The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  The philosophy of nature takes up the material which physics has prepared for it from experience, at the point to which physics has brought it, and reconstitutes it, without putting experience as its final justification [Bewährung]. Physics must therefore work into the hands of philosophy, so that the latter can translate into the concept the abstract [verständige] universal transmitted to it, by showing how this universal, as an intrinsically necessary whole, proceeds from the concept.29

  What science transmits to philosophy is the “abstract universal”: by this, Hegel means a scientific account of some universal form, such as a natural kind or a natural law underlying appearances. Here Hegel explicitly denies that science is a purely empirical discipline, insisting that theory and conceptualization always inform scientific experimentation and observation.30 Philosophers of nature “take up” each natural form already theorized by scientists and “reconstitute” these forms into an “intrinsically necessary whole.” That is, philosophers study how each of these natural forms derives from (“proceeds from,” hervorgeht) the others and fits with them into an organized whole. By showing how each natural form derives from the others, philosophers are reconstructing the necessity of these forms on the basis of the concept—that is, on the basis of a priori reasoning. By this means, scientific findings about these forms receive further non-empirical justification.

  The method of philosophy of nature, then, is to subject scientific accounts of natural forms to a rational reconstruction. In the course of this reconstruction, scientific accounts will often need to be re-interpreted. For just as science always involves theory, so it always involves metaphysical assumptions: “the diamond-net into which we bring everything to make it intelligible.”31 But the assumptions adopted by scientists may well be inadequate: scientists regularly espouse mechanistic materialism, for instance. Often, then, the philosopher must provide a more satisfactory re-interpretation of nature as scientists have described it, informed by the philosopher’s more adequate metaphysics. And when there are scientific claims that do not admit of such re-interpretation, such as (Hegel thinks) Newton’s theory of color, they just have to be discarded.

  But in what sense might natural forms derive from one another? To understand this, we must look at the actual metaphysics of the natural world that Hegel puts forward based on his reconstruction of the science of his time. Nature, he writes, comprises a “series of stages” or Stufengang,32 chiefly three: mechanical, physical, and organic.

  In the first, mechanical stage, nature exists in the guise of units of matter that have little or no unifying organization. The reigning principle is that of Außereinander, being-outside-one-another: matter as bare partes extra partes.33 During the mechanical stage, though, nature advances from its original existence as space—sheer undifferentiated extension—to existence as increasingly structured and interrelated sets of material bodies (ultimately in the guise of the bodies composing the solar system).

  In the second, physical stage, Hegel finds material bodies that are partly, but still not fully, integrated with one another. They are related to one another and affected by these relations, but still not completely so. For Hegel this is the hallmark of magnetism, electricity, and above all chemistry, in which distinct substances react and transform one another, but without becoming bound together into a permanently self-renewing whole.

  This is only achieved in organic life, nature’s third stage. Animals, plants and even the entire earth as a system of interacting elements all realize the inherent nature of an organism to varying degrees, namely to have material parts that are as they are entirely because of their places within the organic whole. A heart, for instance, is as it is wholly because of its function in pumping the blood. The material parts or members (Glieder) of organisms are thus shaped by their unifying forms or concepts. As Schelling did, Hegel relies here on Kant’s view that in an organism the plan—or purpose or concept—of the whole must be regarded as organizing and assigning roles to all the material parts.

  Now, for Hegel, the foregoing succession of natural stages constitutes a progression (Fortbildung)—not in time, but a logical progression.34 Organisms are more advanced than chemical processes and the latter in turn than electrical processes (and so on), because by virtue of their internal structure organisms resolve tensions (or contradictions) within other—less advanced—natural forms. Chemical bodies, specifically, are partly related together and partly independent of one another, thereby embodying a kind of tension. Organisms avoid this tension by having material parts that are fully shaped by the whole. Nature thus exhibits a progression in that each of its forms resolves tensions within other forms, the most advanced forms being those that maximally resolve all the preceding tensions.

  The philosopher does not identify these tensions and their resolutions on a purely speculative basis. He or she first examines the accounts of natural forms provided by scientists, then discerns the tensions within these forms so described, and on this basis rearranges these forms into a sequence from most to least tension-ridden. By doing so, the philosopher of nature is simultaneously deriving each form from its predecessor by a priori reasoning: having first learnt about the structure of organisms from scientists, he or she can now re-establish on a priori grounds that organisms must exist in this form to resolve the tension within chemical processes.

  But why should anyone think that tensions within given natural forms must be resolved, so that other natural forms must exist that resolve them? Like Schelling, Hegel takes it that we can know about nature only on condition that nature exhibits a form of rationality. Unless nature was rational, we could not know about it using reason: nature would not be adapted to the human intellect and would defy comprehension. To be sure, natural beings do not engage in conscious reasoning or entertain rational thoughts. Nonetheless, for Hegel, nature has an overall rational organization that foreshadows the rational order that the conscious human mind gives to itself. Moreover, this a priori insight that nature must be rational is confirmed by scientific findings about the character of organisms, chemical processes, electrical interactions, and so on. These findings show that organisms are such that they resolve the tensions within chemical processes, that chemical processes are such that they resolve the tensions within electrical processes, and so on. This can only be possible if nature has some kind of inner drive to resolve tensions within it—tensions that are contra-rational, so that nature is acting rationally in structuring itself so as to reduce and ultimately overcome these tensions.

