Reason

Observing Reason

This first of three major sections of the Phenomenology’s epic account of Reason is the rational consciousness’s first attempt to ‘raise its certainty into truth, and to fulfill the empty mine.’¹ The abstractions of the Kantian and Fichtean systems are to be overcome: now, reason wants to really reach into the world and understand it for itself. The world is no longer a simple object to be hopelessly grasped, as it was for consciousness (in sensuous certainty, perception, and so on). Instead, in Jean Hyppolite’s words, this braver stage of reason ‘is interested not in the sensuous as such but in the concept that resides in the sensuous.’² By thinking through nature and the sensuous world, understanding it as inherently conceptual, reason will find itself in the world. Whereas, in the stages of consciousness, the subject was content to merely stand before the world, naïvely ‘taking it in’, it has now developed the capacity to reach out to the world, will itself towards knowing it, and so on. This is what permits the earlier summary of Reason as the stage at which the subject’s activity is defined by mediation. The opening paragraph of Observing Reason is remarkably clear, and contains multiple clues for how this mediating relationship with the world will play out:

Formerly, it just happened to consciousness that it perceived and experienced quite a bit in the thing; however, here it itself makes the observations and engages the experience. … Reason thus now has a universal interest in the world because it is the certainty of having its present moment in the world, or is certain that the present is rational. It seeks its other, while knowing that it possesses nothing else in that other but itself; it seeks only its own infinity.³

Of course, the Phenomenology is ultimately populated by a sequence of failures; consequently, in the very next paragraph, Hegel explains how observing reason will eventually fall. Its goal, as we have established, is to engage the world, mediate between subject and nature, and thereby feel at home in the world, and among the world: that is, to not be an individual abstraction, as the I of Kant and Fichte was. However,

if reason rummages around through all the innards of things, and opens all their veins so that reason might encounter itself gushing out from them, then it will have no luck; rather, it must at an earlier point have perfected itself inwardly in order to be able to experience its perfection.⁴

In other words, the observer (this is the name I will give to our current character) will eventually come to find that it cannot find itself in the world of things while it still has an underdeveloped notion of its own selfhood. Or, as Kalkavage puts it, ‘thinghood as observation conceives it (thinghood as nature) is an inappropriate vessel for the self, whose true nature observing reason does not know.’⁵ When this ‘vessel’ proves to be insufficient, reason will turn to the practical realm of ‘self-actualisation’ in order to know itself. Hegel makes this point himself, when he introduces the three divisions of Observing Reason, and gives a clue to what follows them:

What observing reason is doing is to be examined in the moments of its movement as it incorporates nature, spirit, and, finally, the relation of both as sensuous being, and when as an existing actuality, it seeks itself.⁶

Observation of Nature

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, / Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

At the outset, the observer thinks in the tradition of Francis Bacon, working as an ‘unthinking consciousness.’ Hegel does not mean this in a straightforwardly disparaging way; rather, he means that the observer is engaged in a naïve kind of empiricism, which deludes itself into thinking that it relies on observation – ‘tasting, smelling, feeling, hearing, and seeing’ – alone.⁷ The naivety of this position is that it has forgotten the role that consciousness plays in determining the objects of experience. As Kant wrote in his Prolegomena, a ‘given intuition must be subsumed under a concept which determines the form of judging in general’ in order to count as experience and actually contribute to our knowledge of the world.⁸ The observer cannot simply sit and gaze at the world if it wishes to actually observe it. An empiricist like Bacon thus undermines the role that thought (or, for Kant, the understanding specifically) plays in their observation of the world. This consciousness is ‘unthinking’ in the sense that it represses its own thought. (Think also of Hume’s denial of the substantial self, on the basis of it not showing up as an impression). To illustrate this point simply, we know, since the passage from sensuous certainty to perception, that any attempt at grasping a sensuous this always gives way to an unintended universal. Hegel makes the same point again here: ‘the meaning of what is perceived should at least be that of a universal, not a sensuous this.’

At first, this universal is just what consciousness finds to be stable in the movement of the observed world. As a cloud floats through the sky, slowly undulating into different shapes, I nonetheless recognise that it is the same cloud, ‘the uniform repetition of the same doing.’ At this stage, I have this recognition because I – the observer – have a memory of the cloud’s movement and transformation, and through my memories of it, I can identify what remains. This memory is what serves as the universal. As such, Hegel explains, the observer ‘must shift the responsibility to itself for the real movement of the universal.’⁹ That is, universality on this account belongs only to the observer’s description of the world, ‘without the sensuous having in itself become a universal.’ The problem with this is captured by Hegel’s phrase, ‘the indeterminateness of the universal’: when it is up to me and my memory to identify universals in things, there is no criterion in the things for how these universals are identified. Amid the wealth of the observable universe, how are the lines between discrete ‘things’ to be drawn? The observer is left with an ‘endless particularization of the chaotic range of animals and plants, mountain ranges, metals, earth, etc.’¹⁰ Within this ‘inexhaustible supply for observing and describing’, the observer can hypothetically go on classifying forever. By use of its memory, it can take anything to be a universal; as such, ‘it can no longer know whether what seems to have being in itself is not a contingency.’¹¹

In this overwhelming and endless game of classification, the observer comes across a sign that it has not ‘advance[d] into sensuous perceiving’. Specifically, the observing consciousness ends up with a distinction between ‘what enables things to be known’ – that is, the aspects of observed objects that end up in the memory, ready to be classed as universals – and ‘the left-over range of sensuous properties, something which the thing itself cannot do without but from which consciousness exempts itself.’¹² This distinction essentially gives us another form of the thing-in-itself: this time, in Kalkavage’s words, consciousness ‘is aware that its ideas may be no more than mental constructs.’¹³ It is able to recognise the difference between the essential and inessential aspects of a thing, but with this recognition comes also a ‘wavering back and forth about whether what is essential and necessary for cognition can also be said to be in the things.’¹⁴ This is a major problem for a rational observer, who is so preoccupied with finding reason not just within themselves but also within the world.

