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Detail of Ptolemy and Zoroaster holding the earthly and heavenly spheres. 'The School of Athens', 1511, Raphael
Nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide are distinct, analytically simple forms of physical air; but that it is a mistake to think of them as mixing physically. Their appearance and disappearance is rather the manifestation of the chemical process in the air a process that is not independently maintained by the air but depends upon the physical process of the real elements in the total life of the Earth hence we can no more expect to reproduce the whole cycle of atmospheric chemism with finite portions of air, heat, reagents, and so on, in a laboratory, than we can hope to produce a real perpetual motion machine since whereas the power of gravity and its dangers of death is apparent in finite mechanics the Earth-process is a life-giving force known only through its absence in finite chemistry. Upon fully apprehending the cyclic character of the infinite chemical process we have reached physics proper. In the earlier lecture manuscripts the whole dialectic of the elements, physical as well as chemical, is dealt with under the heading ‘Chemism’ the reason to be seen in the reviews of the argument upon reaching the level of physics in 1803 and the principle character of the conceptual movement in the earlier course is the Earth itself. ‘Shape, the result of mechanics is the simple formation of the Earth within itself … in chemism this simple [positing of tone and fluidity within one another] goes into otherness [with its moments] outside one another.’ Hence the chemism of the Earth-process embraces the whole of the movement of its concept.
Mechanics is the realization of the shape of the Earth as an intuition, Poles, Equator, compass points, climatic zones, all the things with which a scientific geography text must begin, then this intuition disappears from view and the cycle of the meteorological process takes over and this is the chemical process of the Earth but the Earth is only the stage upon which the movement of the concept occurs. Terrestrial physics comes on the scene only when that mere stage is recognized again as the living body of continents and oceans, mountains and deserts, and so on to which that process belongs as its life. For now concept and intuition are reunited in the Idea of the Earth in a rational conceptual pattern albeit the language is ambiguous for the Earth does not have an intuitive Gestalt like that of a crystal, there is a chasm between the infinite use of the term and all the finite ones and upon coming to the ‘movement of its concept we discover that on the other side of the chasm one's chemical and one's physical concepts alike are just phases in its chemistry.
Hegel's new method seeks to establish a continuum in the place of this chasm and our concepts the concepts that we need for our finite situation must evolve in accordance with the deeper need for the comprehension of the infnite totality which is equally a need of ours hence we do not begin with the world like the student opening his geography book but we must discover from our mechanical problems with perpetual motion why chemistry is needed and from there why physics is needed and the map of our progress has to be drawn in terms of the frontiers that we need for our scientific use and it remains true that the frontiers on our map can only be drawn by one whose consciousness contains the whole globe of Earth and the whole cycle of the sciences that deal with it, there were no noteworthy working chemists at this time who would have drawn the boundary between chemistry and physics as sciences where Hegel drew it in 1804, except for mechanics none of the boundaries he proposed was of great use then although as for today who knows?
In 1804 an endeavour was made to map the distinct levels of our scientific consciousness of nature, not as prior the levels or phases of a process that was independent of consciousness and as Stephen Houlgate has noted the evolution of Hegel's natural philosophy resembles that of Greek Drama, it has now reached its Aeschylean phase, at first there was only one actor, the Earth, which spoke and acted its story for the chorus of philosophers, now the protagonist is man the scientist who used to be the Chorus leader and the Earth is his antagonist with whom he will finally be united in the way that Prometheus is united with the Earth in Percy Bysshe Shelley, (1792 – 1822), rather than as he is reconciled with Zeus in Aeschylus (c. 525/524 – c. 456/455 BC).
The intolerable artificiality of the boundary lines that he had to draw for this cosmic dialogue may have been one of the factors that led Hegel to abandon it unfinished and the distinction between chemical and physical elements was obviously a pressing one in his view for he always maintained it but the infinite standpoint of his earlier theory at least allowed him to deal with the whole range of inquiries engaged in by those who were for good practical reasons all called chemists and he pointed out the chemical character in his own restricted sense of the word of such processes as organic putrefaction after death a matter which in the evolution of consciousness must necessarily wait until we have attained to cognition of the organism itself.
