Hegel's Confrontation With The Sciences in 'Observing Reason': Notes For A Discussion Cinzia Ferrini

Hegel's Confrontation with the Sciences in 'Observing
Reason': Notes for a Discussion
Cinzia Ferrini
According to a well-known statement in Hegel's Engclopaedia, what differentiates the

philosophy of nature from physics is 'the kind of metaphysics used by them both' (W 9:
§246Z: 20, N: II). 1 In the same vein, recent scholarship has stressed that Hegel criticises
the logical procedures and metaphysical presuppositions of the working scientist's
activity, taking issue with their lack of awareness about the mental categories they use and
the alleged consistency of their way of arguing.2 Put rather more critically, it is often
claimed that Hegel's concerns were purely philosophical, and that he never entered into
genuinely scientific debate.3 Unlike Schelling, who engaged in scientific debate, Hegel is
thought to have confined himself to observing and judging it, demonstrating his ability to
grasp its main features, on the basis of which later to build his philosophy of nature.4
To combat the old tradition of negative assessment of Hegel's relation to the
empirical sciences, which saw it as aprioristic, dogmatic, misleading and ill-informed, the
editors of the critical edition of the Phenomenobgf retrace some of the contemporary
scientific sources for Hegel's objections to description and classification in the natural
sciences, and document his appreciation of new developments in electricity and
chemistry. Through a primarily historical approach, Hegel's critical remarks on the
attempt to fix laws for organic forces (sensibility, irritability, reproduction) and his
critique of the scientific status of physiognomy and phrenology, all of which elucidate his
allusions in 'Observing Reason', are shown to be rooted in contemporary scientific
debates. Recendy, however, it has been contended that this kind of scholarship that
identifies Hegel's active engagement with the science of his time, 'tend[s] to reduce the
text to a document for historians of nineteenth-century science' (Stone 2005: xv).5 In
Italy, a scholar has also made a subtle case for his claim that, in contrast to his mature
system, Hegel's confrontation with the natural sciences in the Phenomenology is essentially
and necessarily critical, aiming to reveal the partiality, one-sidedness, and inadequacy of
forms of cognitive approach typical of the natural sciences, and that it forms part of
Hegel's dissolution of all of consciousness's forms of externality.6
In an attempt to reconcile first-hand historical research on scientific material and
philosophical concerns, this paper aims to show how Hegel took active part in the
scientific debate of the time, by publicly siding with some strands of contemporaneous
natural science against others, as well as how Hegel supports a considered scientific
position, by providing it with philosophical justification and foundation, taking issue at
the same time with formulations of British Empiricism and German Idealism. This is
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Hegel's Confrontation with the Sciences in 'Observing Reason'
because the phenomenological standpoint allows Hegel to reconstruct the genesis and
functions of scientific theories within shapes {Gestalteri) of consciousness which are also
necessary and irreplaceable advances toward his concept of absolute knowing.7 In this
way I also hope to contribute to the current debate about the general status of Hegel's
appeals to contingency and nature's recalcitrance to full rational determination within his
system, from the point of view of the speculative significance of the so-called
'inexhaustibility' of nature stressed in Hegel's analysis of the scientific description and
classification of natural things in the Phenomenology. Issues of this kind, like the holistic
character of animal life, lead Dahlstrom to suggest that 'far from being undone by the
subsequent moves of rational self-consciousness, [these appeals] continue to present a
serious challenge to the interpretation of the claims of absolute rationality in Hegel's
system' (Dahlstrom 2007:40).8
It is worth noting that the phenomenological reason that emerges from the dialectical
consummation of faith through the collapse of the 'empty beyond', which concludes the
chapter on Self-Consciousness, also links the principle of realism to the movement of the
absolute liberation of self-consciousness. For the Phenomenology, judicious, sensed [sinnige]
experience, in which rational self-consciousness has its own immediate presence, begins by
observing the world, freed from the teleological and pseudo-empirical premises of
Scholasticism, as well as from the authority of both tradition and religion, from faith in
miracles, from superstition, from the uncontrolled individualism of mere argumentation,
from the ambiguity and variation of chance, and from the superficiality of mere
experience.9 Even in the system, Hegel maintains that 'in Empiricism there lies this great
principle, that what is true must be in actuality and must be there for our perception' {W
8: §38 Anm.:108, EL 77). On the one hand, this path shows the 'highest' justification of
empiricism and of reason's drive to seek its infinite determinations in the world.10 On the
other hand, this thesis also contains the unavoidable 'lowest' inadequacy of the particular
sensible 'this here' to be what is true, because in speculative philosophy the truth of
things does not genuinely exist in external finitude, but in thought: whatever is external is
merely true 'an sich' or in itself. Therefore, although Hegel maintains that empiricism
contains the principle of freedom (ibid.), one is only truly free in thinking, while in an
important sense, as finite cognition that has the significance only of abstraction and
formal identity that seizes upon isolated aspects of the concrete without integrating them,
empiricism remains a doctrine of unfreedom. This is Hegel's first twofold point at the
beginning of 'Observation of Nature', when considering the role and limits of description
and classification in empirical sciences.
The analysis of reason observing natural things, that is, external finite empirical
existences, begins with Hegel's remark that 'observation' requires advancing from
perception to thought: for consciousness itself, despite its own declarations, the mere
Bulletin Of The Hegel Society 0/Gnat Britain