Consequently, observing reason quickly looks for a solution to this ‘wavering’. In this search, it realises that anything that is cognised as ‘essential’ can only be cognised as such if it counts as ‘that through which [things] break free from the universal continuity of being as such, cut themselves loose from others, and be for themselves.’¹⁵ That is, if a thing is recognised by consciousness as a distinct ‘thing’ at all, it must be thanks to certain elements of that thing which, regardless of any observation, make the thing distinct among the rest of the world (or, what Hegel elegantly calls ‘the universal continuity of being’). In still other words, that which separates an object to the observer must have already separated the object from other objects. In illustrating this point, Hegel turns to the example of taxonomy, where he clearly has Linnaeus in mind:

The distinguishing marks of animals, for example, are taken from their claws and teeth. Indeed, not only does cognition distinguish one animal from another by this means, but it is by these means that the animal itself separates itself off from others. It is through these weapons that it preserves itself for itself and keeps itself detached from the universal.¹⁶

Now, Hegel realises that not all objects are animals; that is, not all objects ‘get as far’ as being-for-themselves. Plants have no ‘intention’ or will to survive; the only ‘distinguishing marks’ that Hegel finds in them arise from their ‘dividing themselves in two’ in sexual differentiation.¹⁷ This limit in distinction, he explains, is what makes plants harder for us to distinguish from one another, in comparison to animals. However, ‘at an even lower level’ – i.e., the level of chemical objects – things make no ‘effort’ to distinguish themselves at all; often, they dissolve into one another and change form constantly. Such an object ‘cannot itself any longer differentiate itself from an other’. It is seemingly a different thing when it is ‘motionless’ to when it is ‘in relationships’; in this difference, we see the world of constant flux that Heraclitus described. Accordingly, the wavering question – of whether our cognition is really grasping what the observed objects actually are – arises again. There is movement in the world that the observer’s account of universals cannot account for. A memory does not move.

Observation of Nature: Laws of Nature

The only way to overcome this problem is to form a new account of the universal – one which won’t hope for ‘inert determinateness’, but instead will expect precisely what it sees in the observed world: that is, the shifting of determinacy. The truth of determinateness, Hegel explains, is ‘its relating itself to its opposite.’¹⁸ The ‘instinct of reason’ pushes the observer now to look not merely for ‘determinatenesses’ in the form of ‘distinguishing marks’, but for the laws that govern the relating of these determinatenesses to one another – that is, the laws of their movement. A classification of all things, a catalogue of every object, is not possible, but a set of concepts – laws – that govern these things seems more achievable. This development of reason is parallel to the previous development of consciousness from perception to the understanding.

What is a law in this context? And how does it come about? Following Harris, we can use the story of Plato and Diogenes the Cynic to exemplify the observer’s sense of a law. This is how Diogenes Laërtius tells the story:

Plato had defined Man as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture-room with the words, ‘Here is Plato’s man.’ In consequence of which there was added to the definition, ‘having broad nails.’¹⁹

In this story, Plato looks for a ‘law’ or concept to govern the universal, ‘Man’ (that is, the human). He bases this law on what Hegel calls ‘those distinguishing marks, which for each of them essentially consists in not existing for itself but in passing over into its opposite.’²⁰ When Diogenes shows that Plato’s concept is too lose to define humans alone, the concept is adapted on the basis of further distinguishing marks. Diogenes’s action, more than simply mocking Plato, says something in general about our current conception of law. The observer is still an avowed empiricist, establishing its laws and concepts on the basis of experience; as Hegel says, ‘the truth of the law is in experience in the way that sensuous being is’.²¹ The problem in this strategy is that there might always be a Diogenes who enters the scene and, in his dirty hands, shows us an exception to our law. No matter how much we refine our concepts and laws, they will never have necessity if they are based on the contingencies found in observation. A law that is based in such a way, Hegel admits, is ‘not really a law.’

The problem the observer now faces is this: without room for necessity, a law cannot be a law; however, without room for contingency, a law has nothing to govern. The current sense of law, based simply on observation of contingencies, clearly has no room for necessity. But this problem doesn’t have to last, Hegel explains.

However, the law’s being a concept not only does not conflict with its being available for observation, but is rather the very reason it is in possession of necessary existence [Dasein], and is for observation. The universal in the sense of a rational universality is also the universal in the previous sense of its exhibiting itself for that consciousness as what is current and actual … but without thereby losing its nature and falling back down into inert stable existence or indifferent succession.²²

In these sentences, Hegel is basically claiming that it is possible for necessity (that is, universality) to be found within the contingency of the observer’s experience. When he claims that ‘the concept presents itself in the mode of thinghood’, he is explaining that the contingent things of our experience are, in fact, the manifestation of the conceptual, lawlike, and rational side of reality. When ‘concept’ is understood as what he calls ‘rational universality’, it is understood not as the artificial abstraction from observed things, but as the genuine reality of what those things are. Law, then, is the recognition of the inherent link between rational universality and the world we observe: if the latter did not have rational universality as its very reality, it would not be possible to make sense of it at all. As such, Hegel makes a profound and aphoristic statement:

