Hegel’s anti-reductionist account of organic nature

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship has analyzed Hegel’s account of life in the Logic in some detail and has suggested that Hegel provides ways of thinking about organic phenomena that might still be fruitful for us today. However, it failed to clearly distinguish this account from Hegel’s discussion of natural organisms in his Philosophy of Nature and to assess the latter philosophically. In particular, it has not yet been properly discussed that some things that Hegel says about organic phenomena there suggest that his position is objectionably vitalist in that he believes investigating physical and chemical properties of organisms is irrelevant for understanding organic phenomena. I argue that Hegel’s core account of life does not imply this sort of a vitalist position. While some claims Hegel makes suggest that he believed inorganic sciences to be of no relevance for understanding organic phenomena, his core position is that they are merely not sufficient for the full understanding of such phenomena. From this discussion I draw a further consequence that the multi-level structure of nature presented in the Philosophy of Nature points to different properties of natural objects, rather than to distinct domains of objects.

KEYWORDS:

• Hegel
• philosophy of nature
• anti-reductionism
• life
• teleology
• vitalism

1. Introduction

Hegel’s account of life in the Science of Logic has received some sustained philosophical attention in recent years.¹ Scholars have done much both to clarify Hegel’s position and arguments and to argue that Hegel’s position might still be fruitful for thinking about the currently discussed problems in philosophy of biology. His account of natural organisms in the Philosophy of Nature, on the other hand, have not received a comparable philosophical treatment yet, although materials from the Philosophy of Nature are often interpolated into discussions of the Science of Logic.² As a result, the distinction between the logical and the natural philosophical accounts of life in Hegel has not yet been made clear, and the latter account itself has not been sufficiently analyzed.

In this paper, I will take steps towards rectifying both problems. In particular, I aim to provide a general discussion of the distinction of the logical and the natural philosophical analyses of the concept of life in Hegel, and then address a specific problem related to the latter concept. The problem is that some things Hegel says about specifically organic phenomena seem to suggest that Hegel denies that sciences of the inorganic phenomena are capable of contributing towards our understanding of organic processes, thus espousing an objectionable form of vitalism.³ Now, today it is beyond doubt that inorganic sciences are important for understanding organic phenomena. If Hegel’s account implies a denial of this, this diminishes philosophical relevance of his account of living organisms. At the very least, in this case, his account of life in the Logic should be detached from his discussion of organisms in the Philosophy of Nature in order to preserve its relevance. While the latter course of action could be viable, Hegel himself certainly considered his philosophy of nature to be an integral part of his philosophical system. Because of this, we should jettison it only if other alternatives are not available.

I believe that another alternative is available. In this paper, I argue that a more attentive look at Hegel’s discussion in the Philosophy of Nature shows that the core of Hegel’s account of natural organisms is not objectionably vitalistic in the sense discussed. Rather, Hegel defends an anti-reductionist position, according to which, although it is possible to apply sciences of the inorganic to our study of organisms, this would not suffice to understand what is specific about organic phenomena and what makes organisms what they are. This position is grounded in Hegel’s account of what it is to be a living individual in the Logic and of what it is to be a natural organism in the Philosophy of Nature. Although some of the claims about the limitations of the sciences of the inorganic in application to organisms that Hegel makes are no longer defensible today, we can very well separate such claims from Hegel’s core position in both the Logic and in the Philosophy of Nature. Addressing this problem will also clarify the meaning of Hegel’s doctrine that nature has a structure that is articulated into several levels. The fact that both sciences of the inorganic and sciences of the organic can be applied to the study of organisms according to Hegel shows that these levels of nature do not apply to anything like non-intersecting domains (which, as organisms belong to one such level, that discussed in the “Organic Physics” section of the Philosophy of Nature, would imply vitalism).⁴ Rather, they demarcate sets of properties that a single object can have (although only organisms have all of them, as only they have organic properties), such that we can abstract, say, from the characteristic properties of organisms, and consider them as merely mechanical or physical objects. Doing this, however, prevents us from understanding precisely that which makes organisms what they are.

In the first section, I sketch the different positions on the status of organic phenomena that were developed in philosophy and natural science by the early nineteenth century: reductionism, vitalism (metaphysical and methodological), Kantian agnosticism, and non-vitalist anti-reductionism. I will also provide the passages from Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature that suggest his position to be vitalist. In the second section, I provide a brief account of Hegel’s core position on life, starting from a brief summary of his discussion in the Logic and expanding it by looking at the way the logical idea of life is realized in nature. Finally, in the third section, I argue that Hegel’s considered position involves only the claim that sciences of the inorganic are not sufficient to understand the phenomena of life, not that they are completely irrelevant to this task. I also develop more general considerations about Hegel’s philosophy of nature on the basis of this discussion.

