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3 - The Problem of Nature’s Spurious Infinite within the Register of Animal Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2021

Wes Furlotte
Affiliation:
University of Ottawa
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Summary

The totality of the Physics sections genetically maps materiality's intensifying ‘inwardness’, its intensifying structural stability and complexity, and concludes with an analysis of what Hegel characterises as the ‘chemical process’. More generally, Physics reveals that ‘the centre of gravity is no longer a subjectivity sought by matter, but is immanent within it as the ideality of these form-determinations, which are initially immediate and conditioned, but which from now on are developed as moments, out of the core of the notion’. While, in this sense, physical (and chemical) materiality displays a heightened interiority, an ‘ideality’, it is, nevertheless, still completely given over to external determination, and this exteriority is what separates the realm of Physics from that of Organics. If Hegel's concept of life is ‘the movement characterized by division and reintegration into unity’, expressing the dynamic ‘relationship of individual and universal’, that is, a fundamental self-differentiating unity, then we are in a position to discern what separates the physical register from that of organics: the objects of physics do not display biological life's self-differentiating return to unity, the complex relationships of self-differentiation and reunification that constitute the organism's self-relational process. While there are connections among various material bodies involved in chemical reactions, they come to material bodies from outside, instead of genetically emerging from within. It is the externality that permeates the entire chemical process that prompts Hegel to state that the differentiation involved is still ‘generally infected with division’ [dass er mit der Trennung überhaupt behaftet ist]. Hegel insists on a fundamental and necessary limit to all inorganic nature (whether mechanical, physical, or chemical). As a recent commentator notes, inorganic nature is devoid of ‘a bond that purposively realizes the existence of a whole, that is the absence of an essential (ideal) internal unity that unfolds by connecting its parts as the truly active, actual ground that rules external necessity’. At the outset of Hegel's analysis of biological organicity, we discover that it is the absence of a purposefully unifying bond that distinguishes life from the mechanic-physico- chemical processes in which it finds itself embedded. In this sense, we see that exteriority is still plaguing the permutations of Hegelian nature to the exact degree that unifying ideal form remains absent.

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Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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