What ought to be is also in fact what is.²³

This statement might sound illegitimate, but only if it isn’t properly thought through. It is, in one sense, a critique of the Kantian tradition’s postulation that there is a ‘noumenal’ world that, despite having no presence in possible experience, ‘is the standard of “pure Reason” by which the phenomenal world of “experience” is to be judged’, as Harris puts it.²⁴ As far as actual experience goes, the noumenon is a concept which ‘only should be, but is not’; and a concept of this sort, Hegel says, ‘has no real truth’.²⁵ Our laws and concepts of the world are of no use whatsoever if we don’t find their truth within reality. Accordingly, the observer is now at the stage of asserting that ‘the truth of the law is essentially reality.’²⁶ Laws are no longer established by generalising and abstracting from singular observations, but instead through experimentation and inductive reasoning about the observed world. Francis Bacon himself wrote that ‘we regard induction as the form of demonstration which respects the senses, stays close to nature, fosters results and is almost involved in them itself’; it is likely that, at this point, Hegel has projects such as Bacon’s in mind.²⁷

As he goes on, Hegel admits that, so long as consciousness ‘sticks to observation’, there is a tension between its new conception of law as ‘essentially reality’ and ‘the universal in itself’. Indeed, he says, such a thing as [the observer’s] law is not an essence that stems from reason.’²⁸ For an observer that wants to find reason in itself and in the world, this is a major problem. It arises because, through what we can call the observer’s ‘inductive method’, consciousness is forced to concede that not ‘all singular sensuous things must have provided evidence for the appearance of law in order for it to be able to assert the truth of the law.’²⁹ This is an intuitive point about inductive reason, wherein Hegel is echoing Hume. ‘Laws’ of the inductive method are arrived at through experimentation; but it is impossible to arrive at a truly universal law by experimenting on all objects. Newton didn’t theorise about gravity by watching every apple fall. Instead, inductive reason arrives only at probability, which is not truth. As Hegel says bluntly, ‘let the probability be as great as it may, vis-à-vis truth, it is nothing.’

However, Hegel also acknowledges that, in the actual practice of science, the inductive method arrives at laws that are firmer than mere generalisations on the basis of some experimentation. He uses gravity as an example:

That ‘the stone falls’ is, to that [observing] consciousness, true because, to consciousness, the stone is heavy, which is to say, because in its weight the stone has in and for itself an essential relation to the earth which is expressed in its falling.³⁰

Though he is not quite explicit about it, what Hegel means to say here is that inductive law can work when the experimenting observer has established not only the applicability of the law (i.e., its demonstration in experiments), but also the intelligibility of the law – that is, an explanation for it. When the scientist arrives at a basic law of gravity, for instance, they are not just giving a mere generalisation or ‘analogy’ drawn from the observation of many objects behaving the same way (that is, falling); in addition, they are giving a theoretical – that is, conceptual – explanation of why this behaviour happens. When the law is understood in these two aspects, then it is ‘true, to itself’, Hegel writes. ‘The law counts as law because it exhibits itself in appearance and at the same time is in itself the concept.’

Interestingly, Hegel mentions that it is again ‘the instinct of reason’ that leads to this more sophisticated account of law; consciousness ‘necessarily sets itself to purifying the law and its moments into concepts but without knowing that this is what it wants to do’.³¹ In this process, the concept which constitutes the nature of an object – that is, the rational aspect of the object – begins ‘as sunken into empirical material’; it is the scientific process of experimentation that draws out this concept, by abstracting from the singular objects of empirical material. Since the observer is now more interested in concepts than in singular objects, it is increasingly focused on the realm of the universal: the concepts that arise in scientific research – Hegel gives the examples of positive and negative electricity, and acids and bases – ‘cannot last on their own, like a tooth or a claw, and be pointed out in that way.’³² Instead, they ‘have truth only in being universal.’ The work of the observer ‘frees the predicates from their subjects.’ However, the observer carries this process out ‘without knowing’. That is, it still attributes the conceptual content of the law to consciousness itself, and does not recognise the reason that is inherent in the world. For this reason, the observer has gone from one one-sided perspective to another: from a grasping of only empirical contingencies, to a grasping of ‘matters’ (acids, bases, calories, degrees of heat, etc.), which are neither sensuous objects nor properties of such objects.³³ A ‘matter’ of this kind is, in Hegel’s words, ‘a non-sensuous sensuousness, an incorporeal and nonetheless objective being.’³⁴ Basically, as Kalkavage puts it, ‘reason has failed to find an embodied universal.’³⁵

Observation of Nature: The Organic

Nature is what we know – / Yet have no art to say – / So impotent Our Wisdom is / To her Simplicity.

In failing to find an embodied universal, and instead finding a pure law, standing free from the sensuous, consciousness proves that ‘the truth of observation is non-observable reality.’³⁶ Its new object is revealed in worldly experience, but is not actually bound up in the sensuous world. As Hyppolite puts it elegantly,

It is as if an experiment were a sensuous conception, an elaboration of the sensuous which reveals in it the necessity of the concept. It raises the concept, which had been submerged in being, and makes it appear as what it is: the dynamism of nature, rather than the static universal of description or classification.³⁷

Law had previously fallen apart when the objects it was supposed to govern were lost in their transformations. A chemical would be transformed in reaction and no longer be grasped by the same law. Now, however, the observer is prepared to understand law ‘as the unity of a process which preserves itself in its becoming-other.’³⁸ The name for the new object of consciousness – the object which is understood through this law – is the organic, or the organism. An organism in this sense is, simply put, a worldly thing grasped in the context of ‘the dynamism of nature’ and the ‘process’ of ‘becoming-other’. The organic worldview is a major theme for Hegel, and it is introduced right at the beginning of the Phenomenology, in a beautiful passage in the Preface:

The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter. Likewise, through the fruit, the blossom itself may be declared to be a false existence of the plant, since the fruit emerges as the blossom’s truth as it comes to replace the blossom itself. These forms are not only distinguished from each other, but, as incompatible with each other, they also supplant each other. However, at the same time their fluid nature makes them into moments of an organic unity in which they are not only not in conflict with each other, but rather, one is equally as necessary as the other, and it is this equal necessity which alone constitutes the life of the whole.³⁹