Terrestrial physics. In 1804 physics is still the science in which we eventually comprehend the nature of our world as an individual whole and yet our approach starts with the process of the real elements a process which cycles deep underground and far above our heads but has its focal centre upon the surface where we are and this is the process of the Earth's own life. There was no individuated world in which the solar process or the mechanical and chemical processes happened, the solar process of motions constitute a world, they do not happen within it or belong to it, and the mechanical and chemical processes do not belong to any individuated world constituted by that process either. Infinite mechanics is the solar process itself and ought not to be thought of mechanically at all, finite mechanics is the constitution process of finite individuals and the comprehension of the inevitable triumph of inertia. Chemism is the process from light to heat that takes place between the free motion of the heavens and the one world-order constituted in that motion that is itself free not dominated by an inertial equilibrium. The Moon has a shape as fixed as a crystal and the Earth in contrast has an atmospheric process that sustains its life. Physics is the study of how the chemical interaction between Earth and Sun sustains the life cycle of the Earth itself.
The step from chemistry to physics is straightforward enough and what is not so straightforward is strictly not to take that step while one is studying chemism. For the chemical process presupposes a real substrate and the real physical elements, fire, air, water, earth, each pass through the whole cycle of chemism, and also represent one moment of that cycle and the real elements maintain themselves by self-transformation into the others and eventually return to their own form through that transformation and this cyclic process gives each of them a definite shape unlike the chemical elements, which remain invisible gases throughout their conceptual exemplification of the process.
The unity of light and heat from which we must begin is fire and fire first exists on Earth, not in the Sun and Hegel takes fire as an element but because all of his elements are processes this turns out to be more sensible than one might suppose in the context of present day usage, it is light as the tone that is to say tension of shape and as heat it is formal resolution, that is to say chemical agency. In its essential transience there is the first visible model of what the chemical elements are, conceptual abstractions. Fire itself involves hydrogen and oxygen and produces carbon dioxide and the assumption that nitrogen is the neutral state of air that passes over into the process reflects the theory of the English investigators who designated nitrogen phlogisticated air, as a matter of fact it is their place in the fire-process that determines the order of the phases in chemism. Fire is the concept of the physical elements and as such stands first among them and the very fact that fire is a process is what leads Hegel to make of it the foundation stone of his dynamic conception of chemistry.
'Allegory'. 'The Knight' Dream', c. 1504. A composition dominated by a sense of great harmony, a figurative consequence of a literary theme, a young knight asleep in front of a laurel tree that divides the picture into two equal parts, a figure of a beautiful young woman in each half, on the left the personification of Virtue is holding a book and a sword above the sleeping figure, the figure on the right is presenting a flower as a symbol of sensual pleasure, the young man's task is to bring both sides of life into harmony.
Hydrogen, inflammable air, is the moment of kindling but the explosion of hydrogen is momentary, combustion requires oxygen for its maintenance, phlogiston is the latent being of hydrogen a mode of speech expressive of the mature view of Cavendish, only in the transient existence of the flame does it have a demonstrable existence. Oxygen on the other hand is the moment of infinity of fire the immediate relation of fire to otherness which means that oxygen is the active, moving force in the process of combustion, infinity being the motion of the concept and so Hegel is ahead of Cavendish who still called oxidation phlogistication. Fire, as the moving concept itself, is turned against both shape and gravity, it is a free-moving shape that reduces fixed shapes to the indefiniteness of ashes and the flame of fire itself always rises. Fire will not burn either in nitrogen or in carbon dioxide and these are the opposite extremes of the process. Carbonic acid is a chemical compound or synthetic unity involving carbon and the unity of oxygen and hydrogen but this last is not called a synthetic unity so a chemical formula is not being proposed. The process of burning itself is an escape from gravity whereas both the initial components of the process and the products are gravitational matters and this moment of freedom in the process is phlogiston which is afterwards hydrogen.
