'The earth'
by Friedrich von Matthisson (1761 - 1831)
When gently enraptured my eyes see
How beautifully the earth blooms in springtime;
How every creature, nestling close,
Lies at her blessed breasts;
And how she loves every suckling,
Gladly giving him mild sustenance,
And thus in everlasting vigour of youth
Brings forth, succours, and creates growth;
Then I feel a lofty compulsion in my bosom
To praise Him with deed and song,
Him, whose wondrous omnipotent call
Created the wide world so beautifully.
Who let forests and herbs grow upon it,
And bade the seas to begird it;
He, from whom all blessings come,
Who floods us with bliss!
Yes, yes, my spirit, extol Him loudly,
Who built our globe!
And as long as it is His desire, delight
In the contemplation of His world..
'Die Erde'
Wenn sanft entzückt mein Auge sieht,
Wie schön im Lenz die Erde blüht:
Wie jedes Wesen angeschmiegt
An ihren Segensbrüsten liegt;
Und wie sie jeden Säugling liebt,
Ihm gern die milde Nahrung giebt,
Und so in steter Jugendkraft
Hervor bringt, nährt und Wachsthum schafft:
Dann fühl' ich hohen Busendrang,
Zu rühmen den mit That und Sang,
Des wundervoller Allmachts-Ruf
Die weite Welt so schön erschuf!
Der Wald und Kraut drauf wachsen ließ,
Und Meere sie umgürten hieß;
Von dem der Seegen alle kömmt,
Der uns mit Wonne überschwemmt!
Ja, ja, mein Geist, erheb ihn laut,
Der unsern Erdenball gebaut!
Erfreu, so lang es ihm gefällt,
Dich an dem Anblick seiner Welt.
Franz Peter Schubert (1797 – 1828), 'Die Erde', D. 579B
====
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770 – 1831). 'Philosophy of Nature'. 'Physics'.
The theory of organism. And so we arrive at the stage where Hegel gave up on the project of his 1804 textbook and our attention now turns to the manuscripts of 1803 a somewhat perilous move given that albeit the developments of doctrine between 1803 and 1804 lack the kind of radicality that we come to expect nonetheless there is quite a marked change of perspective for in 1803 the principal character in the play is the Earth itself while in 1804 the logical evolution of human cognition determines the order of presentation and yet since the textbook has arrived at the Idea of the Earth and has initiated upon a discourse concerning Earths self-cognition the change of perspective poses perhaps less difficulty than it would have done previously but the change is there and because we are treating of Hegel's theory of the organism in the earlier conceptual context it is a good idea at this stage to sketch the outline of the earlier context.
The lectures of 1803 regard the Earth as an organism from the outset and mechanical and chemical theory have not the capacity to present its organic wholeness which discloses itself rather by breaking the bounds of these finite disciplines hence the Earth has a shape that is mechanically self-determining and yet it is a living shape that can only be mechanically expressed as the disruption of the dead fixity of the lunar landscape and we can only understand this disruption by advancing to the chemical level and recognizing the creative response of the Earth to the varying solicitation of the Sun as it follows its spinning ellipse of subordinate motion through space hence in 'Chemism’ there is the life-cycle of the Earth as the context of our efforts of interpretation, chemism as a universal category frames our theory of the hidden cycle in that the chemical elements themselves invisible and hence theoretical entities are translated and yut we can only formulate the concept of the chemical process through our experience with the physical elements.
The life of the Earth is the meteorological cycle of these real elements and the concept of this cycle reaches its intuitive totality in the physical Idea of the Earth and so rather than passing to ‘Physics’ as soon as he has set forth the abstract concept of chemical process a was done in 1804 Hegel must take care of the physical reality of the chemical process in the Earth's climate prior to making the transition to physics proper. The discussion of ‘chemism reaches a conclusion like the discussion of mechanism with the Earth breaking the bounds of the chemical process because it is an organism, it emerges as fertile for life.
‘Physics’ in 1803, starts off with the theory of the mineral elements and of geology which form the substance of the definition of the Earth in 1804 and we kick off from the conception of the Earth as a cohesive system of different specific gravities that is the terminus of the 1804 textbook where the language of cohesion drops out completely and even by 1803 Hegel does not employ the concept of mineral organism for this and since his geology is not evolutionary Johannes Hoffmeister,(1907-55), interpolation is out of place. 'His virtue is understanding, his goddess necessity Hoffmeister once said of Hegel. The life of the organism is hidden within the Earth's cohesion and not reflected out of it for the observer to see and yet the fertility of this titanic chemical amalgam is thrust into prominence as the sure indication of what is concealed.