An inorganic account of the world, such as the one held by mechanistic philosophers like Descartes, cannot comprehend the ‘absolute fluidity’ of the world. When Descartes notices a piece of wax change colour and lose its scent and shape when held near a fire, he concludes that nothing is really essential to the wax but ‘that it is something extended, flexible, and mutable.’⁴⁰ On the other hand, when an object is grasped as organic, ‘all the determinatenesses through which it is open to others are bound together under the simple organic unity. None of them come forward as essential, or as items that could relate themselves free-standingly to others, and the organic thus preserves itself in its relation.’⁴¹ That is to say, an organic object does not dissolve as soon as it enters in relations with other beings (and thereby undergoes transformations). An organism is inherently dynamic: being in relations is not a threat to its persevering existence. The organism maintains itself; this is what it means, after all, to be alive. One final way of illustrating what an organism is comes from Harris, who says that ‘the inorganic thing exists “in itself” in the totality of ways in which it exists “for another”’; while, on the other hand, ‘the organism exists primitively “for itself”.’⁴² His example for this distinction is the difference between a human and a glass bottle falling from a great height: while the bottle ‘falls as it must’ and inevitably shatters, losing its form completely, the outcome of a human’s fall is dependent on some effort taken to land on one’s feet. The human shows itself as an organism in the way it uses its internal capacities to (try to) maintain itself.

In the first moments of the observer’s discovery of organic nature, the instinct of reason leads it towards the observation of ‘aspects of law’ that govern the relation of organic nature to inorganic nature. The inorganic nature that the observer is focused on here is the environment that organisms live in: the ‘air, water, earth, zones, and climate’ are Hegel’s ‘elemental’ examples.⁴³ In the process of maintaining and developing itself – that is, the process of Bildung – an organism must internally respond to the external environment. As such, a system of laws based on such responses will claim that the environment in which an organism develops is the determining factor of what that organism is and can be. The weakness of this kind of law is found quickly, however, once we see that it ‘does not correspond to the diversity of the organic’.⁴⁴ One might devise a law that ‘animals in northerly latitudes have thick coats of fur’, for instance, but the law will quickly be falsified. Hegel also points out that the freedom that is inherent to organisms also allows them to wilfully ‘exempt’ themselves from the determinations of their environment. Consequently, the role of the environment is nothing more than an ‘influence’, and ‘one does not know what really belongs to this influence and what does not.’ Yet again, the observer has devised a law that isn’t really a law, since it doesn’t ‘exhaust the range of the organic.’⁴⁵

Ultimately, the ‘environmental influence’ model of law fails because the relation between organism and environment holds no necessity. Hegel illustrates this point neatly:

as often as a coat of fur may be found to go together with northerly latitudes, … nevertheless the concept of a thick covering of fur is not contained in the concept of the north.⁴⁶

In fact, in the way it is posited by the observer, the organism-environment relation is better described as ‘a teleological relation’: it is external to what is related and is effectively imposed upon the relata by the observer. In Harris’s words, ‘it operates upon the lawful order from outside, and from “above” it, like the sculptor turning his block of marble into a statue.’⁴⁷ Organisms only appear to be ‘designed’ for their environments if we are intentionally ignorant of the organisms that are exceptions to this apparent design.

The law of ‘adaptation’ was based on an external teleology; that is, a concept of an organism’s relation to its environment which ‘seems to fall outside the bounds of the organic’ (and the environment). Residing in neither element, it couldn’t be observed, and couldn’t hold any necessity. Some kind of teleology can be retained, however, if it is found within the organism; that is, if the observer realises that ‘the organic is in fact the real purpose itself.’⁴⁸ This is a more familiar account of teleology for those who are familiar with Aristotle, and it was also understood by Kant, who recognised the organism as ‘an organized and self-organizing being’.⁴⁹ Nothing truly ‘new’ is born in the organism; rather, the organism undergoes changes for the sake of preserving what it is.

The organic does not produce something, it only conserves itself, or what is produced is, as it is produced, just as much already present.⁵⁰

At this stage, then, the observer finds that organisms undergo changes, and develop their ‘distinguishing marks’, by the internal concept of purpose [Zweck] that drives them to self-conservation. This is a significant moment since, in the Preface, Hegel referred to reason as ‘purposive doing.’⁵¹ Laws of purpose are the of the kind that appear in Pindar and Nietzsche: ‘become what you are’.⁵² Only ‘at the end’, Hegel explains, is it retroactively revealed that an organism’s whole process of change was a necessary process of becoming, rather than one of mere transformation: ‘nothing else emerges other than what was already there.’⁵³

Now that the observing consciousness of reason has grasped some kind of purpose in organic nature, reason is closer to seeing itself reflected in the world. Nonetheless, reason’s journey is still incomplete, as it ‘does not recognize itself in what it finds’ in nature.⁵⁴ That is, though reason has managed to find itself in the world, it is still driven only by instinct; it isn’t self-conscious of what it is trying to do, and thus remains ignorant of it. Now, ‘instinct’ is the subjective experience of what, objectively, we call purpose. This is why the observer is not yet aware of discovering itself (as reason) in the world: because it is only being guided by blind instinct, it fails to reflect on itself and realise that this instinct, this drive, is itself evidence of some ‘purpose’.