At the end of the fire-process the active acidic product what remains is CO2 or fixed air hence air is the next term in the ideal cycle of the elements. Air in its simple unfixed state is the element in which the chemical elements are simply inside one another and because it is not immediately perceptible it is not to be regarded as an intuition but rather the paralysed concept (all chemical reaction being at a standstill. Water, on the other hand is the opposite reaction of hydrogen and oxygen, or fire's being unequal to itself and Hegel is on the side of Cavendish against Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, (1743 – 1794), by insisting that we should not think of water as composed of hydrogen and oxygen and these are simply the forms of the chemical elements which appear in it. Hegel was from the outset more interested in the chemical relation between air and water than he was in that between water and fire since the weather-process involves a chemical transformation of water into air, and the converse. Fire exhibits the whole chemical process, but is kindled and extinguished, water only disappears into the invisible atmosphere and air only appears on the way back to water, as clouds, mist, and so on. Yet both of them as elements are processes of appearing and disappearing and there is a hidden process involving the disappearance of hydrogen in nitrogen water to air and of nitrogen in water itself carbon dioxide being chemically submerged, as it were, in both air and water.
Since air and water are therefore complementary, fire as the whole process is drawn out into a tension between them and a question arises as to why their true middle or mingled unity is earth as an element, perhaps Hegel is availing himself of his step from the chemical to the physical level, it is because the Earth is the substrate of the physical process that earth is the true middle of the elements and yet even if this is right every new sentence generates a fresh problem. ‘Earth is the transparent nothing that lets [the other elements] shine through … as the nothing of the elements it is equally their being’. And what this means is that the process of the physical elements is the Earth's life-process its self-sustaining energetic cycle to eliminate all the inappropriate undertones of birth, maturation, degeneration, and death. Earth as an element has the passive role of providing a stage, an inertial background, for the cycle and yet the Earth is not just a background; it is the process. The physical process of fire, air, water, and earth, can now be recognized as the real expression of this energetic cycle. Mechanism and chemism are the ideal moments, the moments by which the Earth's outward shape, and the resolution of that shape into climatic fluidity, are determined or to put it another way these are the aspects of its being and the conditions of its energetic process that are determined from outside by its place in the Solar System.
In such a very real context it is no longer the element of fire, but the Earth itself, that plays the main role. Fire exhibits the whole process but earth sustains it. Earth as an element is no more self-subsistent than the others. The Earth is a concept realized in intellectual intuition. As an Idea the Idea of the elemental process, the Earth is ‘absolute cognition and it makes sense to say this if we think of natural philosophy as a transcendental theory of science. Hegel has shifted from the intuition of absolute motion in the heavens to the energetic-cycle of the physical elements as the necessary frame of all our physical and chemical knowledge and in so doing he has demonstrated that the Idea of the World has a constitutive role in our cognitive organization of experience. It is not a dialectical Idea of Reason as Kant maintained but an absolute cognition a concept that has an a priori intuition as its content. The Earth itself is spoken of as cognition in this peculiar way since we have now reached a turning point, the absolute motion has now become an absolute, self-sustaining or living substance. The biological organism will be the individuation of this life-principle the rational consciousness will then at last be the self-cognition of this same universal self-maintaining equilibrium which now exists as objective cognition and what the interpretive frame of all our finite cognition is is finally understood, when we have comprehended what cognizing is the manner of speech assumed here will desist from apparent oddity.
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Scriabin: Promethée - Le Poème du Feu, Op. 60:
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'Prometheus Bound', c. 1611, Peter Paul Rubens
'Prometheus'
von Franz Kafka (1883 – 1924)
Von Prometheus berichten vier Sagen:
Nach der ersten wurde er, weil er die Götter an die Menschen verraten hatte, am Kaukasus festgeschmiedet, und die Götter schickten Adler, die von seiner immer wachsenden Leber fraßen.
Nach der zweiten drückte sich Prometheus im Schmerz vor den zuhackenden Schnäbeln immer tiefer in den Felsen, bis er mit ihm eins wurde.