2. Is Hegel a vitalist?

During the course of the eighteenth century, it became increasingly difficult to explain the properties of organisms within the mechanistic framework that dominated sciences earlier. Kant provides a nice overview of such properties in the famous discussion in the second part of the Critique of Judgment, in which he explicitly suggests that organisms pose a challenge to any attempt to provide mechanical explanations for all phenomena. In §64 of that work, Kant identifies the self-reproducing features of organisms manifested in nourishment, growth, self-maintenance, and reproduction as that which occasions the introduction of his concept of Naturzweck. These features have in fact posed a problem for all natural scientists and philosophers of the period.⁵ We can distinguish five different responses to this problem.⁶

1. Reductionism (espoused at the time by, for example, Johann Christian Reil) holds that, although organisms are more complex than inorganic substances, they are nevertheless fully explicable in terms of laws and principles which operate in inorganic nature.

2. By contrast, metaphysical vitalism (espoused by a number of researchers from Stahl to Bichat to the early Alexander von Humboldt) holds organisms to be inexplicable in these terms and thus drastically diminishes the relevance of inorganic sciences to our understanding of organic phenomena. Typically, vitalists of this kind postulated some special forces or drives that are only operative in organisms and not in the rest of nature.

3. The Kantian position is similar to metaphysical vitalism in that, according to this position, we can never explain organisms insofar as they are organized using the “merely mechanical principles of nature”; he thus famously claimed that there may never “arise a Newton who could make comprehensible even the generation of a blade of grass according to natural laws that no intention has ordered.”⁷ However, Kant restricted this inability to the cognitive subjects like us with discursive understanding and remained agnostic as to whether the principles behind organisms and inorganic matter might coincide in the supersensible substrate of nature or for subjects with different kinds of cognitive capacities.⁸

4. Methodological vitalism is similar to this Kantian position in its practical consequences but, unlike Kant, it is provisional in its attitude. It does not make strong claims to the effect that organic phenomena can never be explained in accordance with laws and principles of inorganic nature by us, but only asserts this impossibility at a given state of the development of science. It may thus use concepts such as “vital force” or “formative drive” heuristically, and attempts to discern regularities in organic phenomena without attempting to reduce them to inorganic phenomena and their principles.⁹

5. Finally, anti-reductionism agrees with metaphysical vitalism that the peculiar features of organisms are inexplicable by reference to inorganic laws and principles, but does not ground this inexplicability in sui generis vital forces or principles. In this view, inorganic laws and principles do operate in organisms, but there are also holistic properties of organisms and of their interactions with their environments that are not reducible to the former. According to this position, studying organic processes and interactions at, say, mechanical or chemical levels, may be helpful but not sufficient for understanding what is special about them.¹⁰

Now, what was Hegel’s position on this matter? At some places in his discussion of natural organisms in the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel makes claims that not only seem indefensible today but also commit him to something like metaphysical vitalism. Especially in his discussion of the assimilation process, one can find claims which seem to reject the relevance of inorganic sciences for understanding organic processes altogether:

It is on this immediate transition and transformation that all chemical and mechanical explanations of the organism founder and find their limit. […] Try as they will, neither chemistry nor mechanics can trace empirically the transformation of the nutriment into blood. Chemistry certainly displays something similar in both of them; albumen perhaps, and certainly iron and suchlike, as well as oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen etc. It will certainly extract matters from the plant that are also present in water. Wood, blood and flesh do not remain the same thing as these matters however, because, quite simply, both sides are at the same time something else. Blood which has been broken down into such constituents is no longer living blood. It is quite impossible to trace similarity any further and to find continuity here, for the existing substance completely disappears.¹¹

The “transition and transformation” that Hegel is talking about here is transformation or digestion of the materials that living organisms consume. Although in this passage he admits that one can analyze blood, flesh, wood, and other organic substances into their components chemically, he seems to say that such procedures do not give us understanding of the organic substances analyzed. Moreover, he says that the transformation that happens in the assimilation process is not explicable either mechanically or chemically. At other places, Hegel makes claims to the effect that this organic transformation of the consumed materials happens, or at least can happen, in an “immediate” way, without mediation by a chain of intermediate steps. To be more precise, he says that such an immediate transformation, or “infection,” of the inorganic into (or by) organic happens in plants, in contrast to animals: “The physiology of the plant appears as necessarily more obscure than that of the animal body, because it is simpler, its assimilation passes through fewer intermediate steps, and transformation occurs as immediate infection.”¹² Furthermore, in the addition to the next section, Hegel writes that this “immediate infection” is even something opposed to the merely chemical workings:

Finally, the other side of this is the process itself, the activity within the first determination of the plant, universal life. This is the formal process of simply immediate transformation, this infection, as the infinite power of life. Living being is something stable and determinate in and for itself. By coming into conflict with it, external chemical influence is immediately transformed. Consequently, any undue encroachment by chemical action is immediately mastered by living being, which preserves itself through its contact with another.¹³

Hegel thus seems to be saying that assimilation of what is taken in by plants (e.g. of nutrients and water) happens not via chemical reactions that are subject to the same laws of chemistry as chemical reactions that happen in the rest of nature but, rather, immediately, simply through contact with organic matter. This seems to drastically separate the plant kingdom from inanimate nature, in a way characteristic of vitalism.