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Cinzia Ferrini
perception that this penknife lies alongside this snuff-box cannot pass for an observation
(GW 9:139, 9-11), because 'what is perceived should at least have the significance of a
universal, not of a sensuous particular' (GIF 9:139, 12-13). The observed and experienced
content which consciousness as Reason initially takes as the source of and ground for
truth cannot, even for consciousness itself, any longer have the form of the immediacy of
sense-certainty or perception. Thus, Hegel's first strategic move is to challenge the
descriptive, objective, singular and concrete meaning of observation, which was
commonly shared by the working scientists of his time. The relevant scientific reference
is to Gren's famous handbook in which he states:
Experience is called an observation {Beobachtung oder Bemerkung (Observatio))

when we leave things in the state in which they are found without our
activity (Gren 1797: § 11).
Gren goes on to distinguish another sense of experience as experiment. In Italy, in

one of his last essays, Francesco Moiso has underscored the characteristically Germanic
attitude involved in Gren's giving primacy to Beobachtungen over Versuche, because the
former constitutes the integrated frame of reference for the latter, counterbalancing the
risks of partial or isolated experimental practice. Moiso also points out that a similar
distinction between observations and experiments within the general notion of
experience is also found in Gehler's widely influential Physikalisches Worterbuch (1787—
1796), in his entry on 'Erfahrung.'n
It is worth noting that Hegel's reference to the intrinsic universal value of
observation for consciousness, however, implies also a philosophical criticism. I claim
that the relevant view is Kant's, because in his Jena Lectures on the History of Philosophy
(1805/06), Hegel criticises Kant's notion of experience, objecting that, in Kant's view,
'experience' or 'observation' (Betrachtung) of the world can have no other meaning than to
state that 'here is a candlestick, there a snuff-box' (IF 20:352). Evidence that Hegel is not
misreading Kant can be found in Kant's 1788 work on the use of teleological principles
in philosophy. There Kant states that 'observation' (Beobachtung) does not amount to mere
description or recording of facts and it is to be regarded as a 'methodical experience'.
Despite appearances, this is not in line with Hegel's view, for according to Kant, the
significance of observation differs from an empirical groping (Herumtappen) (GS
VIII:161), only because of the presence of a 'Leitfaden', that is, a leading principle or
heuristic criterion to guide natural research that being of rational origin remains extrinsic
to the sensuous particulars that we perceive. It is evident that here Hegel takes issue with
any approach that regards observation as such either as a neutral tool that leaves the
singular sensible object perceived as it is (his scientific target) or that works as an ordered
and methodical assessment of experience only in virtue of the additional presence of a
non empirical principle (his philosophical target).
Bulletin Of The Hegel Society Of Great Britain

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Research in Jena has allowed me to retrace books about geology and mineralogy
owned by Hegel, such as G. S. O. Lasius's and J. Brunner's handbooks. These authors
ground the validity of their results on the 'objective' claim to consider 'only such objects
which nature presents to the eye of the observer'. Likewise, they advise beginners to
counter any mental laziness by the recourse to 'sheer experience'. However, despite their
degree of awareness, they do not merely exhibit what we can regard as naive trust in the
objectivity of observation. For instance, Lasius considers the issue of choosing a criterion
for describing not just individual mountains, but 'kinds' of mountainous formations
(Gebirgsarteri). The choice of criterion determines the 'order of observation' and involves
problems like the 'determination' (Bestimmung) and the written exposition of such kinds
{Gebirgsarten). Two main difficulties emerge for these authors: the inexactness of the
scientific terminology of the discipline with the consequent mutual inconsistency and
incomprehensibility of various modes of description, and, even more detrimental to
scientific progress, the excessive admixture of different standpoints from which minerals
can be regarded. Those approaches and complaints are common ones, to be found in
other handbooks of the time, such as Emmerling's and Erxleben's, owned by Hegel and
present in Jena's libraries. They may well be taken as concrete instances of what, at the
outset of 'Observing Reason', Hegel calls the 'contradiction' between reason's opinion
and degree of awareness and its actual instinctive procedure. The rational self-
consciousness that observes the world expects to take things truly only in so far as they
are taken AS found, that is, as sensuous things opposite to the 'I' (GIF 9:138,28-29), wholly
independent from the subject's activity, according to the status of natural
consciousness.12 However, Hegel warns us that in the course of reason's
phenomenological experience, this will prove to be a 'false manifestation': Reason's actual
activity, Hegel contends, 'contradicts' such a belief, because in fact reason 'cognizes'
(erkennt) things, and thus transforms their empirical sensuousness into concepts {GW
9:138, 30-31).
Relevant here is a topological consideration; it is worth recalling the significance
of the strategic location of Reason in Hegel's book. On the one hand, there is no wonder
that, a couple of years later, Hegel presents the figure of Reason as the highest unification
of the knowing of the object as an 'other' (that along its theoretical path was first meant,
then perceived, and then cognized by the understanding) and the practical knowing of
the self, or consciousness of the world of the finite spirit, developed by self-
consciousness in Section B.13 Similarly, at the outset of 'Spirit' (§BB, ch. VI) Hegel
recapitulates the immediately preceding movement of the coming-to-be of spirit: 'as
immediate consciousness of the being-in-itself and the being-for-itself, as unity of
consciousness and self-consciousness, spirit is consciousness that has reason' {GW 9: 239,
31-33).
On the other hand, in a 1806 lecture fragment on the Phenomenology, Hegel says
that reason is self-consciousness that has notyet grasped either itself or its object as spirit
(GW 5: 474, 5-10): reason is unaware of being 'knowing spirit.' Indeed, at the conclusion
Bulletin Of The Hegel Society Of Gnat Britain