Nach der dritten wurde in den Jahrtausenden sein Verrat vergessen, die Götter vergaßen, die Adler, er selbst.
Nach der vierten wurde man des grundlos Gewordenen müde. Die Götter wurden müde, die Adler wurden müde, die Wunde schloß sich müde.
Blieb das unerklärliche Felsgebirge. – Die Sage versucht das Unerklärliche zu erklären. Da sie aus einem Wahrheitsgrund kommt, muß sie wieder im Unerklärlichen enden.
Prometheus
There are four legends concerning Prometheus: According to the first he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed.
According to the second Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.
According to the third his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of years, forgotten by the gods, the eagles, forgotten by himself.
According to the fourth everyone grew weary of the meaningless affair. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily.
There remains the inexplicable mass of rock. The legend tries to explain the inexplicable. As it comes out of the substratum of truth it has in turn to end in the inexplicable.
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The physical manifestation of the chemical process of sunlight, heat, and weather which he previously constructed in theory is now described, the action of light is called solicitation a terminology to be encountered again in the 'Phenomenology of Spirit' and one which evidently implies that the effect is not a mechanical continuation of the causal action but a response that expresses the independent nature of the force solicited, the separation of the elements at the surface of the Earth are characterizes in terms of the elementary motions of the Solar process. This finite expression of infinite gravity, the distribution of continents and seas, desert and icecap, is the Earth's mechanical totality or shape, and the outer envelope of all of it is air, which is shapeless or cometary. By this envelope the free process of the Earth is protected not even the worst desert is the waterless moon which simple gravity would make of it, and the shape of the Earth is merely the gravitational setting of the stage for its self-shaping process and the fluid elements air and wate are the vehicle of this process. The infinitely dynamic element of fire is localized within the Earth and makes only momentary appearances at the volcanic and atmospheric extremes of the meteorological process itself.
What that process does is make the earth itself into fertile soil and Hegel designates the Earth-process cognition because the Earth produces life on its surface and so makes its infinite self-shaping visible, makes it a matter of experience for the rational life so produced and we are to distinguish between the way the process exists for us and the way that it exists for the Earth itself. This distinction anticipates the great division between two modes of cognition in the Phenomenology. For us the whole process is what the Earth is, it is what must be expressed in the definition of the Earth, the scientific cognition to which we now proceed but for the Earth what falls apart into the process of the other elements with the sunlight is earth itself as an element and the two senses of the word earth hence offer a model of the cognitive process of the Phenomenology. The Earth is an unconscious cognitive process which is to say our conscious cognitive process depends upon the identification of a set of intellectual terms or elements that would be impossible for us if we did not have the light-process of the physical elements before us and we do not have that process before us in the relevant sense until we have developed the concept of Earth with the element of earth as its starting-point and terminus and our ability to conceptualize our own conceptual activity adequately depends upon our prior comprehension of the Earth.
The meteorological process is discussed and illustrated in much greater detail in the lecture manuscripts of 1803 and from the detail we get an indication of the right interpretation of the condensed systematic exposition of the textbook and what is gone through earlier in the 1803 discussion appears in 1804 as part of the definition of the Earth to which we now proceeds, this definition is spoken of as having arisen immediately from the motion of its self-cognition from which we are not to suppose a kind of Earth-mind for we are informed that the Earth-process as a whole and the ordering of its moments exists only for us. It is human consciousness that is the self-cognition of the Earth and humankind is the child of Earth and the transcendental structure of consciousness is an expression first of our embodied existence on this planet, we are not to accept either the reflective formalism of the transcendental unity of apperception or the abstractly rational formalism of Fichte's Ego theory and the next phase of our conceptual progress is the move from the conceptual context of geography to that of biology. The definition of the Earth shows us how the infinite process defines itself in a ladder of forms that culminates with the rational organism for which the whole Earth-process exists as an environment an inorganic nature in just the way that the process of the other elements is here said to exist initially for the Earth itself.