And so we make the move from the Earth as a physical body made up of land, sea, air, and fire, to the theory of the finite types of physical body that make it up and from there to the physical description of how they do so and then finally we are able to deal with the chemical process through which we can comprehend how all the constituents lie beside one another in stable indifference and the procedure of 1804 is dictated not by the structure of the Earth but by that of scientific cognition and yet at the point where the manuscript ends the two paths very nearly converge. For in the definition of the Earth we have at last arrived at the conception of the Earth as an organic whole and we simply need to pick up Hegel's earlier comments about terrestrial fertility and ecology at this stage in order to be somewhat certain of having all the content of his doctrine when we pass directly to the theory of the organism in the manuscripts of 1803.
But there can be no certainty that Hegel would have incorporated all of his earlier comments about the Earth's flora and fauna into his 1804 definition of the Earth because some of them are based upon the magnetic theory that he has shoved into the background if not ditched altogether and yet it is here most assuredly where the general topic belongs, it is the living force of the Earth that takes over the radiant light of the Sun and transforms it into the heat energy upon which the meteorological cycle depends and through this cycle the soil is made fruitful at the apart from at poles where the Earth has a shape as fixed as that of the moon. The two motions of the Earth in the Solar System set up a mechanical gravitational determinism that the Earth resists through its own absolute chemism and Hegel recognises in 1803 that this struggle has a very real history, that animal species have been extinguished in some regions that still exist in others, seas have dried up, lands have been engulfed or cut off from one another, all of which serves as evidence of a different relation of the Earth to the Sun than that which now exists. What sort of difference? Well, through placing free motion at the foundation of his philosophy of Nature a spatial evolution of the Solar System is rendered more easily conceivable than it ever could be in the Newtonian theory and Hegel also recognised that climatic evolution is possible at least because he was himself an adherent of the Aristotelian ideal of an eternal world. Hegel does on occasion apparently reveal an Aristotelian stance toward the Heavens as if no significant change takes place there so that as far as the Earth's orbital motion is concerned every seasonal cycle is exactly like every other and hence the ground of all the evident variation is to be looked for in the Earth itself. But this is only apparent, no such stance is needed by his theory of nature generally and any such assumption is ruled out by the view that the Aufhebung of any stage involves its preservation and persistence. Hegel later was to to credit the hypothesis that Aristotelianism is just fine in the year that a comet returns would not wish to be cavalier towards the correlation of sunspots with the terrestrial weather cycle and Hegel's general conception of comets led him to search for strange phenomena associated but this is the holistic character of his method and Hegel's fundamentally Christian mythology of Reason is of more significance here than any Greek philosophical influence, and yet Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron, (1944 -), point to the μήτηρ τιθήνη mother nurse of Plato's 'Timaeus'.
Geology regardless of whether it has a historical evolution behind it should be studied historically nonetheless the geological formation of the New World has only a North/South tension that is it is more mechanically dominated and less subject to the chemism that operates from an equatorial axis, its flora are more varied than its fauna but even here it does not rival the Old World. The human population is culturally less advanced, still at a young age ‘they lacked what strengthens man most in his mastery of nature, iron and the beast of burden’.
The general concept of life intuited as the aether then develops it through the vegetable and animal levels and Spirit itself is the totality of the organic process and the Earth as an organism is a universal individual’. Everything regarding it is cyclic, its chemical constituents have each a certain range of variability in different situations and yet they have no self-transforming power, the Earth itself is determinate and singular as the universal complex of these constituents and yet each of them is determined by its place in the complex. ‘In order to be what it is’ (in 1804 it would be expressed ‘to know itself that is to be known as what it is’) the Earth must have elements or constituents that are themselves self-maintaining totalities and there is a direct reference here is to the growth of plants and yet the manner by which Hegel presents his concept of the Earth's fertility its ‘absolute life-power’ sheds light on the particular way that he talks of cognition, in the living organism what was simply a theoretical construct to explain how the meteorological process works, our reflection, actually exists.