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Cinzia Ferrini
of 'Observing Reason,' Hegel states that the meaning of the result of the itinerary of
reason's observational activity is to recognize the reality of self-consciousness, though as
an immediate, sensuous object to be perceived. He points out, then, that the result has a
twofold significance. The first is what I like to call the 'high' one recalled above, that Hegel
calls 'its true meaning,' because it completes the outcome of the preceding movement of
the entire figure of Self-Consciousness (GW 9:190, 31-33). The second is what I call the
'low' one of observing the world aconceptually, that is, by taking and resolving the real
presence (Dasein) of spirit into a purely objective thinghood. In the same vein, Hegel
claims that reason is in truth 'all reality' only in the concept, not in lifeless objects of outer
reality such as bones or brain fibers a la Gall (GW9:\9\, 25-26).
From my research, it appears clearly that when Hegel starts to examine the
positive relationship between reason and the world, which is distinctive of Reason in
respect to Self-Consciousness, he faithfully takes into account that initially, the working
scientists of the time claim to conform to mere (passive) description without adding
anything subjective (a la Locke), although in fact they cannot describe without
introducing order and priorities and therefore using criteria (which vary from scientist to
scientist), and without converting the concrete sensuous being of a particular mountain
direcdy into the specimen of a genus — a difficult conversion that requires determining
the genus and finding words and names to convey its characteristics linguistically.14 Once
again, in my view Hegel's point draws from both philosophical and scientific views. On
the scientific side, Hegel could have found support for his view in Alexander von
Humboldt's higher degree of awareness, as it emerges from a remark on the table
attached to the Geography of the Plants, a natural Picture of the Andes based on Observations
(Beobachtungen) and Measurements ... taken from 1799 to 1803, and published in Paris in 1805.
Under the heading 'Geological View of the Tropical Lands,' he writes that the nature of
the kinds of mountains (Gebirgsarteri) is in the whole independent from the latitude and
the height above the sea level, but that in some parts of the earth's crust one remarks
(bemerkt) a certain order in their stratification and disposition, something to be regarded
as the consequence of a particular system of attractive forces. He concludes by saying
that this consideration (Betrachtung) proves how difficult it is (mie schwierig es ist) to say
something general (etwas Allgemeines) about the geological relations of the tropical lands.
On the philosophical side, it is worth recalling that in his 1762 Emile, Rousseau had
already warned against the danger of knowing the nature of the human spirit by
principles that would immediately proceed from sensible to intellectual objects, thus
producing an incomprehensible metaphysics (Rousseau 1969:526). From this view he
draws the conclusion that one should follow only the authority of one's own experience
and intellectual progress and gauge men solely by their actions. At the end of the section
that deals with the observation of human nature, Hegel will make explicit use of this
warning in his criticism of Lavater and Gall, but Rousseau's advice seems also to play a
role in the observation of external nature, when Hegel pits the modes of the animal's
activities against the classifications of the animal kingdom under abstract headings.15

5
These references may help our understanding of why Hegel writes that the form
of reason's observational activity in fact involves no movement in the object itself, but
consists merely in the act of describing (GW 9: 139, 22-24). According to Hegel, this
naive rational observation is condemned to ceaseless efforts: because the 'fortuitous'
discovery of a new species is rare, description must return to the same objects to further
analyze their components.16 This is a potentially limitless activity, given the profuse
particularization of sensible things, their complex nature and overlapping among species
which makes it difficult to draw lines between 'natural' groups. This inexhaustibility of
reality, however, appears to be a problem out of control only for this a-conceptual strategy
of reason involving abstract and immediate intellectual modes of thought. Within the
system, this way of considering nature appears as the starting point of our self-conscious
cognitive approach to the external world as described in Hegel's introduction to his
philosophy of nature:
We begin to perceive, we collect cognitions (ivir sammeln Kenntnisse) about

the manifold formations and laws of nature; this, just on its own account,
goes up and down, out and into an endless detail, and just because no end
can be perceived in it, so we are not satisfied with this procedure (IF 9: 12,
N: 3)."
This dissatisfaction drives the inquiry into the being of nature.18
II
In accordance widi these introductory pages to the Philosophy of Nature, the next,
improved strategy of observing reason in the Phenomenology is to classify the world by
identifying essential marks in natural things. In other words, dissatisfied by the experience
of description that proves to be at odds with its aims and search, reason attempts to
answer the question 'what is nature?', now meaning 'what (essentially) is nature?' This is
to say, it seeks to reduce the multifarious Proteus to the simple unities of genera and
species, families and orders. As Hegel writes in the Encyclopaedia,
when we see nature's processes and transformations we want to grasp its

simple essence [...] so that it may not present us with a variety of ever new
forms, but in simpler fashion bring to our consciousness in language what
itw(ir9:12,JV:3-4).
At the turn of the nineteenth century, classifications of the animal kingdom were
in great flux, due to growing dissatisfaction with Linnaeus's system of classification. In
the Phenomenology, Hegel's analysis underscores the inability of the intellectual tools of
reason to grasp the essential relation between the individual and its universal genus, in so

6
Cinzia Ferrini
far as the former is regarded as endlessly particularised whilst the latter is an indeterminate form. This
point is important to answer Dahlstrom's question on the continuing status, if any, of
Hegel's appeal to nature's inexhaustibility and its bearing on 'Hegel's own philosophical
understanding of reason as spirit.' Hegel concludes that any classificatory system
developed by these means is obtained only through 'power (Gewall) and art (Kunst)' (GW
9: 140, 3). Significantly, here Hegel develops his philosophical concerns by endorsing the
working scientist's own criticism of state of the art natural history. Hegel owned the
fourth edition of Blumenbach's Handbuch der Naturgeschichte (1791) and De generis humani
varietate nativa (1795), where Blumenbach — who endorses Buffon's criticism of 1749,
and who advocated a taxonomy based on habit (hexis, habitus) — emphasizes the limits
of Linnaeus's criterion of classifications of mammals based on teeth, a criterion still
regarded as a good tool at the time of the first edition of Linnaeus's Systema naturae
(1735), though now superseded by new discoveries overseas of many exceptions to his
system (Blumenbach 1795: viii-x). Blumenbach remarks how some naturalists do not
want to draw any determinate border line {keine bestimmte Grenêri) between the animal and
plant realms, due to the discovery of sensible plants, and of so-called animal-plants such
as Trembley's famous Hydra. Others, who support a universal and general continuity in
nature (modeled by a ladder or chain), find it totally arbitrary to divide nature, not only
into realms, but also into classes and orders (Blumenbach 1791: 6). Blumenbach's
approach to this issue shows his awareness that this is a matter of which kind of
determinate concept of the nature of animals and plants a naturalist adopts. His final
judgment is that those who join everything, even though some classes seem so isolated
from certain species they should comprehend, cannot sustain the model of the ladder
without effort (Miihe) and a visible forcing (Zwang). He also uses the expression 'male et
non nisi affectation^ and objects to the motto natura nonfacit saltus^ locutions which convey
connotations very close to Hegel's use of 'Gewalf and 'Kunsf (in the sense of 'artifice').
Once again, in my view Hegel's endorsement of Blumenbach's position also has a
philosophical counterpart. Hegel criticises Kant's nomothetic laws of understanding
because they contain only the condition for the possibility of experience in general: the a
priori elements, which serve as a guideline for our rational investigation of real nature, are
only reflective maxims of the heuristic and subjective judgments analysed in the third
Critique. Therefore, they appear inadequate for constituting the rationale of the systematic
unity of particular and determinate experience in empirical knowledge. Indeed, in the
Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant had proposed a schema of reason for the
thoroughgoing systematic unity of all concepts of the understanding, but through the
application of the concepts of the understanding to (auf) the 'idea of the maximum of
division [i.e. interest in manifoldness and according to the principle of specification] and
unification [i.e. interest in unity and according to the principle of aggregation] of
understanding's cognition in one principle', we obtain 'only a rule', a 'maxim', a 'merely
regulative' or 'subjective' kind of judgment grounded merely on the interest of reason and
so providing no possible insight into the nature of the object. Note that in this way Kant