As far as animals are concerned, Hegel does acknowledge that their digestion happens through multiple intermediate steps in which various internal organs participate. Nevertheless, he also seems to think that these intermediate steps are not really needed for the assimilation of the inorganic materials as such.¹⁴ For Hegel, the articulation into these intermediate steps is, rather, merely the consequence of the complex organization of the animal itself, not a necessary presupposition for assimilation of the materials taken in:

If organic being, as purpose, does gradually bring inorganic being into identity with itself by means of the particular moments, then these extensive digestive preparations by means of various organs are certainly superfluous for inorganic being. The course of organic being within itself still takes place however, in order that organic being itself may constitute movement, and so have actuality.¹⁵

Moreover, Hegel says that, even in animals, the “immediate infection” that he was talking about in his discussion of plants takes place and is an essential moment of the assimilation process:

The main moment in digestion is the immediate action of life as the power over its inorganic object. […] This action is infection and immediate transformation; it corresponds to the immediate seizure of the object pointed out in the exposition of purposive activity (§ 208). – The experiments of Spallanzani and others, as well as more recent physiology, have also demonstrated the immediacy with which living being as a universal, without further mediation, employing no other means than simple contact and the taking up of nutriment into its heat and its own sphere in general, maintains its continuity within this nutriment. These researches have been carried out empirically, and have shown that the facts are in accordance with the Notion – contrary to the idea that digestion functions as a purely mechanical secretion and excretion of parts which are ready for use, or as a chemical process.¹⁶

As we can see from this passage, in accepting this immediate transformation of foodstuffs and other materials taken in from outside, Hegel thought himself justified by the results of the recent scientific research.¹⁷

These points, together with Hegel’s claim to the effect that the motion of blood in the organism is not explicable mechanically,¹⁸ sometimes raise suspicions that Hegel’s position was, if not simply vitalistic, at least very close to vitalism.¹⁹ In what follows, I will, first, outline my reading of Hegel’s general position on natural organisms. I will then consider the charge of vitalism and assess whether Hegel’s more objectionable claims are tied to his core account of organic phenomena.

3. Hegel’s account of logical and natural life

In my reading, in the Subjective Logic, the third part of his Science of Logic, Hegel provides an account of different structures of object, in particular, of the mechanical object, of the chemical object, of the living individual, and of the cognitive and practical agent.²⁰ The embodiments of these structures are then discussed and further specified in Hegel’s Realphilosophie. As we are here interested in Hegel’s position on life, I will first provide a very brief summary of his account of life in the Logic, and then discuss its specification in the Philosophy of Nature discussion of natural organisms.

The logical idea of life is constituted by three processes: that of the living individual, the living process, and Gattungprozess, or the process of the kind. In my reading, Hegel develops these moments of the logical idea without relying on any empirical material from biology.²¹ The process of the living individual is itself constituted by two drives, the drive for differentiation and the drive to integrate the diverse or, in Hegel’s words, “the specific drive of the particular difference, and [ … ] the one universal drive of the specific, which brings this specification back into unity and preserves it there.”²² Similarly to Kant’s Naturzweck, Hegel’s living individual is a purposive unity, in which every member is both a means and an end for every other member. Furthermore, Hegel distinguishes the moments of sensibility, irritability, and reproduction, which correspond to the moments of universality, particularity, and singularity of the living individual. In the discussion of sensibility, he points out that any determination imposed on the living individual from outside gets integrated into its unity because of the unifying drive that partially constitutes the living individual. Irritability corresponds to the ability of the living individual to act upon external material, and reproduction corresponds to the integration of that material into the living individual (again, due to its unifying drive).

The relation between the living individual and that which is external to it is further elaborated in the discussion of what Hegel calls living process in the Logic. Here, Hegel considers both the action of an external object upon the living individual and the outward activity of the living individual. The important point about the first is closely related to what Hegel says about sensibility: because the living individual absorbs and integrates the effects of external objects upon it, it is not simply causally determined by them. Rather, it responds to their action in accordance with its own nature:

Insofar as the object is at first an indifferent externality with respect to the living, it can act on it mechanically; but in this way it acts on it not as on something living; insofar as it relates itself to the living, it acts not as a cause, but rather the object excites it. Since the living is drive, the externality comes to and into it only insofar as it already in and for itself is in it.²³

The important point about the outward activity of the living individual is that, because the non-living objects are indifferent to their determinations, they do not have the power to resist the activity of the living and to preserve themselves against this activity. For example, for the mechanical object, it is indifferent which particular determinations it has. Because of this, there are no mechanical factors which work specifically against the activity of the living individual; the latter is capable of imposing determinations appropriate to it on mechanical objects, although, to be sure, its interactions with the latter are constrained by mechanical laws. Similar considerations apply, mutatis mutandis, to the interactions of the living individual with chemical objects.²⁴ Thus, the living individual is capable of, so to speak, transforming what is external to it in its own image.