Observing the problem from the other side as he does in 1803 the concept of organism has evolved or has logically unfolded itself at least at every significant turning-point, every advance to a higher Potenz or power and the bodies involved in the exposition of free motion differ in their periodic motions and yet the system is in perfect equilibrium and the periodicities that this sets up are the frame of the meteorological process and in that process the Earth itself becomes the central focus in which all of its simple elements are inextricably fused and upon studying the meteorological process we observe that the emergence of organic life is an integral continuation of it and plant life emerges directly from the earth and is a cycle of the elements within the great meteorological cycle expiring in the winter when the earth lies fallow and reborn again in the spring.
For the transient cyclic process of the living and dying organism the great environing cycle of the Earth's own life becomes a stable unchanging background of simple being and this greater cycle of which the organism is really a single moment becomes its inert or inorganic environment hence the real unity of organism and environment becomes a relation of opposition and yet the organism is bound to place itself in opposition in this manner only in virtue of there being a tension within it that resembles the chemical tension of the elements. It strives against death its own submergence in the elemental cycle and yet its own death is part of its concept, to escape total submergence it must be capable of self-reproduction and for that purpose it must be divided in such a way that its recombination will produce the new organism. ‘The Idea of organic individuality is the kind (Gattung),’ Individuality is something which does not belong to plants because they can only subsist while they remain rooted in the Earth, they are thus parasitic upon the life-giving fertility of the soil and properly individual organisms must be self-fertilizing and the true individual is the mated pair.
Note: Gatte means mate or spouse and Gattung probably has always an echo of mating in Hegel's use, indeed his use is better understood by remembering Martin Luther's translation of Genesis 1 than by thinking of its technical use as genus in biology so kind is borrowed from the Authorized Version of 1611.
'And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so'.
'And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good'.
...
'And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good'.
'And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth'.
'And the evening and the morning were the fifth day'.
'And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so'.
'And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good'.
Although the text dates from a year later and a new phase in Hegel's system building is under way and the relation of biological Trieb to physical Gattung in this passage is perhaps a sound basis for the analogical interpretation of the relation of moral Trieb to the substance of ethical life in the 'Natural Law' essay. .)
Each of the two sexes ‘is the whole Idea’ and what that means is that they cannot be defined independently and his theory of what happens in sexual generation is inspired by Aristotle's theory of intellectual conception rather than taken over from his physical theory whereby the male is ‘the agent of the form’ and the female physically conceives it and no definite genetic theory appears to be intended and all that matters is that an individual as sexed is both equal to the Idea and different from it which sets up the tension of the sexual drive (Trieb).
___________________________
The restles swallow fits my restles minde,
In still revivinge still renewinge wronges;
her Just complaintes of cruelly unkinde,
are all the Musique, that my life prolonges.
With pensive thoughtes my weeping Stagg I crowne
whose Melancholy teares my cares Expresse
hes Teares in sylence, and my sighes unknowne
are all the physicke that my harmes redresse.
My onely hope was in this goodly tree,
which I did plant in love bringe up in care:
but all in vanie, for now to late I see
the shales be mine, the kernels others are.
My Musique may be plaintes, my physique teares
If this be all the fruite my love tree beares.
(Author unknown)
'Portrait of an unknown woman in masque costume, associated with Aura Soltana', 1590s, Marcus Gheeraerts
___________________________
Whereas plant life is a cycle within the meteorological cycle of the elements the animal organism contains the two cycles of self-maintenance against the elements and of self-fertilization within itself and yet we can merely say that it contains this second process as Gattung and what happens empirically is that two individuals are brought together by a Trieb and a new individual is born as a result. 2 Hegel compares these two cycles to the motions of the Earth. Self-maintenance is analogous to axial rotation and in the reproductive cycle the Gattung operates as the Sun of the individual and the natural environment on the other hand which Hegel now calls inorganic becomes a satellite of the cycle of self-maintenance. (Hegel had not called the elemental environment inorganic and yet he does say it is the ʻseyende indifferente träge Allgemeinheitʼ which is a reasonable characterization of the inorganic moment in his dialectical opposition of ʻorganicʼ and ʻinorganicʼ. And having reached the free individuated organism Hegel begins to speak of the terrestrial environment as ʻinorganicʼ).