1
voids the objectivity of any conflicting claims advanced by competing scientific theories:
by reducing their principles to maxims that express the twofold interest of speculative
reason in manifoldness and in unity, Kant may show that what naturalists assume to
come from their proper insight into the object is 'only' grounded in their own mode of
thought. The scientific battle among different systems of classification of inorganic and
organic realms — Kant mentions the model of the ladder of continuity among creatures
by Leibniz and Bonnet, which was also challenged at the time by Linnaeus — is thus
deprived of any possible objective outcome. Moreover, the apparent theoretical rivalry
becomes an objectively unjustified contrast, Kant says, because the constitution of the
object (die Beschaffenheit des Gegenstandes) 'lies too deeply hidden' (^w tiefen verborgen liege) for
empirical scientists (GSIV: A 667/B 695).
In decided contrast to Kant, Hegel sides with the realism of the natural sciences,
and grounds it on philosophical reason. Indeed, drawing from Blumenbach's assessment,
he criticizes the arbitrariness and contrivance of any intellectual classificatory systems,
for, on the one hand, the substantiality of the species and genera is not the foundational
principle that concretely acts and manifests itself in producing the many differentiae as the
universal that remains within itself in its self-differentiation, and, on the other hand, the
singularity of the individuals is not posited in an undivided unity with the universality
itself, as it would be the case with the concept.20 To be satisfied with scientific
classification would require overcoming the formality of the understanding's procedures
and stating the relationship between the individual and its universal genus as essential
both for the things themselves (as they are irrespective of us) and for our knowledge of
them, a relationship that will receive a proper answer only when, approaching nature as
thinkers, we will reach the truth of being and essence with the concept and will aim at
acquiring rational knowledge not of the natural things as they are in their sensuousness,
but of the realized, actual truth of being and essence in the sensible natural things,
namely, of the idea of nature.
In considering the role of distinguishing marks (the teeth and claws of animals) in
the rational cognition of nature, Hegel then has the difficult task of accounting for both
sides. Indeed, he has shown that, at this stage of knowing, the identity of mutually related
phenomena is only an external one, for between the universality of any scheme and the
singularities of the individuals remains an unresolved tension so that the phenomena are
simply not captured by their classifications under abstract headings. This objective feature
of the scientific debate of his time is viewed as the typical consequence of the separation
and external connections of the determinations of natural phenomena set up by the
understanding's logical procedures (IV 10: § 467Z). In the Encyclopaedia, we find that the
determination of the universal of physics 'does not pass over into particularity'. The
determinate content therefore falls outside the universal: and so is split up (%ersplittert),
divided into parts (%erstiickelt), isolated (vereinêlt), and separated (abgesonderf) (W 9: §246Z:
21, JV:11). But in the Phenomenology, Hegel also insists that our artificial systems, though in
competition, are based on detecting real differentiae, and are works in progress. Pace Kant,

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Hegel's Confrontation with the Sciences in 'Observing Reason*
highlight that in the empirical relation to each other the individuality of any chemical
substance does not maintain its difference. For this view, Hegel could rely on the scientific
work of an author known to him: I refer to J. J. Winterl's Darstellung der vier Bestandtheile
der anorganischen Natur [...] A.us dem hateinischen uberset^t von Dr. Jobann Schuster Qena:
Frommann, 1804), where Winterl sets up the empirical problem constituted by the
proper definition of what is an acid and what is a base for the host of distinguishing
marks that come together. He concludes that those marks may give a likely indication of
this or that nature of bodies, but do not provide anything determinate, for there is a border
line beyond which the acidic or basic character disappear in the same hodyP Hence, 'what is
lacking' at the lower levels of nature seems to me to involve reference to Leibniz's
principle of the identity of the indiscernibles, for what is at stake here is the quest to
comprehend organic life according to its two moments of universality (genus, Gattung)
and individuality. Moreover, the quest for the conceptual cognition of the independence
of individuality would represent an appreciation of Leibniz's stress on the uniqueness of
individuals, contra both Locke's model24 and Spinoza's global structures formed by an
infinity of modal elements (this latter involving an implicit criticism of both Schelling's
and Goethe's positions, which reappears explicitly in the pages of Observing Reason
devoted to the knowing of organic nature).25 I found evidence that Hegel here has in
mind Leibniz in a passage of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy (W 20: 241), where he
uses the same phenomenological instance of the animals' self-distinguishing marks to
elucidate the deep meaning of Leibniz's principle of the identity of the indiscernibles. In
contrast, it is also worth noting that in his lectures on Locke, Hegel rejects Locke's
nominalistic approach to genera by stressing first that nature cannot be perfectly adequate
to the concept, because it has only in spirit its true existence, and, secondly, that the
genera, the universals, are 'an sich\ they are the real essence of nature. For Hegel, Locke's
account of the nature of knowledge is backward and insufficient, because it presents the
concept of genus as a subjective product of our spirit the validity of which rests on its
being referred to objects, that is, on 'being-for-another', and so in no way as objective 'in-
itself (IF 20: 219-221).
To sum up: starting from the dissatisfaction of the naturalists with the current
answers to the question, 'What kind of an animal is this?', Hegel legitimates the instinct of
reason to look for essential relationships among living beings and for universals in the
world, and marks a progress because through systematic classifications the concept 'rises
above the dispersion of the sensuous' {GW 9:140,19-20), which is a necessary and
irreplaceable advance toward absolute knowing.26 Nevertheless, because the resistance
constituted by overlaps, transitions, confusions and relapse into merely descriptive
classification shows the inadequacy of the intellectual way of conceiving the relation
between universality and particularity here pursued by reason, the subsequent strategy
concerns the quest for the stable and fixed universality of laws in nature that rule
particulars. As remarked earlier, for observing reason, the truth of laws of nature lies in
experience. The dialectic of these pages aims to show how it emerges for consciousness