This way of talking about the Earth-process as self-cognitive is new in the textbook of 1804 and yet the course of the argument is not noticeably changed when this new way of speaking is added to the more traditional pre-critical terminology in which the real physical Earth is the substance for which the individual elements are accidents, properties, ideal moments. Even in 1804 the Darstellung of the Earth must inevitably repeat the deduction and yet now that we properly know what is going on what was implicit before becomes explicit and the role of fire as the concept that is moving force of the whole process is made clear and the cometary tension of the air is revealed as its power to form clouds, and the opposite extreme or lunar tension presents itself in the spontaneous formation of dead earthy bodies, (meteorites, aerolites, in the atmosphere. Fire is now declared to be the Sinn of the Earth and this sensation nonetheless is only its ideality or inward essence or to put it another way it signifies or outwardly represents the productive imagination and its intuitive reality is as a moment of tension at the opposite extremes of the meteorological process of the elements, as volcanic activity in the Earth and as shooting star in the atmosphere. It is the source of cometary tension at both extremes, as lightning it stands also at the limit, and turning-point of the rain-cycle between air and water.
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Liszt: Prometheus, symphonic poem:
Crystallization takes place in a watery medium and leaves a liquid residue and this analogy is used for the formation of mountains, rivers, and springs, and the fresh water formed in this process between the Earth and its atmosphere is essentially unstable. As a stable element water has the chemical neutrality of the sea. Atmospheric air differs from any of the chemically distinguishable forms of air in virtue of all the tensions already discussed and the whole range of water-forms emerge from it and so do forms of earth and fire and yet it is the Earth itself that is the active substance to which this whole process belongs and this is the totality from which the motion of fire through the two fluid media starts and to which it finally returns. And having returned to fire we now start on the ideal evolution of particular bodies and here fire as the driving energy of the infinite cycle must primarily appear as a negative, destructive, consuming agency. But the consuming activity of fire is only chemical resolution and the first particular bodies Hegel considers are the real chemical elements isolated by the work of scientists like Cavendish and Priestley and he reiterates the view that mephitic air’(Stickstolf, nitrogen) is the original being of inflammable air, hydrogen, while fixed air, carbon dioxide, is what oxygen passes into as a result of combustion. Oxidation and deoxidation are now discussed as processes in the laboratory and in finite natural contexts and what is important here is not the details of Hegel's chemistry but his view that this is the most elementary form of ordinary combustion or finite fire-process.
Chemical fire has no apparent shape. The distinguishable components of finite fire as an apparent shape, the flame, are light and heat, and light breaks up in finite experience into the colours or it synthesizes with an opaque surface as its colour. Heat permeates bodies and is communicated from one to another and every body has some definite temperature at any time but different bodies have different heat-capacities which is their capacity to subsume fire in this fluid form. The transition from temperature to the concept of a singular finite body can only be called magical and Hegel declares that a singular body is an extinguished fire since in it a visible process has come to a standstill. Whereas his definition of the mechanical concept of body in terms of the lever is prophetic the transition to mineralogy from the Heraclitean fire-process looks back to alchemy and yet anticipates no modern development but the fact that colour and melting-point are identifying marks for metals does demonstrate Hegel's genuine concern to construct a conceptual framework for empirical inquiry.
The positing of air and water in solid bodies is equally symbolic. Air is the moment of rigidity, and water of neutrality and since metals do melt there is an analogy between this neutrality and water and as for the analogy between rigidity (Sprödigkeit) and any quality of air it is the supposed capacity of the air to produce metallic bodies, meteorites, that forms the link, water, on the other hand, is the medium of crystallization, and in its elemental state, as sea-water, it is neutral and at this stage now that we are dealing with solid bodies the atomic hypothesis shows itself. The Earth as a finite body that is to say not an energetic cycle of the elements but as one of the moments isolated from that process and can be analysed into absolute bits, an analysis for the purpose of cognition merely.