A helpful analogy. It demonstrates plainly where the centre of Hegel's own conceptual universe is namely in mankind as Gattung and also it sheds light on the odd locution ‘self-cognition of the Earth’ that we came across earlier. For upon the basis of this analogy Hegel asserts that ‘the essence of the Earth is completely realized’ in organic individuality, or that ‘in it the Earth comes to itself’, and the ‘absolute life-force’ that exists in the Earth but which has hence attained independent existence, is the aether that is the ultimate source of things. Life is in Hegel's view the primitive concept, it is not to be thought of as a result or product arising from factors or components that are themselves inorganic nor is it a mystery because its essence is awareness or cognition, the philosopher who strives to know and to say what really is must acknowledge that it is precisely this effort to know that he or she is concerned with and he or she must frame his or her fundamental questions and concepts accordingly. If one thinks of life as a response to the challenge of the non-living environment or of cognition as the response to an external stimulus the philosophical understanding of what is becomes impossible since the relative character of the interaction is accepted from the beginning and for this reason the polar oppositions, magnetism, electricity, irritability, and so on, to which Schelling and his pupils attached so much importance in the philosophy of nature were as misleading in Hegel's view as the mechanical models of Isaac Newton and Immanuel Kant.
The immediate existence of this terrestrial life-force is the Earth's vegetation and at the level of plant life there is no proper individuation and every kind is a self-perpetuating continuum and there is multiplication and there is reproduction but no true sexual division, even upon Hegel acknowledging in 1805 that his botany was not empirically correct on this point he did not budge from this conceptual ideal of plant life, every individual is the whole Kind, sexual pairing, the complementarity of distinct individuals is not essential for plant reproduction as it is for animals, plant life as ‘the first Potenz of the organic process’ is a spurious infinite, an endless chain of processes which are cyclic, but have no proper beginning or end, no moment of completion. ‘The Idea as such ceases to exist in this portioning.’ The Kind exists, not as an individuated reality but as an implicit multitude of singular manifestations.
Generally speaking Hegel's theory of plant growth does not change in 1805, but there are implications of his insistence that generic incompleteness is essential to individuality, it means that a true individual must both be incomplete, and be capable of recognizing what is necessary for its completion outside itself. That is what it is to be or to contain a concept and plants are all identical with their concept, as manifest, apparently individuated phenomena, they are contained within it, rather than containing it. An entity can contain its concept in the first instance as an ideal toward which it actively strives and yet even plants strive toward maturity and for proper individuality the completion striven for must actually exist elsewhere so that the striving is a quest ending in the recognition of the self that is desired in another being like oneself. Sexual incompleteness and consequent need is the beginning of this questing relation with the world which is the condition of individuality as the self-moving production of the knower's own Idea and the plant does not call its own mate.
Louise Farrenc, (1804 – 1875), Cello Sonata, Op. 46 - II. Andante Sostenuto:
====
The plant produces nectar which calls upon an intermediary which is a being of nobler nature precisely because it can be called and animal sensation is the primitive form of organic independence of the environment. And now we may talk of the great organism of the Earth-process as inorganic for even for the animal-senses it is reflected, broken up into parts which exist for the organism and only in its own reproduction cycle is the single animal involved in a process of which it is merely a subordinate moment. It is then aware of its Kind as a controlling urge (Begierde). Hegel in general uses Thier, thierisch, and so on, for what belongs to the beasts, while Animal, animalisch refers to the common nature of all animals, rational and irrational alike, hence it is significant that he speaks of Begierde as thierisch and of the theoretical and cognitive aspects ofsensation as animalisch for it suggests that he is not directly concerned with the cognitive capacities of beasts even of the mammalian quadrupeds but simply wants to examine how the animal senses become cognitive in man hence he does not maintain that the brutes discriminate colours as colours but only for instance as attractive or aversive signs and throughout the development of the ‘system of the absolute character of the animal nature (des animalischen) that forms itself outwardly (ausbildet) on its own account’ the physical development of a sub-conscious organism is spoken of and yet the Individuum he has in mind is the human animal.