The third moment of the logical idea of life is Gattungprozess. Hegel’s discussion of this moment in the Logic is rather cryptic. While at the logical level he cannot be concerned with anything as specific as sexual propagation, it seems clear that Hegel at least distinguishes the relationship between two individuals of the same kind from the relationship between the living individual and objects that are, in Hegel’s language, indifferent to it. Although we certainly get more details in the Philosophy of Nature, in the Logic it is clear that the relationship between two individuals of the same kind must be something different from imposing one’s own image onto external objects, at the very least because now the other, with which a living individual stands in the relationship, already has that image.

Now, natural organisms are embodiments of the idea of life. They are thus constituted by the natural-philosophical specifications of the logical processes discussed above, namely by the process of formation of individual bodies (Gestaltungsprozess), the process of assimilation, and the process of the kind. The first process is that of forming the body of a determinate structure and shape that is determined by its kind or species. The latter plays the role similar to that of Aristotelian form, as can be seen from passages in which Hegel uses markedly Aristotelian language:

On the other hand, living being is also the shape which has substantial form dwelling within it. This form is not only determinative on account of the spatial relationships of the separate parts, but is also the productive restlessness which determines the process of physical properties in order to bring forth shape.²⁵

This process differs as to the strength of its constituent drives of differentiation and integration in animals and plants (as well as between different animals). As in the Logic, here Hegel also considers the moments of sensibility, irritability, and reproduction, which he identifies with different systems within the organism (Hegel points out that plants and lower animals might not have dedicated systems for all these moments, which is due to their generally lower degree of differentiation).

As in the Logic, but now much more concretely, Hegel considers natural organisms as functionally integrated purposive wholes, although, unlike in the Logic (and, indeed, in opposition to Kant), Hegel explicitly denies that everything in natural organisms must be purposive.²⁶ Still, Hegel believed that the results of the contemporary science, especially those delivered by comparative anatomy, provided ample empirical confirmation to this concept of the integrated functional whole.²⁷

The second moment of organic life, the process of assimilation, accounts for the ability of living organisms to take in the materials from the outside and to assimilate them. As we have seen in Section I, it is particularly the discussion of this process that gave occasion to most of Hegel’s claims that raise the suspicion of vitalism. Accordingly, in the next section, while addressing this suspicion, I will focus on this process. Just as it was with the process of formation, the particularities of assimilation depend on the species to which the organism belongs: the organism selects the matter to assimilate in accordance with its specific needs, and then assimilates the matter it takes in into its own organic materials, both the latter and the needs of the organism being determined by its species:

The drive is completely determinate in particular animals; each animal has as its own only a restricted range of inorganic nature, which is its own domain, and which it must seek out by instinct from its complex environment. […] The animal can be stimulated only by means of its inorganic nature, because for the animal, the only opposite is its own. The animal does not recognize the other in general, for each animal recognizes its own other, which is precisely an essential moment of the special nature of each.²⁸

Here, Hegel points out that only those things in the world that correspond to the nature of the animal itself work as a stimulus for it, so that the rest of nature is not even there for the animal.²⁹ What counts as a stimulus for the organism depends on the nature of that organism, and that nature is determined by its species.

Now, Hegel points out that, because the organism reproduces itself in the process of assimilation, it shows itself as the product of itself or, in his terminology, as mediated by this process and not as something immediate, as it was initially considered to be in the process of formation.³⁰ Thus, the relation of the organism to its environment mediates its relation to itself. This leads Hegel to the thought that something identical to the organism,, as far as its Gattung or kind is concerned, can also be encountered in its environment, and he thus makes the transition to the third moment of organic life, the Gattungprozess (here I do not attempt to reconstruct the precise argument underlying this transition): “The third relationship, which is the union of the first two, is the generic process [Gattungprozess], in which the animal relates itself to itself by relating itself to one of its kind.”³¹

Hegel’s treatment of the Gattungprozess is complicated, involving discussions of the taxonomy of living organisms, their propagation, as well as the necessary inadequacy of individual organisms with respect to their kind, which manifests in disease and, ultimately, death of those individual organisms. In these discussions, the term Gattung seems to play different roles: sometimes (e.g. in the discussion of sexual propagation) it seems to refer to the biological species, and sometimes (as in the discussion of taxonomy) it clearly refers to larger taxonomic groups. Fortunately, these complications are not important for our concerns in this paper. What is of significance here is only that the species determines the specific way in which the organism is functionally integrated and the specific ways in which it interacts with its environment.

4. Hegel between vitalism and reductionism

Now, the important thing is that, although the properties discussed above belong to natural organisms insofar as they are organisms, and thus are something higher than what belongs to matter qua merely mechanical or chemical, the organisms possess these latter, too. The question is: How should we conceive the relationship between the properly organic and the mechanical or chemical features that natural organisms possess in Hegel’s system?