The theological ‘argument from design’, made by figures like Aquinas or William Paley, makes the mistake of assuming that purpose-driven nature requires some superior intelligent being directing this purpose. At this stage of observing reason, consciousness makes a similar mistake. Instead of arguing that it is God who bestows purpose onto nature, however, the observer might instead assume that all purpose is projected onto nature by itself. Either way, observing consciousness refuses to accept that purpose is within organisms, and instead recognises it as given unto them: the observer ‘makes a distinction between the concept of purpose … and self-preservation, a difference which is really no difference at all.’⁵⁵ This erroneous distinction is easy to make: if non-human organic beings like flowers and bunnies have no reason, it would seem that we can only describe their development in a teleological (i.e., purposeful) manner in a subjective sense – that is, in the sense that we project a teleology, a τέλος, onto their development. But behind this line of thinking is the false idea that purpose belongs only to intelligent, thinking organisms like humans. As Hegel puts it, observing consciousness ‘does not recognize that the concept of purpose is not existing somewhere else in some intellect but just is here [in the organism] and as a thing.’⁵⁶ Really, it is inevitable for observing consciousness to make this mistake, since ‘purpose’ is internal to organic things, and therefore not observable. To return to the claim of my last paragraph, this is again why the observer has no adequate understanding of itself: it cannot observe reason and purpose, and thus has nothing on which to base a conception of itself.

Hegel recognises that the observer’s current conception of organic nature, wherein the organism has no inherent, self-concerned purpose, quickly falls apart. If this were true, then an organism’s ‘doing would accordingly be empty efficaciousness without any content in its own self; it would not even be the efficaciousness of a machine, for a machine has a purpose, and its efficaciousness thereby has a determinate content.’⁵⁷ In other words, if organic activity had no intrinsic purpose, it would be meaningless and random. As Michael Inwood puts it nicely, ‘for all we know, bears might light fires or knit themselves sweaters to fend off the cold.’⁵⁸ Of course, we witness every day that this isn’t the case: there is regularity to the development and activity of organisms, demonstrating that there is some teleology within the organism itself, driving its self-conservation. ‘In its own self,’ Hegel writes, ‘the activity [of an organism] is an activity inwardly turning back into itself, not an activity led back into itself by anything alien to itself’, like the mind of the observer.⁵⁹

The observer’s problem, from our perspective, is that it cannot comprehend the intrinsic relation between an organism’s activity and its purpose – that is, the directed movement of organic activity towards a purpose. In short, this is because that relation, that movement, ‘can only be grasped as concept’, and the observer is still stuck in a mode of thinking that expects everything to be sensuous and observable. Consequently, Hegel explains, consciousness ‘transforms’ the two poles of the individual organism and the universal purpose ‘into the kind of opposition that conforms to its point of view.’⁶⁰ This newly posited opposition is the classical dualism of body and soul. The observer now understands the organism as divided in terms of its form: body and soul are not separate entities, but separate senses, aspects, or modes of the single organism which is ‘laid as the foundation’.⁶¹ What the body is is self-explanatory. The soul is the ‘inner’ aspect of the organism, but can nonetheless be observed, since ‘it appears as doing, or the movement of vanishing [i.e., changing] actuality’.⁶² To understand this, think of the Latin translation of Aristotle’s work on the soul: De Anima. The soul, ‘anima’, is what moves – animates – the organism.

The soul expresses itself in all organisms as ‘reproduction’ and, in animal organisms, also as ‘sensibility’ and ‘irritability’. Hegel explains what each of these mean:⁶³

1. Sensibility is the animal’s ‘organic reflective turn into itself, or the universal fluidity of this concept.’ This is a rather strange definition today, but it can be understood by comparison to the word sensation, when referring to the phenomenon whereby an animal’s nervous system ‘takes in’ the surrounding world, thus enacting the animal’s ‘turn into itself’. The nervous system can thus be understood as the ‘outer’ manifestation of ‘inner’ sensibility. As a sensing thing, the animal organism is something in-itself.
2. Irritability is the animal’s ‘organic elasticity’: the organism’s capacity for ‘conducting itself reactively’. In other words, if sensibility is the receptive property of the soul, irritability is the responsive property. Irritability is the ‘actualization’ of the organism’s being-for-others, Hegel explains. The ‘muscular system’ is Hegel’s example of an outer manifestation of irritability.
3. Reproduction involves both the growth and self-maintenance of the organism, as well as the genesis of new organisms. It is essentially the same as what Aristotle called the ‘vegetative soul’. Because reproduction is the condition of possibility for an organism in general, Hegel describes it as organic ‘activity as a purpose in itself’. Through reproduction, an organism is in and for itself. The ‘intestinal system’ is one outer manifestation of reproduction, Hegel suggests.

The whole point of describing organisms in this way, as possessing a soul with manifold properties, is so that the observer can devise a new kind of law: at this stage, laws ‘concern a relationship between organic moments in their twofold meaning’, Hegel writes.⁶⁴ The ‘twofold’ in question is the organism’s inner and outer: the inner side of the organism is the soul, the ‘life-principle’, and its properties such as sensibility, and the outer side is the expression of these properties, in concretenesses such as the nervous system.

The observer looks to construct laws regarding these life-properties, the ‘factors’ of the organism; however, Hegel explains, the search for these laws exposes the fact that although they might appear as distinct divisions of the organism, they are in fact the opposite: sensibility, for instance, is actually ‘a universal moment which is essentially undivided and inseparable from reaction, or irritability, and reproduction.’⁶⁵ The reason for this is that, when a rational observer (like a nineteenth-century scientist) comes up with a law such as, ‘sensibility and irritability stand in inverse relations of magnitude, so that as the one increases, the other diminishes’, they are ignoring the fact that these factors – sensibility and irritability – are not separable, wholly distinct quantities, but modalities of the same whole (that is, the organism).⁶⁶ If this is unclear, Hegel makes it clearer by use of an analogy:

Just as [a] hole and what fills it and what is removed from it are qualitatively opposed, what is real in them and its determinate magnitude are one and the same. … So too the organic moments [sensibility, irritability, etc.] are likewise inseparable both according to what is real in them and in their magnitude, which is itself the magnitude of what is real in them. The one decreases and increases only with the other, for either one of them has a meaning at all only insofar as the other is present.⁶⁷