10
Cinzia Ferrini
that the truth of the laws of nature lies in the concept. Here I confine myself to
considering the core of a series of examples drawn from Hegel's treatment of mechanics,
chemistry and electricity.
Ill
Hegel regards the kind of research that characterizes modern science as 'freeing' the
moments of the law from any one specific empirical being {GW 9:143, 35-39). This
appears as mere speculation. However, historical considerations suggest otherwise.
The rational ratios of the law are relations which should not be confused with the
mere quantitative significance of the mere numbers together with their inherence in
nature in a way accessible to observation. The essential reality of these rational ratios is
something that does not become apparent to a consciousness that remains at the finite
level of a subject-object observation and believes that the universality of natural laws has
nothing to do with the nature of the self, and derives solely from external nature. The
first counter-example contradicting this belief concerns generalizing the law to cover all
cases. When, despite Hume's skeptical doubts about the operations of the understanding
{Enquiry §4), consciousness realizes that it does not make the experiment of the fall by
raising a stone from the ground and then dropping it ad nauseam {GW 9:142, 20-143, 5), it
has in experience both the being of the law and its conceptual form {GW 9:143, 23-24).
Thus consciousness comes to acknowledge that the validity of a law lies both in its
phenomenal manifestation and in its conceptual nature {GW9:143, 24-26).
To clarify Hegel's reference to a separation of what is purely conceptual from
what is phenomenal, and his subsequent reference to the 'purification' of the law and its
moments as the quest for finding the pure conditions of the law {GW 9: 143, 27-36, see
too: 91, 33-37), recall the innovative two-fold structure of mechanics introduced by
Galileo, which provides theoretical definitions (e.g., the notions of 'uniform' or
'uniformly accelerated' motion) and (mathematical) proof, and also treats empirical,
existing facts as additional, existential propositions that do not affect the law, as in
Galileo's geometrical proof of the law of falling bodies independent of empirical
observation of any kind. In his letter to Pietro Carcavy (5 June, 1637), Galileo states that
if experiments would not confirm that the empirical motion of fall is uniformly
accelerated, his proofs would lose none of their force and conclusiveness since they are
only supposed to be valid for his own hypotheses. More importantly, he states that they
are no more affected than are the propositions of Archimedes on spirals by the fact that
no bodies found in nature exhibit a spiral movement. Torricelli repeated the claim in his
letter to Michelangelo Ricci (5 February, 1646) remarking that if shells, bullets or stone
balls would not follow the theory of the motion of bodies in absence of friction, this
would be their own loss: Ve would say that we are not speaking of them'. In other
words, for Torricelli, the comprehension of the motion of bodies in absence of friction,
that is, in abstracto, was preliminary and necessary to the comprehension of the
Bulletin Of The Heff I Society Of Gnat Britain

11
phenomena and independent from them. In this way, it has been observed, Galilean
mechanics is divided into two methodologically distinct, though systematically related
parts: an empirical one, 'in which hypotheses about the physical world are formulated and
experimentally verified or falsified,' and a conceptual one, with principles that first make
experiments at all meaningful, such as 'equal conditions lead to equal results,' which
supply tools such as definitions and propositions that follow logically from these
determinations.27
The other, sensible side of the law also undergoes a similar process of abstraction
by arranging experiments {GW 9: 143, 29-30). Gren's Grundrifi is paradigmatic of this.
Gren first defines experiment (Versuch) as the experience we obtain when we change the
state of a thing and thus allow other effects to occur from the altered circumstances (GW
9: 143, 33-34). In this way we can know forces that we may never have been able to
perceive through simple observation. The experiment brings us deeper into the nature of
the examined bodies (Gren 1797: §11). Experiments are conducted with instruments,
which allow us to 'reach the necessary requirements of simplicity, precision, and purity'
(Gren 1797: §13). Inquiring into the forms of bodies and their cohesion, these
experiments amount to physical, mechanical, and chemical analysis of the bodies,
individuating their constituent materials and parts, and also their proximal and distal parts
or elements (Urstoffe), which are similar in kind for the first two sciences, though
dissimilar for the third (Gren 1797: §§109-117). Gren actually diagrams the progressive
decomposition of 'bodies' (e.g., atmospheric air) into 'matters' such as heat, oxygen,
carbonic acid, etc. Hegel regards this kind of research as freeing the moments of the law
from any one specific sample (GW): 143, 35-39).
Consider in this regard Gren's account of Riccioli's and Grimaldi's attempts
(stated in Riccioli's Almagestum novum, L. II, Cap. 21, Pr. 24; Bononiae 1651; Frankfurt
1653) to prove by experiments and a-posteriori Galileo's law of falling bodies.28 Their
results, which Gren, in language strikingly close to Hegel's in the Phenomenology, calls
seeking 'to confirm the truth of the Galilean proposition through immediate
experiments', perfectly satisfied the law of the acceleration, proving its 'reality' versus its
alleged 'appearance' (stated by Galileo's 'strange conjecture' in the Dialogue, according to
which 'the true and real motion of the stone is never accelerated at all but is always
equable and uniform").29 However, Gren comments that these measures matched the
formula quite exacdy notwithstanding the air resistance, an empirical factor to which no
regard was given 'in the theory itself. Hence he draws the lesson that 'one can righdy
posit mistrust in the reliability of observation' (Gren 1797: §213)30. In so far as empirical
observation is not regarded as providing the ultimate warrant for scientific law, Hegel
contends that experiments themselves show to consciousness the inversion of its initial
standpoint, which takes experience and observation as the sole source of truth. References
to this kind of scientific theoretical awareness help us understand how and why Hegel
interprets the investigation of the pure conditions of a law as elevating the law into theform of
the concept (GW): 143, 38).3>