In my reading, quite generally in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, considering objects only insofar as they have certain properties that are situated lower in Hegel’s hierarchy (which proceeds from the mechanical properties through various physical and chemical properties to the organic properties discussed above) means considering them in an abstract manner, apart from their higher-level properties which are, for Hegel, not reducible to the lower-level properties and are not explicable in their terms. For inorganic bodies this means that, say, their electrical, magnetic, or chemical properties are neither reducible to nor fully explicable in terms of mechanical properties. Therefore, the mechanicist approach is insufficient even for the study of inorganic bodies. For organic bodies, this means that their functional integrity, their specific ways of interacting with their environment, and their propagation are neither reducible to nor fully explicable in terms of the properties which they share with inorganic bodies. This by itself shows that a study of organisms that focuses on their lower-level properties is not fully irrelevant for understanding them; it is just that such a study is not sufficient for the full understanding of them.

Although I cannot defend this reading in its full scope here, I will now provide evidence that it is this doctrine, and not an objectionable form of metaphysical vitalism, that lies behind most of Hegel’s claims about the limitations of mechanical, physical, and chemical research into organic phenomena (as we have seen, some other claims that seem no longer defensible are actually borrowed by Hegel from the scientific literature of his time). I start with this programmatic claim:

The natural sciences fall into the greatest confusion when these differences are overlooked. The attempt is made to put everything on the same level. Everything can of course be treated from a chemical point of view, but everything can also be treated from a mechanical point of view, or as electricity. When bodies are treated at one stage, this does not exhaust the nature of other bodies however, as for example when vegetable or animal bodies are treated chemically.³²

Here, Hegel does not deny that we can study organisms chemically or even mechanically, as he sometimes appears to. He merely says that if we do just that, we miss important aspects of them, we “do not exhaust” their nature. In his most sustained discussions of the assimilation process, Hegel makes similar points: we can analyze organic processes characteristic for organic bodies chemically but, if we do only that, we miss important aspects of these processes and bodies. The most important aspect of the assimilation process, for Hegel, is not the chemical transformations of the substances as such. Rather, the important thing is that these substances become integrated into the unified processes characteristic of the organism, or, as Hegel puts it:

The process begins with the mechanical seizure of the external object. Assimilation itself is the changing of the externality into the unity of the subject. Since the animal is a subject, a simple negativity, the nature of this assimilation can be neither mechanical nor chemical, for in these processes, the substances, as well as the conditions and the activity, remain external to one another, and lack an absolute and living unity.³³

This “unity of the subject” or “absolute and living unity” is the unity of the living organism that is especially characteristic of higher animals but to some extent shows itself in plants and lower animals as well. The main point that Hegel is making here is that, once we focus only on the level of individual chemical processes, we lose sight of the larger context, in which we can see that the transformed materials start playing certain functions within the organism, become purposive for its organs and systems; in short, get integrated into the organism. Similarly, when Hegel says that the function of blood cannot be explained purely chemically, for example, as a carrier of oxygen,³⁴ the main point is that an explanation in such terms alone ignores the function of blood in the context of the organism as a whole, in its preservation.

Now, it is true that Hegel seems to also think that not only this broader organic context is missed whenever we focus solely on the lower-level explanations, but also that some of the transformations of the materials taken in themselves can be neither explained nor reproduced by us chemically.³⁵ I will now provide the passage in which Hegel expounds his position on the reductionist treatment of organisms at length. In this discussion, both kinds of reasons for his dissatisfaction with such a treatment are provided and, indeed, stand next to each other:

For a long time now, it has been the fashion to give a mechanical explanation of the process of assimilation and of the circulation of the blood. […] Use has recently been made of chemical relationships, but assimilation cannot be susceptible of a chemical interpretation either, for in living being we have a subject which maintains itself and negates the specific nature of the other, whereas the acid and alkaline being of the chemical process loses its quality, and either sinks into the neutral product of a salt, or reverts to an abstract radical. In this case, the activity is extinguished, whereas the animal is the persistent unrest within self-relatedness. Digesting may certainly be grasped as a neutralization of acid and alkali: it is correct to say that such finite relationships begin in life, but life interrupts them, and brings forth a product which is not chemism. […] These finite relationships may be pursued to a certain point therefore, but then quite another order begins. A chemical analysis of the brain will certainly reveal a good deal of nitrogen, just as an analysis of exhaled air will reveal constituents other than those of the air that is breathed in. One is therefore able to trace the chemical process, even analyze separate parts of a living being. It should not be assumed however, that the processes themselves are chemical, for chemical being only accommodates that which is lifeless, whereas the animal processes are perpetually sublating the nature of chemical being. There is plenty of scope for tracing and indicating the mediations which occur in living being and in the meteorological process, but this mediation is not to be reproduced.³⁶

Here we see that: (1) Hegel’s position assigns some value to the purely chemical study of organisms (or, more generally, to the study of organisms with the methods of inorganic sciences); (2) Hegel’s main point, however, is that such a study by itself does not allow us to understand the organic as that which preserves itself in its interaction with its environment; (3) finally, Hegel also insists that “the animal processes sublate the nature of the chemical,” and that the transformations characteristic of life cannot be reproduced by us. It is point (3) that can be justifiably criticized from the contemporary standpoint, and some historical explanation for Hegel’s acceptance of such a view is surely to be found in the fact that organic chemistry had not yet been really developed during his lifetime.³⁷ His point (2), though, has its force independently of (3), and some variation of it has to be defended by anyone who believes, for example, that the concepts such as that of function are ineliminable from our study of life and are not of a merely pragmatic use for cognitive subjects like us.