The discussion of the animal organism is articulated in the manuscript by the use of Greek letters. Section alpha maybe is incomplete, it introduces the concept of organic shape (Gestalt) very generally and the brute power of voluntary motion and the temporal transience of the brute life-cycle are briey characterized. In section beta and continuing through to section zeta there is a discussion of the jelly (Gallerte) from which the body is formed and because Hegel's embryology was Aristotelian the seminal fluid has to provide the seed of life that is present in this jelly, it is precisely this self-fertilized medium of life which plant life cannot generate for itself and the egg-laying animals of sea and sky are placed in the borderline category between animals and plants for pre-natal development in the womb is the distinctive mark of animal life and even prior to the young animal being born the whole fluid process of its self-maintenance goes on within its skin. Skin-formation we may take to be primitive, as the limit between inner and outer, and differentiates this primary process in the opposite directions of bone and muscle formation. Bone and muscle operating together against one another give the developed animal its capacity to move and react to stimuli, the system of irritability, and the primitive jelly from which skin-formation proceeds which Hegel begins to designate the lymphatic system once the outer organism is formed is self-moving, as well as self-reproductive, the lymph is the energy-source of the animal organism, the universal reproduction of animal fluidity.
Digestion is the primitive system of organic self-maintenance in which the organism takes part of its environment into itself and draws from it the raw material that it needs and this raw material must be vegetable matter at least and that the best vegetable foods are fruit and the complex digestive arrangements of herbivores are of little interest here neither are the chemistry and mechanics of digestion for the primary concerned is the insistence that when the plant material is infected by the animal process and the animal jelly is generated an absolute transformation not reducible to any chemical or mechanical process takes place. The self-maintaining organic process relates itself to the great cycle of nature outside its skin through its sensory powers, the nervous system is the foundation of sensation, it is a further differentiation of the bone structure and we must distinguishes the sympathetic nervous system from the voluntary system but Hegel's knowledge here was incomplete and his revisions are chiefly evidence of the continuing increase of his stock of factual information.
The arterial system Hegel treats as a development of the musculature. The heart upon which it all depends is a muscle with no nerves so we have no direct sense-awareness of it, the blood which it pumps is the bearer of the inward life that makes the body one, while the nerves externalize everything for intuition within a single field of sensation, so the nerve is the ‘absolute concept in the form of universality’ while the blood-system is ‘the absolute concept in the form of difference’, and as the ‘side of difference of the inner system the blood makes the absolute Zusammenhang (the point of infinity) of the outer and inner systems’. The nerves translate physical reality into mental awareness while the blood is the life-force in a physical form and the blood is a more complete expression of vitality than the lymph which arises directly from the transformation of the raw material that the body takes over, it receives the lymph, keeps it alive, and carries it to different parts of the body for further transformation in the body-building process. There is a reverse process but let us not dwell upon the breakdown and removal of waste-products, the Hegelian conception of the organism is a closed one but it has a dependence on earth and air so the lack of any reference to our water simply reflects a gap in Hegel's empirical knowledge and even his theory of the function of lungs and liver rather patchy and lacking in fattiness unlike my actual liver, my lungs are functioning ok though, breathe in, the finishing line of this article is in sight .....
'Portrait of a Lady, Called Elizabeth, Lady Tanfield', 1615, British School 17th century
The circulation of the blood is the life-principle of both the inner and the outer organism. ‘The individual is complete in this reciprocity of the two organisms, it must become universal.’ This it does in the sexual, reproductive process and all through the nervous system the inner organism has sense-awareness of the whole body and in order to complete its existence as a Kind it must have sensory awareness of what concerns it in the outer world. The specific sensory apparatus is its means for this, the sensors have to be modifications of the skin process and of the nervous system and awareness of the outside world is the specifc function of the brain and the primary sense organ is the skin itself the seat of the sense of touch and at the opposite extreme from touch stands the specialized sense of sight which is an ideal form of awareness in that it involves no bodily contact.
‘In sight the brute is pressed to the ultimate abstraction of nature that is possible for it'. Smell is a sort of synthesis of the real communication that typifies touch and the ideal awareness that typifies sight and though there is real contact it is only through an ideal that is to say imperceptible form of pure fluidity, the scent, smell is the sense of the combustible, for what volatilizes from an organism as its distinctive scent is the fiery principle of its life. As those of you kind enough to have read it I spoke much about fire in my previous article, Hegel evinced a sympathy towards evolutionary hypotheses about the history of the earth in 1803 but later clearly rejected them. In principle Hegel was a Vulcanist and not in the Star Trek sense for he stated ʻthe might of the Earth, or the earthly time [i.e. cyclic driving principle] is fire.ʼ But the Vulcanist hypothesis is just as much a ʻfalse semblanceʼ as that of the Neptunists (water but I don't need to tell you that) in so far as it suggests an ongoing process and the fire has ʻgone outʼ in the same sense that the mock-coals which decorate some modern electric heaters are a fire which has ʻgone outʼ and only in its fertile capacity to produce plant life is the Earth's fire in reality kindled.