As such, to construct laws regarding the ‘quantities’ of the organism’s life-properties is to get no further than tautology. There is really one quantity – the organism itself. As Hegel writes, ‘an organic existence is such a quantitative size … It is what is increased or diminished, and if it is increased, both [or, all] of its factors are also increased.’⁶⁸ Interestingly, this point was already suggested in the first Kantian Critique when Kant likens a system of science to ‘an animal body, whose growth does not add a limb but rather makes each limb stronger and fitter for its end without any alteration of proportion.’⁶⁹ Ultimately, The mistake of the observer was to isolate moments of the organism’s life process and interpret them as distinct, quantifiable properties of an inner that affects an opposing outer. ‘The law wants to grasp and express [this] opposition as motionless aspects’, Hegel writes, ‘but in being kept apart in that way, they lose their organic significance.’⁷⁰ Hegel gives a rather opaque definition of the organism as the movement of the dissolution of determinations; this definition makes sense when we see that the observer’s attempt to isolate the moments of the organism’s life process and render them as stable determinations necessarily fails because of the constant movement and interrelation of these moments within the organic whole. As Kalkavage puts it,

More generally, Hegel argues that static systems of any kind cannot capture the Concept of life. Formalism in biology turns life into anatomy: the study of the living organism insofar as it is dead. … In using number to formulate laws of organisms, reason also reveals it bond with the abstract understanding. It reduces the fluidity of life to the static being of the inorganic. It makes the determinateness of living things rational at the expense of what they are.⁷¹

Now, the observer is different to the Understanding that appeared in the consciousness chapter, because the relation that its laws are supposed to describe is objective – that is, the relation is found within the observed object (the organism) rather than imposed upon the world by consciousness. At the end of the chapter on consciousness, Understanding was transformed into self-consciousness because consciousness recognised itself as the movement and relation of law-bound objects. For the observer, however, it is not the relation but the relata, the ‘objects’ themselves, that cannot be found in the observed thing. These relata – which the observer names the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ – are in constant motion and change, and thus cannot be grasped as easily as they could at the stage of Understanding. The observer, Inwood writes, ‘can no longer get a grip on intrinsically static sides needed for a law. The sides immediately succumb to the unrest of the concept.’⁷² Or, as Hegel puts it, ‘because the moments are essentially pure transition, it turns out that there are no such existing aspects as had been demanded for there to be law.’⁷³

The result of all this is that the observer has yet again failed to describe nature in law – and, more broadly, that reason (embodied in the observer) has failed to find itself reflected in nature. The systems of law hitherto attempted have remained too static to capture the endless motion and transition, the inherent dynamism, of the natural world. What can be said with lawful necessity of a being that is constantly shifting? The organic being, Hegel explains, ‘refuses to offer any enduring sensuous differences [i.e. differentiating qualities] to observation’; or, in other words, ‘its essential determinateness [is] only the changing flux of existing determinatenesses.’⁷⁴

Observation of Nature: The Outside World

After all of these failed attempts at constructing laws of the organism itself, Hegel turns to ‘the outer of the organic’ – that is, the organism’s environment – and its inner and outer. Of course, the observer already looked at the environment previously, but found no necessity or lawfulness in its effect on the organism’s form. As Hegel acknowledges, ‘inorganic nature [that is, the environment] cannot constitute the aspect of a law vis-à-vis the organic creature, because the latter at the same time is utterly for itself and assumes a universal and free relation to inorganic nature.’⁷⁵

In order to preserve this freedom, reason leads the observer to a conception of the organism as a mediation: a ‘mediating middle’ between being-in-itself (inorganic nature – the environment’s outer) and being-for-itself (pure life – the environment’s inner).⁷⁶ The last time we considered the environment, the observer looked at the organism as a passive recipient of the environment’s influence. Now, the organism is conceptualised as a more complex being, residing in a syllogistic relationship between life and the environment. ‘Life’, in this sense, is what Hegel calls an ‘infinite One’, which might remind us of his description of life and infinity in the earlier chapter on the understanding:

This simple infinity, or the absolute concept, is to be called the simple essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal bloodstream, which is omnipresent, neither dulled nor interrupted by any difference.⁷⁷

The life as ‘infinite One’ which is mediated in the organism also fits this description: it is not ‘interrupted by any difference’ because it is a ‘simple negativity’, nothing but the indifferent striving to be. As Hegel writes, ‘It is a matter of indifference to this stream of life what sorts of mills it drives.’ When it is mediated in the organism, therefore, ‘life appears in it as the simplicity of subsistence [Einfachheit des Bestehens].’⁷⁸ On its own, therefore, life is ‘devoid of content’: a striving force is nothing without that which strives; it is only in its mediation with nature – that is, in the organism – where life is given an organic shape, and expresses itself. This makes sense; after all, there is nothing we can point to and say, ‘this is life itself.’

This conception of ‘the organic whole’ – that is, the environment and the organisms within it – still shares a similarity with previous conceptions, insofar as the dualism of inner and outer works in a relationship wherein the latter is an expression or manifestation of the former. In this case, the stream of life is expressed, in its mediation with inorganic nature, as the organism. Now, since the stream of life is indifferent to how it is manifested, as explained above, only by means of numbers can ‘the whole range of differences which develop themselves’ in organisms be generalised. Hegel saw this in the life sciences of his own time in the concept of ‘specific gravity’, which ‘can be observed just as well as can the determinateness of number’. Harris helpfully explains this concept which, today, might be a little less obvious:

Specific gravity is the ‘inward aspect’ of the different ‘shapes’ of matter. Hegel conceived of “specific gravity” in strict accordance with its name. It was a specification (at a higher level of logical development) of the primitively undifferentiated force of gravity. In Hegel’s interpretation, this makes it analogous to our concept of atoms and molecules. What the number corresponds to in the object … is a numerically determinate quantum of energy.⁷⁹

Basically, the observer takes the specific gravity of an organism to be the determinate, numerical signature of that organism: the measure of the organism’s being-for-itself. Number takes the organic flux of the stream of life and renders it stable and determinate.