In order to defend his thesis (2), Hegel does not need to rely on any vitalist claims about mechanical or chemical inexplicability of specific transformations of substances. This thesis amounts to the claim that mechanical or chemical research by itself does not allow us to understand organisms as functionally differentiated and integrated wholes which tend to preserve themselves as such in their interactions with their environment which involve assimilating matter taken in from that environment. It is defensible even if this assimilation itself happens by means of chains of chemical reactions, each of which can be fully explained chemically. What goes beyond the scope of chemical research is the fact that these chains of chemical reactions are arranged in such a way that their end products get integrated into the functioning of the organism as a whole.

If this is right, Hegel’s core position on the organic is as follows: he believes that organisms cannot be fully understood without the categories that are proper to them alone, and organic life is irreducible to inorganic nature. However, this position does not imply that the laws, as well as specific causal mechanisms that operate in inorganic nature, do not also operate in living organisms. Even so, for Hegel, much of what is special to living organisms has to do with their relation to their environment, which cannot be properly grasped in terms of causal interactions that may be appropriate at other levels of nature. Instead, organisms integrate external materials into their own organization and into their constitutive processes, and they perceive those aspects of their environment that correspond to their needs as salient, the perception of which is closely related to their behavior directed at those aspects of the environment. If we do not consider these specifically organic features of organisms and focus on those features they have in common with inorganic objects and processes, and thus “put everything on the same level,” we in effect abstract from that which actually makes organisms what they are, and such consideration “does not exhaust the nature” of organisms.³⁸ As long as we remember this limitation, though, we can abstract from the features that constitute organisms qua organisms, and we can obtain various useful results in doing so.

My account is close to Kreines’ reading of Hegel’s project, according to which Hegel distinguishes different levels of reality which differ in relation to the kinds of explanation appropriate at these levels and to the kind of explainers (items in the world that figure in our explanations, which for Kreines’ Hegel are immanent universals or objective concepts) that are available at those levels. Kreines identifies the levels of mechanism (where the concept of matter as such, without further differentiation into its different kinds, plays the role of explainer), chemism (where concepts of various kinds of matter operate), life (the level of the concepts of natural biological kinds which, for Kreines’ Hegel, support teleological explanations), and absolute idea (constituted by the kind that is free and possesses both theoretical and practical reason).³⁹ Now, a problem of Kreines’ account is that it runs together the material from Hegel’s logic and philosophy of nature, in effect interpolating the natural philosophical material into his account of the logic. For instance, Kreines talks about the concept of matter when giving an account of the logical concepts of mechanism and chemism, even though matter only comes on the scene in the philosophy of nature. Similarly, the concepts of various biological kinds, which Kreines mentions in the context of the transition from the logical idea of life to absolute idea,⁴⁰ belong to the philosophy of nature becuase the very fact that there are multiple biological kinds is something that, as far as I can see, cannot be derived within the logic. Accordingly, Hegel does not in fact talk about such diversity of biological kinds in his Logic but only in the Philosophy of Nature.

My account corrects this confusion by keeping the accounts of life in the Logic and in the Philosophy of Nature distinct, although certainly not unrelated. In my reading, while Hegel’s logic provides the account of the general types of objects that can figure in our explanations, his philosophy of nature moves on to the more specific kinds of natural objects. I further extend Kreines’ reading of Hegel by addressing the more specific issue of the relation between different ways of investigating natural organisms, the problem that becomes significant at the level of natural philosophy.

Alison Stone likewise interprets Hegel’s philosophy, this time focusing specifically on his Philosophy of Nature, as presenting a multi-level metaphysical structure of nature.⁴¹ Unlike Kreines, Stone does clearly separate the natural philosophical conceptual structures from the logical ones; indeed, she argues that the latter are just abstractions from the former and thus that Hegel’s logic is posterior to his Realphilosophie.⁴² Similar to Kreines, though, Stone argues that different levels or stages of nature are individuated by different objective concepts or, in her terminology, forms of thought combined with matter. However, Stone does not address the question of how we should approach the natural objects that simultaneously belong to different levels of reality; in particular, those that are at the same time physical, chemical, and biological objects. Indeed, she sometimes writes as if these different levels do not intersect in this way but, rather, each applies to a distinct set of objects: “Within this process of harmonization, Hegel identifies distinct stages, each including a specific range of natural forms.”⁴³ But the consequence of this way of thinking about Hegel’s philosophy of nature (even if Stone does not seem to draw it explicitly) is that one does not consider the problem of applicability of different forms of explanation employing different kinds of objective concepts to the same natural objects. As should be clear by now, however, Hegel himself does explicitly address this problem, and indeed he provides what seems to me a largely satisfactory solution to it.