Taste is the chemical sense and the one that is crucial to assimilation and digestion and touch and sight are the two sides of primitive sensibility or common sense, smell and taste are special modifications of touch for the general media of air and water respectively and yet hearing and voicing are the true climax, the totality of sensibility, for together they make ideal communication possible. Calling cries may be almost involuntary or quite non-deliberate and spontaneous but they are still radically different from the rustles and clangs that sub-animate things produce only in response to direct contact; and responses are radically different from physical echoes. Hegel has of course only dimly aware of great variety of animal communication and yet in this first systematic philosophy of organism the significance of mating calls is clearly established. ‘In voice Kind and individual, universality and infinity coincide; and in this absolutely reflected unity of individuality, it [the singular organism] has become itself an outward [being] as whole individual.’ The cry expresses the universal Kind, a knowledgeable human hearer can say instantly what animal it is and yet it also expresses outwardly the inward life and feeling, the absolute need of the singular organism and it closes the cycle of infinity by making that single organism a whole individual when it brings the two sexes together.
The theoretical process of sensation was re-written in order to include an account of how it constitutes the organism's dominance or subsuming of the environment in its quest for food, and so on, as well as the more important subsumption of the single organism in the process of the Kind and the organic/inorganic distinction is demonstrated to arise from the ideal sublation of the greater organic process in sensory consciousness which breaks the Earth-process itself into finite bits and the movement of the whole is now dominant as desire or need, the field of sensory awareness is full of attractive or aversive stimuli and we can generalise the analysis from the need for nourishment.
What is added to the discussion of the Kind-process is an account of the impulse to nurse and protect the young: ‘in [re]cognizing the young the brute has become Kind [for] itself … This becoming external of universality [i.e. of its Kind] is the highest form of rationality of which the brute is capable.’ The herding-instinct is brought in here for the first time in this connection albeit Hegel does not rate its rationality particularly highly, it is ‘the displaying of a higher relation with the Kind, but this universal is here itself nothing but a multitude of singulars.’ Herding in animals is like sex in plants, (yes even plants do it) an anticipation of higher developments, but more than required for the proper comprehension of this present stage we have reached.
And so the organism is completed, there is a life-cycle of the Kind for which the physical self-preservation of the single bodily organism is an external and dispensable means and the bodily organism is a middle between the Kind as a life form, and the great outward organism of the Earth-process, and in sense-cognition the middle breaks free from its servitude to the immortal powers which it connects and the animal-cry albeit it is an essential practical moment in the infinite cycle of the life of the Kind is also a critical moment of self-assertion for the individual organism. The whole realm of spirit turns upon this fulcrum. Reproduction has been expounded as the context of irritability and that in turn as the context of organic sensation and the natural goal of the whole process is the mature individual whose sensory apparatus is focused upon calling and coupling with its mate, disease and death now follows as the logical revelation that the Gestaltung of the single organism is only a means for the continued propagation of the Kind and yet the emergence of sense-consciousness is the beginning of a new cycle altogether.
As for the completion of the life-cycle itself the natural degeneration and death of the organism as distinct from its succumbing to some accident of the Earth process or to the attack of some enemy happens since the harmonious functioning of the organism is constituted by a hostile tension between its sub-systems and very distinct kind of bodily tissue, bone, muscle, nerve, blood, and so on, is a particular tension of the primary jelly. This tension can be broken or overcome by one of the others hence the body can begin to digest itself so to speak using digestion as the name for any return to the primary fluidity and fever is interpreted as the general symptom of the disturbance and restoration of the proper organic equilibrium. Organic tensing and slackening is ‘the essential theory of sickness’.