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Cinzia Ferrini
After considering a further series of examples drawn from chemistry, Hegel refers
also to the latest development in electricity (GW): 143,39-144,24). One of his example is
the passage from glass- and resin-electricity (static electricity, still connected to bodies) to
the abstract representations of positive and negative electricity, as self-subsisting matters
which are neither things nor properties, but 'beings in the form of a universal.' Here he
follows once again Gren's account (Gren 1797: §1297). Gren traces the following
sequence: first comes du Foy, who experimentally distinguished between the frictional
electricity of rubbed glass and of resin. Yet this designation (Beêicbnung) proved
inadequate because both bodies were proven to contain in part the two kinds of
electricity. Then Franklin distinguished between plus (for frictional electricity) and minus
(the frictional electricity produced by the glass tool that rubs glass and resin bodies)
which were eventually called positive and negative electricity. Finally, Iichtenberg
introduced the notation +E and -E. Chris Lauer comments that 'the end of this
increasing mediation of the experience of nature' (that he also finds in quantum physics)
is 'to eliminate the sensuous side of the law' (Lauer 2007:59).
Contrary to this, I claim that Hegel's phenomenological account of empiricism
shows that it is now apparent to the rational self-consciousness itself that the essential
nature of the sensuous being is a universal. Liberating consciousness from deriving truth
solely from sensuousness through this process of purification does not necessarily imply
a sheer elimination of the sensorily given. If the affirmation of ideality here implies
eliminating real sensuousness, we would relapse into the case of appetite (Begierde), that is
in the case of the appropriation of things that characterizes the practical relation of the
self to the world. To free the moments of the law of nature completely from a specific
being should not, therefore, be reduced to 'discard and discount' what reason finds
'indeterminate or infinite in nature', that is, sensuousness, as Dahlstrom contends, when,
in a vein similar to Lauer's, he refers to the process of the purification of the law and to
the purified matters speaking of 'the loss of the sensorily given individuality of things'
(Dahlstrom 2007:47). In my view, when we examine Hegel's text and try to make sense
of what he writes about those matters, namely, that they are 'universal beings', we should
pay more attention to the side of being, stressing that Oxygen, Heat, positive and negative
Electricity are not ideal as if they were independent modes of a merely subjective
thought. In the system, it is made clear that their significance and validity rests in being
taken/mm their perceived sensuousness and their justification rest 'in the connection that
can be demonstrated in experience,' for they are still beings, although consciously posited
in a conceptual mode (GW9: 144, 25-26).32 In this regard, an historical reference can cast
some further light: note that Kant had already recognized the 'influence of reason on the
classifications of students of nature,' but he had taken, e.g., pure earth, pure water, pure
air, as ideas of reason according to which we question nature (GS IV.- A645-6/B673-4),
not, as Hegel does, as concepts of natural things, determining their empirical objectivity.
My claim is that the loss of the immediate corporeality of amber and glass can have
another meaning than the mere complete elimination of their sensory being, namely the
bulletin Of The Hegel Society Of Gnat Britain
13
establishment in thought of a relationship between the concrete subsistence of natural things and its
negation (the positive side stated in the 'Consciousness' section, the negative in the 'Self-
Consciousness' section). As Hegel maintains in his 1825/26 Lectures in the Philosophy of
Nature (Dove's transcript), the contradiction is solved in the double movement of rational
thought that both ideally transforms and really leaves things to their sensuous,
immediately single existence.33 This reading may help our understanding of why Hegel
uses apparently paradoxical expressions like 'non sensuous thing of sense' or 'incorporeal
and yet objective being' when referring to a chemical matter like Oxygen (GW9: 144, 30-
31).
On the theoretical side, the nature of the laws of nature is the simple concept that,
although effectively embedded in sensuous being and thus present to observation, is also
free and independent from its spatio-temporal manifestations and our observation of
them (GW 9: 144, 34-38): on the one hand, concepts are not without reference to
empirical knowledge and empirical knowledge is not devoid of conceptual elements; on
the other hand, the truth of the theoretical, inward side of the law is independent from
experience. In other words, the transparency and accessibility of the purified laws of
nature to reason do not require that Self 'absorbs' sensuousness, and to acknowledge the
'otherness' of sensuousness in respect to the Self, its contingency and immense wealth,
does not hinder the essential recognition of sensuous singularity as an appearance (Schein)
that can neither constitute a source of truth, nor be deduced a la Krug. For the first time
in these pages of observing reason, the empirical reality of matter appears in our self-
conscious experience of knowing otherness as being essentially a thought-product, and
the nomothetic universality of thought has emerged as the conceptual net inherently
regulating a priori the appearances of sensible things and actually existing within
phenomena as their ratio.
To conclude, my contention is that the core of the phenomenological reason that
observes natural things is the development of a movement in which the opinion that the
truth of our scientific knowledge of the external world lies in experience shows itself as a
groundless belief. This is because the theoretical consideration of the natural sciences
shows that empirical individual things have truth only in so far as they have a ratio essendi
and manifest in themselves a specific essence on their own (a determinate universal). As
remarked earlier in respect to reason's quest to find itself in the classification of animals
and their objective distinguishing marks to move away from other natural groups and
other individuals, it seems to me that reason neither recognizes itself in the particularities
of the real because 'pure thought has surrendered itself into what is not logical' (Collins
2000:789), nor does it know 'the stuff of real existence' as what 'sets conditions that
reason must meet in order to be the fundamental truth of reality' (Collins 2000:790).
Indeed, as already stressed in the Preface to the Phenomenology {GW 9: 20, 11-15), both
reason and nature are determined as %weckmdj£ige Thun, purposive activity; that is, there is
congruity between the oriented internal drive of natural (mind-independent)
differentiated things to realise themselves and the rational finalized activity of the

