and then explain what it means.

21 Hegel, Geist, 20.380.

22 See Ferrarin on Hegel’s interpretation of Aristotle’s nutritive soul, animal soul, and rational soul: Ferrarin, 250.

23 Hegel, Encyclopedia, §381.

24 Gentry, “The Ground,” 167–9.

25 Pippin, 243; Kreines, 375. For my discussion of Pippin and Kreines on Hegel’s logic of life and teleology and my critique of interpolation with regard to the scientific method of the Logic, see Gentry, “The Ground,” 157–63.

26 The debate of whether to read the Logic as metaphysical or non-metaphysical has a long and well-known history. My suggestion here stands outside that tradition in the following sense: the Logic cannot be taken as metaphysical until it reaches a stage in its self-emergent proof such that metaphysical ideas are valid without falling prey to the charges of skepticism or returning to pre-critical metaphysics. At the same time, Hegel clearly has metaphysics in view in the result. In short, I think the metaphysical/epistemological debate is an unhelpful dichotomy that obscures Hegel’s fundamental and repeatedly stated effort to establish genuine ideas through a pure science of thought that presupposes nothing in its self-emergent method; the Logic is the “exposition” (Darstellung) of the truly “self-producing concept” (selbst producirenden Begriffs) (12.205).

27 Hegel, Logic, 12.205.

28 Cf. Horstmann’s 1984 account of inner relation structuring self-consciousness in what Horstmann calls Hegel’s “ontological monism.”

29 For an account of Goethe on art that I take to accord with Hegel’s, see Wellbery, 16–31, 72–3. Förster draws a direct connection between the two on intuitive understanding, 360–2.

30 For an account of the relevant similarities (and differences) between Hölderlin and Hegel, see Henrich, “Hölderlin über Urteil und Sein,” 74; Henrich, Hegel im Kontext, 39.

31 A.I 68.

32 Some might argue that Aristotle’s Poetics identifies a “soul” of drama or tragedy. It seems to me, however, that this is an example of a soul only homonymously in his view.

33 A.II 332–3.

34 14.1, 47.

35 For more on Hegel’s translation of Aristotle over the years, see Ferrarin, 248. For an account of the Aristotelian roots of Hegel’s ethics, see Novakovic’s 2018 account of habituation. For one of the finest accounts of Hegel’s actualization thesis – which, as I have suggested, is deeply (though not explicitly) indebted to Aristotle’s hylomorphic conception of the soul as the principle of life – see Alznauer, 36–7. Pippin sees greater affinity to Fichte than to Aristotle here (62–4), but see also Alznauer’s response to Pippin (30–1), which I think is right: Hegel’s method is thoroughly idealist, but most of his core conclusions are deeply Aristotelian.

36 PR, §316-A.

37 For a particularly fine, accessible, and inciteful account of Schelling’s conception of the world soul and the layers of organization including organic and inorganic are iterative from the underlying principle of organization, see Fisher, “The Unity of Nature,” 236–49.

38 For an account that brings Plato and Aristotle interpretively closer on the topic of teleology than is commonly held, see Sedley, “Teleology, Aristotelian and Platonic,” 5–29.

39 Schelling, HKA 1/5, 211; Ideas 174. For instance, Nassar argues that Schelling at times seemingly abandons a strict distinction between living and non-living by deriving mechanistic forces of nature, a reading she draws chiefly from his 1797 Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, 219–30. For a contrasting reading to Nassar’s, see Fisher, 236. Although Schelling’s philosophy of nature is arguably more influenced by a broadly Platonic conception of unity, the points of productive comparison reach to the heart of the Aristotelian roots in his contemporaries. As Franks argues of Schelling, “the very same principle which underlies the natural scientific investigation of the organic–i.e., the soul as an organizing principle–should also underlie the investigation of the mechanical” (83). Franks also traces Schelling’s philosophy of nature to the Kabbalistic tradition.