Nature, Ethics and Gender in German Romanticism and Idealism by Stone Alison;

Author:Stone, Alison;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

8. Liebig, as quoted in Beiser (2002: 507). The source of the quotation is Liebig (1874: 24).

9. On Humboldt’s view of nature, see also Millán-Zaibert (2009).

10. Consequently, Humboldt was willing to affiliate himself with Philosophy of nature, in a letter of 1836 (see 1997: xvi), provided that this meant arranging data in light of rational ideas, not vainly trying to deduce data from ideas.

Chapter 8

Hegel, Naturalism and the Philosophy of Nature

In this chapter I consider whether Hegel is a naturalist or an anti-naturalist with regards to his philosophy of nature. Rather than approaching Hegel on the assumption that naturalism and anti-naturalism are polar opposites, I suggest that we can make better sense of Hegel’s view of nature by adopting a cluster-based approach to naturalism. On this approach, positions are more or less naturalistic depending how many strands of the cluster naturalism they exemplify, and how thoroughly they exemplify these strands. Following Finn Spicer, I suggest that the strands of the cluster naturalism include belief that philosophy is continuous with the sciences and denial of the existence of any supernatural entities or processes. I assess Hegel’s position with respect to these two strands.

As I will explain, methodologically, Hegel maintains that philosophy of nature is continuous with the empirical sciences insofar as philosophers of nature begin by learning from scientists about natural forms. Philosophers of nature then reconstruct scientific accounts of these natural forms on an a priori basis, thereby establishing how these natural forms are organised into a rationally connected chain. In the process, though, philosophers of nature also reinterpret these natural forms in light of a metaphysics according to which nature is a rational whole. Hegel explicitly says that this metaphysics is distinct from that of empirical science. Even so, Hegel also thinks that this metaphysics only makes explicit a presupposition – that nature is an organised whole admitting of rational comprehension – that scientists implicitly hold all along, and must hold if their inquiries are to have any motivation. Methodologically, then, Hegel regards philosophy of nature and empirical science neither as discontinuous from nor entirely continuous with one another, but somewhere between the two. In terms of his stance on the philosophy-science relation, he belongs in the middle of the spectrum that runs from the most naturalistic to the most anti-naturalistic positions.

Turning to rejection of supernatural entities and processes, we can again identify a spectrum of positions here. At the naturalistic end of the spectrum, mechanistic materialists regard nature as composed entirely of units of matter in efficient-causal relations. Somewhat less naturalistic, Kant maintains that we may legitimately postulate final and formal causes within nature – specifically in the form of the ground-plans that animate purposive wholes – as long as we do not ascribe real, mind-independent existence to these ground-plans or purposes. Less naturalistic again, Schelling maintains that we may legitimately postulate really existing final and formal causes in nature as long as we do so in ways that recognise the pervasiveness of mechanism in nature and that

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