  Hegel thus regards nature as a rationally organized realm in which matter gradually becomes shaped and organized by “the concept”, in the process assuming organic form. In that nature exhibits this progression towards organism, all natural forms approximate to organic status to varying degrees (down to a vanishingly low degree in mechanism). Moreover, nature is also organic in that it is a self-organizing whole, the stages of which are rationally ordered and are as they are because of their places within the whole.35

  Hegel retains much of the basic structure that Schelling imparted to Naturphilosophie. Hegel, too, reinterprets scientific findings on an a priori basis and regards nature as a self-organizing whole such that it prefigures the human mind and can be known by us. However, the concept of force that was so central for Schelling plays no role in Hegel’s account of nature. For Hegel, instead, reason is the crucial notion: nature organizes itself on the basis of its internal, albeit implicit and non-conscious, rationality. Nature is driven to restructure and reshape itself again and again not because it consists in productive force but just because it is rational, so that Hegel considers any appeal to productive force in the explanation of natural organization to be redundant.

  16.4 THE DECLINE AND SURVIVAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE

  Working out his ideas at very much the same time as Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer took his philosophy of nature in the reverse direction to that of Hegel, emphasizing the non-rational will in nature. Schopenhauer did s
o in The World as Will and Representation of 1818/1844 and his 1836 essay On the Will in Nature. Despite his anti-rationalist emphasis on the will and his hostility to German Idealism generally, Schopenhauer in fact continues the basic project of philosophy of nature, both in epistemology and in metaphysics.

  In epistemology, Schopenhauer believes that we can achieve philosophical insight into the fundamental metaphysical reality of one single vast will by extrapolating from my awareness of the primary reality of will in my own case. This insight allows us not merely to infer that the ultimate reality of all natural beings must be will but actually to directly apprehend this reality of will within the phenomena. Some “especially acute” empirical scientists have apprehended this too—and done so in their own terms, Schopenhauer maintains, without his needing to “twist and strain” scientific findings to adapt them to his metaphysics, as he claims other Naturphilosophen (Schelling, Hegel) have done.36 These scientists have recognized the will by observation, as Schopenhauer has on a priori grounds: two groups of investigators meeting from opposite directions.37

  In metaphysics, Schopenhauer vehemently opposes “crude materialism,”38 denying that nature is reducible to a mechanical aggregate of causally interacting spatio-temporal objects. To be sure, nature so appears to us given our mode of representation. But if we have grasped the reality of will—either explicitly, by way of Schopenhauerian metaphysics, or implicitly, if we are acute Naturforscher—then we can also recognize this reality underlying nature’s phenomena. In all organic nature, we can observe striving (to survive, to reproduce; to eat, digest, excrete), growth, formation. Even in non-organic processes we can observe processes of formation (as in crystallization), magnetic and electrical attraction, movement under the action of forces: all the forces operative here are simply the single cosmic will.39 That is, all these beings and their particular strivings or movements are merely individualized ways that the will appears to us. Thus, once we grasp that nature is will, what initially appeared as a mere mechanical aggregate shows itself to be quite different—the plural and antagonistic appearance of one ever-dynamic will: “the will…fills every thing and manifests itself immediately in each—thus showing each thing to be its phenomenon.”40

  The will manifested in natural things is non-rational, for Schopenhauer. It has no consciousness and no goal and can find no satisfaction; intellect is only its subordinate tool. The will is an empty, endless striving, so that nature is not a purposive whole but a realm of unceasing conflict and suffering. For Schelling, nature was dynamic and rational: to recognize nature’s self-organizing power was to recognize a forerunner of human reason and autonomy, and thereby to feel at home in a rational world. For Schopenhauer, the study of nature in its dynamism only confirms the truth of pessimism, that the world has no meaning. His view thus contributed to a historical process that Odo Marquard calls the “disenchantment of Romantic nature,” in which nature progressively lost “the attributes of harmony…and purposiveness” over the nineteenth century.41

  So far I have discussed only philosophers, but in the early nineteenth century Naturphilosophie was popular with many practicing scientists. Its partisans included Hans Christian Oersted and Johann Wilhelm Ritter, who respectively discovered electromagnetism and electrochemistry. They made these discoveries by starting from theoretical assumptions drawn from Naturphilosophie. The idea that different natural processes manifest a common structure at varying levels led Oersted, Ritter, and others to look for and find parallels and connections amongst electricity, magnetism, and chemistry. Indeed, Thomas Kuhn argued that the same philosophical belief in the fundamental unity of nature contributed to the simultaneous discovery of energy conservation by a number of nineteenth-century scientists.42