But is this not just another attempt to repress the freedom and indeterminacy present in every organism? As we saw above, no singular quantity – whether it is of a property like sensibility, or of specific gravity as in this case – can capture an object as a whole of related, qualitatively different properties. If we were to hierarchically order a group of things according to their specific gravity, nothing about a particular thing’s position in a hierarchy would tell us why it is qualitatively such-and-such a way. Again, Harris summarises Hegel’s critique of this kind of hierarchical science:

Any measurable property that varies progressively can represent the essence in series of this kind; in other words it can be a Vorstellung of the essence, but it is not the “Thing itself.” The Thing itself would be the Concept (and we might say that it is represented in a genuine theory). But no parallelism of properties in any sequence of bodies could be a Concept of the essential nature in its self-differentiation. Serial arrangements, therefore, are not what we ought to be trying to establish; organizing things in “series” is not yet “science.”⁸⁰

With the failure of this numerical classification, reason moves onto the final stage of observing nature. As we just saw, an organism cannot be understood merely by reference to a particular property that it has. For a start, the properties of a living organism are always undergoing change; secondly, these changes always emerge from a relationship with the outside, the environment. In other words, an organism has otherness as a constitutive element of itself, and thus cannot be grasped via some self-contained property. As Hegel puts it, ‘the being-for-itself of the organically-living … has the principle of otherness in its own self.’⁸¹ In a dense web of words, Hegel defines ‘the inner of the organic’ as ‘the unity of the self-equal self-relating-to-itself and pure negativity.’ What does this mean?

We can understand this conception of the organic being by contrasting it with an inorganic being. In an inorganic being, like a stone, the ‘inner’ is one property among others, just like specific gravity. Though it might underpin other properties, like a stone’s solidity, it never ‘reaches outside’ of the inorganic thing itself; in other words, it does not manifest the striving that is so essential to the stream of life. An organic being, however, is organic precisely because it strives and exhibits life. The organic being not only responds to its outer environment, but transforms itself in its striving to survive in this environment. The ultimate act of survival is reproduction, where the organism transcends its own death by continuing the existence of its inner, its universal aspect. Understood like this, this aspect – the inner of the organism – is the genus. In clarifying this point, Hegel continues the comparison between organic and inorganic beings: a property, like specific gravity, resides in inorganic (and organic) beings as ‘One Determinateness’, belonging exclusively to a particular being, and eventually withering away when the being is destroyed (or dies, in the case of organic beings). ‘However’, Hegel explains, ‘the freedom of the genus is a universal freedom and is indifferent to this shape, or indifferent to its actuality.’⁸² That is, the inner universal element of an organism – its genus – has no regard for individual instances of itself; rather, it is concerned only with reproducing itself as universal, continuing its existence. Sialia, the genus to which bluebirds belong, is indifferent to which particular bluebird it is manifest in: it is a universal with the sole ‘purpose’ of striving to continue its existence. When a bluebird mates and has offspring, it is externalising itself from itself and thereby continuing the existence of its universal inner; this is the activity of the ‘pure negativity’ that Hegel referred to. In Hyppolite’s words,

life as universal manifests itself … as the interior of the living being, without a means of expression proper to it – as the process of the living being’s life which finally negates that being in the uninterrupted production of other living beings.⁸³

The observer thus replaces number with genus as the concept at the heart of organic nature, and admits that ‘number itself can thus only be taken as a kind of play in the organic but not as the essence of its vitality.’⁸⁴ It is the pure negativity of genus – the repelling of itself from itself in reproduction and death – that animates organic nature, in just the way that consciousness in the Phenomenology is urged forward by the negativity of dialectics. (Of course, at this point, consciousness does not see this similarity.)

Now, the observer acknowledges that we cannot point to an organism and identify it as the genus. I cannot point at a bluebird and say, ‘that is Sialia.’ Rather, what is actually observed is the species, with its determinate properties, numerical quantities, and so on. ‘The existence at which the negativity of the universal, or the negativity of the genus, arrives is only the developed movement of a process that runs its course in the parts of the existing shape,’ Hegel writes.⁸⁵ He continues: ‘Actuality begins with the genus, or what enters into actuality is not the genus as such, i.e., is not thought at all. As the actually organic, this genus is only represented by something standing in for it.’⁸⁶ The observer is still obsessed with the search for something stable and observable, and is thus reluctant to grasp life conceptually; instead, it is more comfortable with individual organisms as determinate but ‘imperfect expressions of life’.⁸⁷ Hegel thus finds another syllogism, where one extreme is ‘the universal life as universal’ – that is, the genus – and the other extreme is ‘life as singular’, or, the particular body or matter that comes from the Earth and (at death) merges back into it. The species which I point to – ‘this is a bluebird’ – is a ‘determinate universality’, the middle term in the syllogism of life and Earth.⁸⁸ Peter Kalkavage clarifies this syllogism:

One extreme is the universal life-process or genus. The other is this same universal individualized and brought to rest as the Earth. The middle term ‘is composed of both.’ The first extreme participates in the middle term as a species (the determinate universal), the second as a concrete single individual (the rabbit [or, in our case, the bluebird]). In one aspect of the middle term, the organism is a specification of universal life: in another a mere outward life-form that comes to be and passes away on the great stage that is the Earth.⁸⁹