Earth is an abstract universal (formale Allgemeinheit) and its ideality is not a living potential but a fixed reflection (formelle Idealität) hence the reason why the Earth must fall into atoms is that knowledge itself must have simple elements that are not further analysable and the atoms here are not necessarily physically indivisible, not like the atoms of Newton and Dalton, it would be self-defeating to divide them further and all that can be learned from a small piece of pure gold can be learned equally well from a larger piece. The physical atom here would be a minimum perceptible piece because to endeavour to divide that would be to lose sight of it yet we have reached the conceptual atom of Earth as a formal community of simple natures, once we have isolated gold as an element in the sense of the chemistry textbook. The Earth must be constituted of such simples since its self-cognition takes place through a community of individuals, whose experience embraces only finite segments of it. Ultimately it is we the finite thinkers who are the real atoms and when we come to deal with cognition from the subjective side there will be no serious difficulty about the proposition that the Earth cognizes itself as the absolute multiplicity of these mid-points and yet Hegel desires us to note that singularity has a long sequence of applications before we come to the indissoluble unity and privacy of the individual consciousness.
'Prometheus Carrying Fire', Jan Cossiers (1600-1671)
'Prometheus Unbound' (excerpt)
by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822)
A CONFUSED VOICE
We hear: thy words waken Oblivion.
DEMOGORGON
Spirits, whose homes are flesh; ye beasts and birds,
Ye worms and fish; ye living leaves and buds;
Lightning and wind; and ye untamable herds,
Meteors and mists, which throng air's solitudes:
A VOICE
Thy voice to us is wind among still woods.
DEMOGORGON
Man, who wert once a despot and a slave,
A dupe and a deceiver! a decay,
A traveller from the cradle to the grave
Through the dim night of this immortal day:
ALL
Speak: thy strong words may never pass away.
DEMOGORGON
This is the day which down the void abysm
At the Earth-born's spell yawns for Heaven's despotism,
And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep;
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.
Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance--
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength;
And if, with infirm hand, Eternity,
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length,
These are the spells by which to reassume
An empire o'er the disentangled doom.
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life; Joy, Empire, and Victory!
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To begin with absolute motion requires indissoluble gravitational units and the parts of the Earth itself have a single gravitational centre and the Solar System depends on the singularity of its Solar body and these bodies are uncuttable in the sense that the whole system would be affected if they were cut hence the system of absolute motion falls apart into atoms and the Earth as an atom of that system falls apart first into motions the elementary processes and yet now the substantial unity of the elementary processes has to fall apart into elementary substances and to be a substance is to contain the process and this kind of process constituting substance, and containing substances constituted by process’ is what reality is, because it is what cognition is or vice versa, the transcendental standpoint as primary, the proper parts of the Earth must contain a process within themselves that is analogous to the cyclic process of fire, water, air, and earth and in the description provided of the constituents of the Earth regarded as a universal container nonetheless all real process comes to a standstill and this is a stage where a form of cognition is somewhat static so a detailed pursuit of his mineralogy or his geology is unnecessary. .
In order to exhibit his frozen image of process, Earth-cognition at the level of immediate sense impression, Hegel divides his elementary solids into metals, combustibles, neutrals, and earths. In his 1803 lectures this classiffication is brought into connection with the distinction drawn by Paracelsus between mercury, sulphur, and salt; and the use of earth as a sub-classiffication is linked with Jakob Böhme (1575 – 1624). Hegel explains that mercury, sulphur, and salt were class-names in the older tradition hence in his own textbook he defines the categories that they symbolized. Metal is the class of simple solids. Metals melt and change colour when heated but they are not chemically changed as a result. Combustibles and salts are the opposite aspects of the fire process physically realized. The combustibles are simple elements that burn readily, the salts are decomposable compounds arising from a chemical process.