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Cinzia Ferrini
thinking subject.34 This amounts to saying that genuine scientific knowledge of nature -
that is, theoretical and reflective consideration of nature which is not just an external
aggregate of isolated data - is knowledge of what is both universal (genera, laws, forces)
and internally organised and finalized (1F9: §246:15, JV:6). In other words, a judicious,
"sensed experimental physics (eine sinnige Experimentalphysi/i) [...] will exhibit the rational
science of nature [...] as an external image that mirrors the Concept' (IF 8: §16 Anm.4:
62, £L:41)35. What in the phenomenological movement takes place for us, that is, for
philosophical consciousness, is what allows us to take as object those very universals,
considering them systematically according to their own immanent conceptual necessity.
We are able to do this because along the phenomenological path we experience
progressive liberation from the irreducibility of the subject-object opposition proper to
natural consciousness. This liberating process is due to the conjunction of two
movements: from real to ideal side and from ideal to real. Their conjunction accounts for
the inexhaustibility and contingency of natural existing things and the explanatory
completeness of the essential, inward and stable significance of their sensuous external
transitory being. On the real-to-ideal side, we experience the transformation of the
external (mind-independent) being of the immense realm of phenomena into a being-
that-is-thought as their truth. On the ideal-to-real side, we experience the transformation
of the internal (mind-dependent) thought from a formal way of reducing multiplicity to
unities by abstraction and subsumption into categorial thinking that determines the true
objectivity of the sensuous particulars. Therefore, my conclusion differs from
Dahlstrom's, according to which 'the inexhaustibility of nature militates against any claim
to explanatory completeness on the part of a rational observation of nature' (Dahlstrom
2007: 43).
Cinzia Ferrini
Department of Philosophy
University of Trieste
[email protected]
Notes
De orbitir. Dissertatio philosophica de orbitis planetarum...pro licentia docendi.. .submittit Ge. Wilh. Frid.
Hegel, Iena: Prager et soc, 1801.
W: G.W.F. Hegel, Werke in %waniqg Bdnden, ed. E. Moldenhauer and K.M. Michel, Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1970. The En^klopddie der philosophischen Wissenscbaften I is in volume 8,
Enq/klopadie derphilosophischen Wissenschaften II in vol. 9, Ewgiklopadie derphilosophischenWissenschaften
III in vol.10. Vorksungen iiber die Geschichte der Philosophie III in vol. 20. The Niimberger mid
Heidelherger Schriften, 1808-1817 are in vol. 4
GW: G.W.F. Hegel, Gesammelte Werke. The Phdnomenologie des Geistes is in vol. 9, ed. W. Bonsiepen
and R. Heede, Hamburg, Meiner: 1980. The Schriften und Entwiirfe (1799-1808) are in vol. 5, ed.
M. Baum and K. R. Meist, Hamburg: Meiner, 1998. The ]enaer Systementwurfe I, are in vol.6, ed. K.
Diising and H. Kimmerle, Hamburg: Meiner, 1975. The Wissenschaft derLogik — Erster Band: Die

15
Objektive Logik (1812/13) is in vol. 11, ed. F. Hogemann and W. Jaeschke, Hamburg: Meiner,
1978, The Wissenscbaft der Logik - Zweiter Band: Die Subjektive Logik (1816) is in vol. 12, ibid., 1981,
and The Wissenschaft der Logik - Enter Band: Die Lehn vom Sein (1832) is in vol. 21, ibid., 1985.
N: Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, trans. A.V. Miller, with foreword by J.N. Findlay (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1970.
EL: The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T.F. Geraets, W.F. Suchting and H.S. Harris (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1991
GS: Kant's gesammelte Schriften, ed. by the Koniglich PreuBischen Akademie der Wissenschaften,
Berlin, Reimer (1902-1910). Berlin: de Gruyter & Co, 1968. The Kritik derninen Vemunftis in vol.
IV, Uber den Gebrauch tekologischer Prindpien in der Philosophie in vol. VIII.
1
See also: 'Das wodurch sich beide Wissenschaften unterscheiden is die Metaphysik beider'
(Marmasse 2000:73). Moreover, in the 1821/22 Berlin lectures, Hegel clarifies this claim by
saying that the philosophy of nature differentiates itself from the other sciences 'only because it
changes the categories of ordinary knowledge [nur dadurch, daB sie die Kategorie der sonstigen
Erkenntnis andert]', (Marmasse and Posch 2002:10).
2
As Ferrarin (1998: 76) puts it: 'Empirical sciences and philosophy do not differ by the way of
their more or less close tie with experience, but with respect to their different categories or
underlying metaphysical assumption.'
3
See for instance: 'For Hegel, the central assumption underlying science is that natural forms are
bare things. In contrast, his own metaphysical view is that natural forms are (in a certain qualified
sense) rational agents, which act and transform themselves in accordance with rational
requirements' (Stone 2005: xii). From this standpoint, however, Hegel's relationship with the
empirical sciences is seen only in terms of incorporating, reinterpreting, re-describing and
relocating scientific claims, with the risk to overlook Hegel's own intervention in their
assessment.
4
See Poggi 2000:19-20, also 28-29 and 41-45.
5
Stone mainly refers to the works of Breidbach, von Engelhardt and Petry (Stone 2005, note 18:
172).
6
See Illetterati 1995:217.
7
See Verra 1997:83-122 esp. 96.
8
The present paper is also a reply to Dahlstrom's thought-provoking essay, deepening, updating
and recasting an extensive study - based on research carried out in Jena (March 2005) supported
by the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation - forthcoming in the Blackwell Guide to Hegel's
Phenomenology, edited by K. R. Westphal (ca. 2008). I wish to thank Ardis Collins, for making
Dahlstrom's paper available to me when it was still in proofs and all those who, like Robert
Stern, Stephen Houlgate and Robert Pippin, participated in the discussion offering me the
possibility to clarify and widen the horizons of my talk.
9
See Ferrini 2008: 274-286 on the ideal side of Empiricism (see for example Hegel on Bacon, W
20: 74-79, pace Popper) - as well as on the empirical side of Rationalism (see Hegel's account of
Descartes in comparison to Fichte, If 20: 129-135, 141) — both at the origin of the cultural,
historical and philosophical aspects of the transition from 'Unhappy Consciousness' to the
'Certainty and Truth of Reason', in light of the reconciliation between self and world and the
new interest in reality that emerges after the Reformation (W20: 62-66).
10
It is certainly right to recognize that the principle of empiricism, that what is true must be
present there for our perception, in external existence, is not antithetical to idealism. Halper does
so by writing: There is no reason to suppose that Hegel does not draw upon experience. His
point is just that experience is also ideas' (Halper 2002-03: 24). On Halper's view, however, this
implies that learning \post festum] 'about concepts from experience' means to 'presuppose'
idealism (ibid.: 24), in the sense of a self-generating and conceptually closed system (ibid.: 19),