  Despite these ways that Naturphilosophie helped to advance scientific knowledge in the early nineteenth century, it was above all advances in science that discredited Naturphilosophie in many eyes. For as the nineteenth century unfolded, scientists gradually found ways to provide a unified mechanistic explanation of hitherto puzzling chemical, electrical, magnetic, and biological processes. Moreover, these advances in understanding were often thought to be due to a renewed adherence to the methods of observation and experiment. The scientific-philosophical outlook that became increasingly dominant from the mid-century onwards thus combined empiricist method with mechanistic materialism. In many ways, this outlook was the polar opposite of Naturphilosophie. Its advocates insisted both that inquiry into nature must be wholly or primarily empirical, eschewing any speculative philosophical contribution, and that nature ultimately consists of units of matter in motion and causal interaction. Hermann von Helmholtz, for example—the leading scientist in later-nineteenth-century Germany—insisted that science must be based on experiment, observation, and induction43 and that nature is to be explained by being reduced to interacting units of matter.44

  In this context Naturphilosophie was increasingly viewed as having obstructed and retarded scientific inquiry—even as having been “the pestilence and black death of the century,” according to the influential chemist Justus Liebig.45 Supposedly, Naturphilosophie had had such disastrous effects because its entire program rested upon a basic mistake. Its practitioners had abandoned empirical method and the mechanistic paradigm rather than patiently working out how to explain electricity, chemistry, life, and so on within empirical and mechanistic terms.

  An 1843 attack on Schelling and Hegel by Matthias Jakob Schleiden represented the rising line of thought. For Schleiden, the only legitimate scientific method is to start with exact observation then infer to the laws that best explain the observed facts; there is no place for philosophical speculation. Those who indulge in it—Schelling, Hegel—try to deduce knowledge of nature a priori and inevitably traduce many empirical facts in the process.46 In reality, contra Schleiden, Schelling and Hegel thought that the empirical and the a priori could work together. But for Schleiden and others they could not, and a priori speculation could only ever damage scientific inquiry. From this perspective, Schleiden and others could not even see that Schelling and Hegel adopted a mixed approach, and wrongly assumed that their method was purely a priori.

  Despite these criticisms of Naturphilosophie, significant residues of it persisted throughout the nineteenth century—even in some German scientists. So, although the

  union of idealist philosophy and a posteriori enquiry into nature did not endure…[we must] get this fact into focus. Romantic ideas about nature did not disappear or lose currency abruptly or at any clearly determinable point. They remained strongly influential, to such an extent that [in] many nineteenth-century figures—Alexander von Humboldt, Theodor Fechner and Haeckel provide examples—the elements of their thought that we would consider genuinely “scientific” join inseparably with those that we would call “romantic.”47

  Consider Humboldt, the leading German scientist of the first half of the nineteenth century. In his multi-volume Kosmos, he offered a total picture (or “general view,” generelle Ansicht) of nature and the overall development of scientific knowledge. In his view, nature was no mere aggregate but, precisely, a “cosmos”—an ordered, harmonious arrangement. This position reflected Humboldt’s overall approach to inquiry into nature. Humboldt sought to avoid what he called “vicious empiricism” by conducting his empirical investigations—measuring and categorizing geological and geographical phenomena, travelling the globe to document its climatic, mineral, botanical, and other variations—informed by a “higher standpoint.”48 This standpoint is that of aesthetic experience, in which we apprehend nature as a whole the parts of which interconnect completely. From this aesthetic standpoint “all the organisms and forces of nature may be seen as one living active whole, animated by one single impulse.”49 Beginning with an overall aesthetic view, we descend to detailed empirical research that gives definiteness and precision to what we merely intimate (ahnen) aesthetically. We then rise back, by putting together the results of various branches
of research, to a fully elaborated version of our original intuition.50

  Here Humboldt remained largely faithful to the program of Romantic science as Robert Richards interprets it.51 In this program, empirical investigation is informed and guided from the outset by aesthetic intuition of the whole in which the empirical particulars are located; study of the particulars then rounds out our original intuition. Thus the aim of Romantic science, as of philosophy of nature, was to contextualize scientific detail within a broader insight into the character of nature as a whole. Romantic science and philosophy of nature may seem to differ in that the former gained its insight into the unity of nature aesthetically, the latter philosophically. But the divide was not sharp. For Schelling, philosophical reason recaptures the unity of intuition at a higher, more articulated level; whilst for scientists such as Humboldt, aesthetic experience is already implicitly rational: “Nature considered rationally,…is a unity in diversity of phenomena,…one great whole animated by the breath of life.”52 Aesthetic experience, in fact, provides one source of rational insight into the unity of nature, so that Romantic science is continuous with philosophy of nature.53

  Advancing to the twentieth century, Naturphilosophie still did not die out. To take just one example, French this time, Henri Bergson was a paradigmatic philosopher of nature. Rejecting mechanistic materialism, Bergson thought that nature was unified by its élan vital: the spontaneous and unpredictable creativity of matter itself, in virtue of which matter grows, unfolds, and organizes itself in ever-evolving ways. For Bergson, this élan can only be grasped in intuition, in the light of which scientific accounts of natural forms and phenomena must be reinterpreted—as he did in his 1907 work Creative Evolution.