Earths contain the totality of the conceptual process of simplicity and opposition hence they can be classified according to which moment of the process is dominant. The self-formation of the Earth is of interest, rock formations are treated of at length, struggling continually to discover the principles governing the type-sequences and yet his assumption is that he is looking at a transformation process frozen into an image of spatial continuity and this is not an evolutionary view but he appears to be asking how the earlier formation was modified or transformed into the later one and he is interested in sequence only as a function of deeper continuity, he was an enthusiastic field geologist, as well as an industrious student of the textbooks and he could have accommodated to an evolutionary hypothesis without difficulty but he thinks of the Earth on the model of an organism rather than as a great chemical laboratory as a totality, rather than a Gegensatz so no evolutionary revision of any of his successive hypotheses is of much use. .
Having completed his account of the elements he proceeds to his account of finite or empirical chemical process. Geology is the static image of an infinite process including even petrifactions that is to say fossils which are an anticipatory portrayal of the real infinite process or organic life for which the static image is a stage and a backdrop. In 1803 Hegel as a matter of fact considers the ecology of the Earth briefly as a prelude to finite chemistry. Like his consideration of the Earth as a mechanical Gestalt this is eliminated in 1804. Finite chemical process is a reaction between two singular bodies that are complementary poles of a single cycle and in this process we discover the kind of energy-equilibrium locked up within any neutral body that placidly maintains itself within the general environment unaffected by anything except the wear and tear of the weather. The finite chemical process is the displaying (Darstellung) of cognition and the three types of element distinguished, metals, combustibles, and salts, reveal the process in ways analogous to the absolute process of fire, water, and air respectively and the types of earth exhibit a process like that of earth itself as a universal element.
Metals present the bare concept of the process, they change in form, by melting, glowing, and so on., when heated, their specific gravity also called their cohesion changes, they liquefy but they do not crystallize, each metal has its distinctive melting-point and is in this way defined by the process. In the galvanic process, with a watery medium, and fire in the form of acid, on the other hand, metals go through real chemical change and yet the synthetic products are not bodies but only the chemically affected, oxidized or reduced, metals themselves. What is released by the process is a gas, and fire exists as acid or caustic base. As thus polarized, fire cognizes itself that is to say it reveals what it is for our cognition, for these are the poles of chemical neutrality. The formation of the metal-salt transforms the abstract metal into a form of the reality of the earth while its phlogiston, hydrogen, escapes into the air.
The theory that the hydrogen thus released is the phlogiston of metal provides Hegel's transition from the metals to the combustibles especially sulphur for sulphur is hydrogenated metal. Free fire’ or flame is fire posited in the form of air, it requires a combustible material but it is a chemical reaction in the atmosphere and to deduce his thesis that acid is fire posited as a real body Hegel interprets that reaction as the neutralization of hydrogen, phlogiston, by nitrogen, phlogisticated air, to produce an acid, carbon dioxide. Acid is fire realized in physical form. Acid is active fire, sulphur is passive fire and yet in the chemical neutrality of a salt fire has become the other of itself. In earth itself we have that which is dry but incombustible, (Hegel's paradigm is silica, yet at the end of the chemical process we have an equilibrium in which the fire has gone out. The assumption is that chemical neutrality gives us the clue to what earthiness is. Chemistry is properly the analysis of what is static into its abstract, or dynamic components and the Earth as a divisible whole is a totality of neutral elements and in chemistry different reagents have different specific products and yet every stably neutral thing must be conceived as having an acid/base polarity of its own distinct kind and only in the noblest of the metals do we discover a simple element which really resists chemical polarization and neutralization.
Neutrality is therefore a systemic characteristic and if the different things that have settled into equilibrium are shaken up into a new pattern a new process toward chemical equilibrium must occur and the elementary substances out of which our earth seems to be built up are only stable in their established chemical balance. Chemical process brings the ideal substances into real compounds, and breaks up compounds into ideal physically unstable substances again and only the cyclic process is a true substance and yet in chemistry there is no true cycle there is only the swaying motion of a pendulum and the truly cyclic process of a self-maintaining substance is the organism.