Probably owing something to John Brown's, (1735 - 1788), theory of disease, (the Brunonian system of medicine essentially understood all diseases as a matter of over or under-stimulation a theory focussing on outside factors that would excite the body and lead to different diseases and the presentation of various symptoms, the stimulation was seen as excitability; hence the relation of Brunonian medicine and excitants and Brown argued that any symptoms of disease or behaviour which strayed from that of a healthy individual suggested over-excitement of the body, for instance, even a person presenting as weak had been over-excited). The same view of fever is put presented in 1805 and even later in the philosophy of nature the Brownian influence is still in evidence and yet this initial statement of Hegel's theory of disease could be described as the older Galenic theory, (Galen, 129 – 216 AD)), adapted to accommodate William Harvey, (1578 – 1657), and restated in Brownian terminology. Brown's own theory much in fashion among Schelling's students comes in for some sharp criticism as a formalistic one while Hegel's own theory is a transcendental one in which focal concepts are identified and the range of their possible application is illustrated. Brown confuses a logical theory with a method of treatment and as a consequence he forgets the living organism that his logic should articulate and approaches the body as if it were a laboratory full of chemical retorts. Hegel's medicine were there such would be more holistic.
‘With sickness the brute oversteps the bounds of its nature; but the sickness of the brute is the coming into being of the Spirit.’ The cycle from primitive fluidity to terminal fluidity identifies death with birth and rational consciousness is the comprehension of this fluidity that articulates itself as a definite shape only in order to reassert itself and dissolve the shape again and the animal achieves its identity as the conscious Kind only as a sensible intuition and Hegel does not ascribe to it any conscious recognition of self in the mate or the young: ‘this whole that it is, it intuits; its totality as the other sex and as its ospring; thus this [its sensing as organic whole] is likewise posited for it strictly under the form of singularity.’ Only in its natural death does the brute express what it is.
It cannot know what it is, because it cannot develop its sense-awareness into a universal cognition as we do when we say ‘red is a colour’ and so identify the community in which ‘red’ is a member along with all the other colours that are sensibly opposed to it as different. The corresponding identity of the finite organism with the great community of natural life is what is shown by its death and yet Hegel points the contrast between this natural transition, and the cognitive transition in which the finite elements of the higher community are preserved, at the natural level we have not the preservation of the single individual but only the clear emergence of its universal meaning, it is the Kind that survives. ‘The brute is now the absolute trinity of organisms, of the outer, of the inner relating itself to that [i.e. circulation and nervous system], and of the absolute inner free organism.’
The outward life of the embodied Kind can only rise to this freedom as a spurious infinity of one generation succeeding another and the singular living organism preserves itself at all costs and yet only the Kind is really preserved. ‘The being of the individual on its own account … becomes empty illusion (Täuschung). While it means to produce itself, it is a product of the whole, and it produces the whole.’ In his first draft Hegel finished his philosophy of nature by commenting that it is the destiny of spirit to repeat this cycle in consciousness but he erased that and substituted a review of the whole progression from the natural aether to the aether of consciousness. The primordial aether is ‘self-equivalent indifference’ (universality) in contrast to the ‘existing infinity’ of the system of free motion in the heavens, and in the Earth-process this opposition is mediated and the free motions all become aspects of the Earth's own life-cycle and yet this identity of life and motion as embodied in the living Earth is only ‘the absolute return of the aether into itself’. The infinite life is now embodied in a substance and itt can now be conscious of itself and yet it does not yet have any consciousness. ‘In the spirit nature exists as that which its essence is.’ Existirt has here the sense of ‘stands forth’. The essence of Nature is what stands forth to be seen in the organism and Spirit is simply the organism's becoming capable of seeing how it has stood forth.
'Portrait of a (Pregnant) Woman in Red', 1620, Marcus Gheeraerts II
For my Muse, please accept this, yet another of my animal cries to my mate. You make my jelly wobble. Forever and ever you are the One:
Ever and ever, forever and ever you'll be the one
That shines on me like the morning sun
Ever and ever, forever and ever you'll be my spring
My rainbow's end and the song I sing
Take me far beyond imagination
You're my dream come true, my consolation you'll be my dream
My symphony, my own lover's theme
(Ever and ever, forever and ever) my destiny
Will follow you eternally
Take me far beyond imagination
You're my dream come true, my consolation
you'll be the one That shines in me like the morning sun
(Ever and ever, forever and ever) my destiny
Will follow you eternally
====
Demis Roussos, 'Forever and Ever'
Coming up next:
Shape. And other strange matters.
It may stop but it never ends ...