Acknowledgements

I thank Karen Koch for reading and commenting on the previous version of this paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anton Kabeshkin

Anton Kabeshkin is currently a wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the University of Potsdam. He defended his dissertation on anti-reductionism in Hegel's philosophy of nature and earned his PhD in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University in 2019. His work is primarily focused on the theoretical philosophy in Kant and German Idealism, especially on the treatment of life in Kant, Schelling and Hegel, but also on other topics in (especially) Hegel's philosophy of nature and logic.

Notes

1 See especially Kreines, “The Logic of Life”; Kreines, Reason in the World, 77–112; Lindquist, “Hegel’s ‘Idea of Life’ and Internal Purposiveness.”

2 For example, Kreines tends to use the material from the Philosophy of Nature in this way, the procedure that Gentry, “The Ground of Hegel’s Logic of Life and the Unity of Reason,” also critically discusses.

3 Some Hegel scholars have indeed suggested that Hegel is sympathetic to vitalism on these grounds. See Spahn, Lebendiger Begriff – Begriffenes Leben; Hösle, “Pflanze und Tier,” 380–1; as well as Pinkard, Hegel’s Naturalism, 22, who criticizes Hegel for rejecting the relevance of mechanistic or chemical explanations of the organic. Ferrini, “From Geological to Animal Nature,” 80–4, on the other hand, puts Hegel (rightly, I believe) between reductionists and vitalists, although she focuses on the scientific context and does not analyze the relevant passages from Hegel.

4 As I argue later in the paper, Alison Stone at least suggests this picture in her account of Hegel’s philosophy of nature, although I do not believe she would want to ascribe a vitalistic position to Hegel.

5 Good recent historical studies of these issues include Gambarotto, Vital Forces, Teleology and Organization; Lenoir, The Strategy of Life; Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment; Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life; Zammito, The Gestation of German Biology.

6 In the next four paragraphs, I summarize my discussion in Kabeshkin, “Schelling on Understanding Organisms”, while slightly modifying my characterization of vitalism.

7 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 271; 5:400. When citing Kant, I provide references to the English translations listed in the bibliography followed by the volume and page number of the German Akademie edition.

8 See Kant’s discussion in §§76–77 of the Critique of Judgment and the important treatments of these paragraphs in Förster, “The Significance of §§76 and 77”; Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, 140–5; Haag, “Grenzbegriffe und die Antinomie der teleologischen Urteilskraft.”

9 A number of scholars have argued that many natural scientists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who used vitalistic terminology were in fact only methodological vitalists, although this thesis proved to be controversial in application to particular figures, such as Blumenbach. See Lenoir, The Strategy of Life; Benton, “Vitalism in Nineteenth-Century Scientific Thought”; Larson, “Vital Forces”; Look, “Blumenbach and Kant”; Lohff, “The Concept of Vital Force.”

10 In Kabeshkin, “Schelling on Understanding Organisms”, I have argued that Schelling articulated and defended this position in his early writings on natural philosophy.

11 Enz. §365Z; Hegel, Philosophy of Nature vol. III, 156–7; Hegel, Werke, 9: 484. When citing Hegel, I provide references to the English translations listed in the bibliography (unless I provide my own translations, in which case I note this) followed by the volume and page number of either the critical edition, Gesammelte Werke, or to the Werke in zwanzig Bänden (Werke). When referring to the Encyclopedia, I use “Enz.” and provide references to the paragraph number prefaced by §, with “A” standing for “Anmerkung” and “Z” for “Zusatz.” I occasionally modify translations slightly without special notice.

12 Enz. §345A; Hegel, Philosophy of Nature vol. III, 54; Hegel, Werke, 9: 381.

13 Enz. §346Z; Hegel, Philosophy of Nature vol. III, 74; Hegel, Werke, 9: 402.

14 When Hegel uses the term “inorganic” in this context, he does not mean inorganic strictly speaking, but rather something like “that which does not yet belong to the organization of the animal or plant in question.” Thus, he says: “Although it is true that the animals and plants which an animal consumes are already organic, they constitute, in their relation to it, the animal’s inorganic being.” Enz. §365Z; Hegel, Philosophy of Nature vol. III, 156; Hegel, Werke, 9: 484.

15 Enz. §365Z; Hegel, Philosophy of Nature vol. III, 157; Hegel, Werke, 9: 485.

16 Enz. §365A; Hegel, Philosophy of Nature vol. III, 153–4; Hegel, Werke, 9: 481.

17 Although they were actually somewhat outdated by the time of composition of Hegel’s Encyclopedia, as Spallanzani’s work he is referring to was published in 1780. See Petry’s endnotes to this passage at Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, vol. III, 337–8.

18 Enz. §354Z: “As absolute movement, and the natural living self, the process itself, the blood is movement, not something that is moved [ … ] All these mechanical explanations offered by physiologists are inadequate”; Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, vol. III, 122; Hegel, Werke, 9: 450.