The discussion of chemical process in the manuscript of 1803 is easier to follow in virtue of it being more directly descriptive and is illustrated by empirical data at every turn and Hegel owed much to the theory of chemical affinity in Claude Louis Berthollet's, (1748 – 1822), Chemical Statics and prior to that to the pioneer work of the Swedish chemist, Torbern Bergman, (1735 – 1784), in this area. It is from Bergman that his chemical classiffication of minerals into metallic, inflammable, saline, and earthy comes, though he insists on fnding an earlier pedigree for it in Paracelsus, (c. 1493 – 1541), and Böhme. Hegel maintained that no chemical element, not even gold or platinum, remains stably in its pure form, and the empirical difficulty of obtaining pure reagents for chemical work has a foundation in physical necessity.
Upon comparing the doctrine of chemical fire in 1803 with the transcendental theory in the 1804 textbook we get an indication of why Hegel insisted on the emblematic significance of mercury, sulphur, and salt in the older tradition of Paracelsus. In 1803 the moments of the mineral organism are metal, simple concept, salinity, combustibility, antithesis, and earthiness, totality, and yet in 1804 when the conception of the Earth as a mineral organism has fallen by the wayside like the conception of it as a mechanical Gestalt the pattern is triadic. Earthiness is now interpreted in terms of neutrality that therefore ceases to be half of the antithesis and becomes the a priori synthesis through which the nature of the Earth as a chemical system but not as an organism is revealed and there ought now to be no room for such crudely material emblems of chemical process as mercury, sulphur, and salt and yet as a matter of fact, sulphur occupies a crucial place in the evolution of the three logical moments of chemical process, metal, acid, neutrality. In 1803 Hegel surveys the forms of fire beginning from free flame and moving through the array of its otherness, galvanism, static electricity, chemical affinity, and the atmospheric process, to the purely theoretical concept of phlogiston. This array disappears in 1804 rather an attempt is made to deduce the first big step from free flame to the inwardly fiery character of acid. For this step the natural combustibility of some minerals is crucial, sulphur being important because it provides a powerful acid, and what is deduced is a theory of the transformations of phlogiston and because Hegel sided with the phlogiston chemists he had to be able to deduce their assumptions from his transcendental theory. Hegel's theory is a transcendental one that developed through an increasing tendency to focus attention upon the triad of Paracelsus, that is, from his study of the elements Paracelsus adopted the idea of tripartite alternatives to explain the nature of medicines which he thought to be composed of the tria prima three primes a combustible element (sulphur), a fluid and changeable element (mercury), and a solid, permanent element (salt) but let us not go down that road and complicate matters .....
'Prometheus Bound' (ending)
by Aeschylus
PROMETHEUS
The time is past for words; earth quakes
Sensibly: hark! pent thunder rakes
The depths, with bellowing din
Of echoes rolling ever nigher:
Lightnings shake out their locks of fire;
The dust cones dance and spin;
The skipping winds, as if possessed
By faction-north, south, east and west,
Puff at each other; sea
And sky are shook together: Lo
The swing and fury of the blow
Wherewith Zeus smiteth me
Sweepeth apace, and, visibly,
To strike my heart with fear. See, see,
Earth, awful Mother! Air,
That shedd'st from the revolving sky
On all the light they see thee by,
What bitter wrongs I bear!
Charles-Valentin Alkan: Grande Sonate 'Les Quatre Âges' Op. 33 '50 Ans: Prométhée Enchaîné' :-
Dedicated to the One who always lights my fire. 🔥And my soul and mind. I love you ❤️
You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
Girl, we couldn't get much higher
Come on, baby, light my fire
Come on, baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire
The time to hesitate is through
No time to wallow in the mire
Try now we can only lose
And our love become a funeral pyre
Come on, baby, light my fire
Come on, baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire, yeah
The time to hesitate is through
No time to wallow in the mire
Try now we can only lose
And our love become a funeral pyre
Come on, baby, light my fire
Come on, baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire, yeah
You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you Girl, we couldn't get much higher
Come on, baby, light my fire
Come on, baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire
Try to set the night on fire
Try to set the night on fire
Try to set the night on fire
====
The Doors, 'Light My Fire:
Coming up next:
Theories of the organism.
It may stop but it never ends ....