The observer is thus putting forward a picture of nature wherein the striving stream of life, manifest as a universal, shapes the matter of the Earth and accordingly gives rise to a species, a singular embodiment of the universal genus. As such, ‘the differences of the concept’ are exhibited ‘as a series of simple determinatenesses’, Hegel explains.⁹⁰ This is likely a reference to medieval and early modern thinkers of ‘the great chain of being’ – Alexander Pope, for instance, for whom

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.⁹¹

The stream of life takes determinate shape in the Earth in every way it can; thus, the observer contends, every organism corresponds to its own place in ‘a numerical series’ of the natural kingdom. However, Hegel is quick to point out that the ‘universal individual’ – that is, the Earth – is ‘not only free from all the divisions of the genus’, but also ‘the power over them.’ That is to say, the ‘enterprise’ of the genus, striving to take its shape in the organic material of the Earth, ‘becomes interrupted through the unbridled violence of those elements and comes to be both full of gaps and is stunted.’⁹² Hegel thus counters the observer’s Leibnizian view of organic life with the chaos of the elements and seasons of the Earth, just as Voltaire had done in his Candide.⁹³

Observation of Nature: The Story of Nature Collapses

The great chain of being has given way to the ‘unbridled violence’ of the Earth. What this ultimately means is that, as soon as the observer hopes the find a story that finds rational order in nature, the chaos of the Earth, and the contingency of organic life, causes the observer to lose their footing. Think of the failures we have witnessed so far in this chapter:

1. First, the observer found (what seemed like) universality in nature by relating particulars in the memory, but this process turned out to be inexhaustible and arbitrary: if we leave the rationality of nature down to the subject’s memory, nature itself plays only a negligible role.
2. Next, the observer tried to construct laws that governed the movement and development of natural things. However, as the example of Diogenes demonstrated, so long as a ‘law’ is based on observed experience, it never holds necessity – and is therefore no law at all.
3. Consequently, the observer turned from mere experience towards experimentation, in the tradition of Francis Bacon. A new sense of law thus arises, wherein a law is not only applicable in inductive reasoning but also intelligible through the concepts it gives rise to. However, in generating such experimental concepts, the observer’s use of reason becomes increasingly detached from the embodied world; we end up with a catalogue of universals that have left the corporeal world behind.
4. The observer thus turns to yet another conception of law, wherein natural things are understood as organic; in other words, the observer embraces the dynamism and flux of the world, and thus avoids the risk of stable but lofty concepts which retreat from the changing world. The first conception of organic law claims that organisms change by adapting to their surrounding environments. But such laws can easily be falsified, and are based only on an ambiguous ‘relation’, which cannot be observed.
5. Next, the observer instead tries to find the rationale for the organism’s dynamism within the organism itself; that is, with the concept of purpose. However, the observer comes to believe that the organism’s purpose is projected onto the organism (or, more specifically, the ‘inner’ of the organism) by consciousness. Because ‘purpose’ is not observable, the observer cannot comprehend the idea that non-human, non-thinking organisms might genuinely have intrinsic and purposive teleology. This current conception of nature thus falls apart, because the patterns and regularities in nature’s dynamism cannot be explained by a teleology that is merely projected onto the world.
6. Finally, the observer makes multiple attempts to envision organisms as twofold: the organism is either an inner which is expressed as an outer (for instance, properties of life such as ‘reproduction’ and ‘sensibility’ are manifested as certain body parts), or it is the middle term of a syllogism (of, broadly speaking, inorganic environment and the stream of life). Nonetheless, even this sophisticated conception falls apart, since nature is not wholly captured by it; instead, ‘its various forms are merely pigeonholed.’⁹⁴ Reason has failed to comprehend the essential concept of nature, incorporating its dynamism and variety; the observer always gives way to a rigid imaginary structure (a numerable series) or utter contingency with no order (the chaos of the Earth).

Clearly, no matter how sophisticated and complex the observer’s account of nature becomes, something remains beyond its reach. Why is reason so unable to find itself reflected in nature? Hegel argues that this inability is not wholly the fault of the observer’s thinking; rather, there is an insufficiency in the observer’s object – that is, nature itself. As he puts it, ‘organic nature has no history; organic nature immediately descends from its universal, or life, into the singularity of existence.’⁹⁵ That is to say, when the things of organic nature come into being – whether that is by the outer expression of an inner, or as the middle term of a syllogism – these things fall from the universal, and ‘the whole’. The latter is only ‘preserved’ in organic objects insofar as these objects develop themselves qua singular, individual beings; the wider context of the universal as a whole is essentially forgotten. Hegel expresses this falling and forgetting in the following way:

The moments of simple determinateness and singular liveliness united in this actuality engender coming-to-be [Werden] only as a contingent movement, within which each is active in its parts and the whole is preserved, but within which this vitality is restricted for itself only to where it reaches its pinnacle. This is so because the whole is not present within it, and the whole is not present in it because the whole is not here for itself as a whole.⁹⁶

By analogy, think of how Christianity understands humans to be created in imago dei, in the image of God. Human existence thus ‘immediately descends’ from Godly existence, but it would not be possible to comprehend the latter purely by observing the former from outside. In just the same way, observing reason ‘is confined to the description and narration of suppositions and vagaries about nature.’⁹⁷ As Hegel puts it, quite bluntly,

observation cannot get any further than to make charming remarks, bring out interesting connections, and make friendly concessions to the concept. However, charming remarks are no knowing of necessity. Interesting connections are just that: interesting. … The friendliness of the individual in playing around with a concept is a childish friendliness, which is really childish when it either wants to or is supposed to count for something in and for itself.⁹⁸

If the observer wants to find reason in its object, it will therefore have to turn to a new object: one which carries the universal within itself, by being wholly for-itself and recognising the journey of its development. For the reader of the Phenomenology, it is clear what exactly this object is: self-consciousness itself, whose conscious journey we have been following this whole time.