19 See n. 3 for examples of such assessments in the recent literature on Hegel.

20 I discuss the topics of this section in much greater detail in Kabeshkin, “Logical and Natural Life in Hegel”.

21 Other authors, for example, McTaggart, A Commentary on Hegel’s Logic, 275–7; Düsing, “Die Idee des Lebens in Hegels Logik,” and Lindquist, “Hegel’s ‘Idea of Life’ and Internal Purposiveness,” have questioned this. In this paper, I cannot provide a full defense against their objections; for that, see the reference provided in the previous note.

22 Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, 12: 181 (my translation).

23 Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, 12: 187 (my translation).

24 In the context of the Logic, both mechanism and chemism have to be understood as logical structures, not as the subject matter of the sciences of mechanics and chemistry.

25 Enz. §343Z; Hegel, Philosophy of Nature vol. III, 46; Hegel, Werke, 9: 372. See also Kreines, Reason in the World, 77–109, for a similar Aristotelian-style interpretation of Hegel’s concept of Gattung in the case of organic life. Lindquist, “Hegel’s ‘Idea of Life’ and Internal Purposiveness,” and Lindquist, “On Origins and Species – Hegel on the Genus-Process,” suggest a different interpretation of the Gattung. As I mention below, however, Hegel employs the concept of Gattung in somewhat different ways in different contexts.

26 See Enz. §368Z; Hegel, Philosophy of Nature vol. III, 184–5; Hegel, Werke, 9: 508.

27 See, especially, Enz. §368A; Hegel, Philosophy of Nature vol. III, 177–8; Hegel, Werke, 9: 500–1, and the Zusatz to this paragraph, in which Hegel talks of the “habitus” as a correspondence of various organs of an animal and refers to Cuvier to substantiate this empirically.

28 Enz. §354Z; Hegel, Philosophy of Nature vol. III, 147; Hegel, Werke, 9: 450–1.

29 Hösle, “Pflanze und Tier,” 408–9, discusses the parallels between these ideas of Hegel and the idea of Umwelt developed by Jakob von Uexküll, as well as the related considerations of Helmuth Plessner.

30 Enz. §366; Hegel, Philosophy of Nature vol. III, 169–70; Hegel, Werke, 9: 497.

31 Enz. §366Z; Hegel, Philosophy of Nature vol. III, 170; Hegel, Werke, 9: 498. This formulation echoes Kant’s first example with the tree in §64 of the third Critique, see Kant, Critique of Judgment, 243; 5:371.

32 Enz. §286Z; Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, vol. II, 43; Hegel, Werke, 9: 145.

33 Enz. §363; Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, vol. III, 151; Hegel, Werke, 9: 479.

34 See Enz. §362Z; Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, vol. III, 150–1; Hegel, Werke, 9: 478.

35 In a brief discussion in his “Kant and Hegel on Teleology and Life from the Perspective of Debates about Free Will,” 143–4, Kreines correctly points out that the first point is the one essential for Hegel. However, he does not discuss Hegel’s occasional endorsement of the second point and simply rejects one version of the vitalist reading of Hegel, pointing out that he does not argue “that matter has a soul that represents concepts and organizes itself in accordance.”

36 Enz. §363Z; Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, vol. III, 151–2; Hegel, Werke, 9: 479–80. Petry translates the last clause, “aber diese Vermittlung ist nicht nachzumachen,” as “but this mediation is not to be confused with the real nature of the phenomena,” which removes Hegel’s more objectionable claim altogether.

37 Wöhler’s synthesis of urea from ammonium cyanate in 1828 is usually considered to be an important step in the development of organic chemistry. This probably happened too late in Hegel’s life for the consequences of this advancement to be integrated into his philosophy of nature.

38 Enz. §286Z; Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, vol. II, 43; Hegel, Werke, 9: 145.

39 See Kreines, Reason in the World, 237, for a brief summary of his account of the multi-level structure of reality in Hegel.

40 See Kreines, Reason in the World, 219–20. There, Kreines says that “[t]he idea of life in the Logic does nothing to explain why multiple forms or species should be actually realized in the world, nor which ones should be; it leaves all this unexplained.” However, the discussion in the Logic abstracts from all such variety that can be found in nature, and so the latter cannot be used to motivate the transition in the Logic.

41 See Stone, Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy, 53, for a clear formulation of her reading.

42 See especially Stone, Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy, 102–6, for this argument. I do not quite agree with this thesis, but here I leave this aside.

43 Stone, Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy, 54. Later, on page 73, she writes that Hegel “is extending teleological explanation to the natural world in its entirety, not merely carving out a limited terrain within nature which is impervious to mechanical principles,” which appears to contradict the former claim. However, it does not: what Stone means is that even the forms of thought that are embodied at the mechanical and chemical levels are teleological because all natural forms are, on her reading of Hegel, intrinsically rational and thus weakly teleological, as she claims throughout the book, including the sentence right after the last quotation. Thus, Stone is not saying (and I believe she is right in this) that all of nature is teleological for Hegel in the strong sense corresponding to his own account of teleology. It is still the fact, however (which Hegel is well aware of), that natural organisms have mechanical and chemical features, and that they can be considered insofar as they are mechanical and chemical.