16
Cinzia Ferrini
and authorizes the reading that 'could be no experience, or anything else, that exists outside of a
truly comprehensive and complete system' (ibid.: 20, my italics).
11
See Moiso 2002: 436-437.
12
See for instance Locke 2004:II.xi.§15: 'Wherein I must appeal to Experience and Observation,
whether I am in the right: The best way to come to Truth, being to examine Things as really they
are, and not to conclude they are, as we fancy of our selves, or have been taught by others to
imagine.'
13
W 4:122 (Texte zur philosophischen Propadeutik, Bewufitseinslehre fur die Mittelklasse, § 40).
14
On this point see Bach 2006:70-71.
15
I mention Rousseau's Emik because its motto 'Pour connoitre les hommes, il faut ks voir agir1
appeared on the frontispiece of Bergk 1803, a book owned by Hegel. Bergk reacted to Gall's
attempt to identify the moral and intellectual qualities of people from their (alleged) innate
dispositions, organs, impressions on the brain cortex, and shape of the skull, by reducing a
cultural, psychological, and anthropological question to mere physiology. The point, however,
endorsed by Hegel, was already present in the Gospel and stressed by Iichtenberg when,
polemicizing against Lavater, had also stressed that actions were the only reliable signs to decipher
self-orienting, self-producing individual human inwardness; see Tomasi 1997:157-158.
16
Once again this complaint about the role of description for the advancement of the study of
nature seems to meet the new sensitivity and higher lever of awareness that emerge in the
analysis of leading naturalists of the time. For instance, Trevkanus (who for first introduced the
term 'Biologic' for a unified study of the living beings) had lowered the value of 'descriptions' of
animals and plants (Beschreibungeti), based on visual details and findings, pitting artificial systems
regarded as 'mere registers', against the higher purpose of the 'science of nature' to inquiry on
the driving force that keeps the 'great organism' that we call 'nature' in eternal activity, uniting
the dispersed parts into a whole: 'Ein Werk, worin die vielen Thatsachen, die in den Schriften der
Naturforscher zerstreut liegen, in Beziehung auf jenen Zweck zu einem Ganzen verbunden
waren, wiirde einen hohern Werth haben, als alle Beschreibungen neuer Thiere und Pflanzen, die
uns weiter nichts sagen, als dass diese so oder anders aussehen, und in diesem oder jenem
Winkel der Erde zu finden sind', Trevkanus 1802:v-vi.
17
This is my translation; Miller's rendering of wir sammeln Kenntnisse is 'we collect facts' (JV 3).
18
See Ferrini 2004.
19
On the principle natura non fadt saltus non datur vacuum formarum, or lex continui, see Leibniz's
letter to Pierre Bayle (July 1687), published in the Nouvelks de la Kepublique des lettres. It is
mentionned in the Avant-Propos to his Nouveaux essais sur I'entendement humain (1704; pub. post, in
1765: la nature nefaitjamais des sautr. 'une de mesgrandes maximes et deplus verifieei); see also there the
use of the principle by Theophile in Leibniz 1979: II. i. § 18; III. vi., § 12; III. x. § 14.
20
The concept is defined as 'the substantial might which is for itself and which 'is free' W 8, §§
159-160:304-308; EL 233-237.
21
GW 6:328-329, see editorial note 64, 27-65, 13. On Hegel's discussion of the chemical
elements in his Jena Lectures on Philosophy ofNature, see Burbidge 1996:20—22.
22
See Renault 2001:251ff.
23
This appears to be a reference to Winterl 1804, §1, 1-2; in his private library, Hegel owned
Winterl's Prolusiones ad chemiam saeculi dedmi noni (Budae, 1800), which I was not able to consult.
On Winterl and Hegel's appreciation of him see Renault 2001:231-232.
24
See Locke's argument that 'General and Universal, belong not to the real existence of Things, but
are the Inventions and Creatures of the Understanding, made by it for its own use, and concern only Signs,
whether Words, or Ideas' (Locke 2004:III:iii: § 11); note however, the reference to the similitude
of things to be found in nature's production (ibid. § 13). Locke argues that on the one side 'many
particular Substances are so made by nature, that they have agreement and likeness one with
another, and so afford a Foundation of being ranked into sorts' and on the other, there is the

17
Hegel's Confrontation with the Sciences in 'Observing Reason*
'sorting of Things by us, or the making of determinate Species, being in order to naming and
comprehending them under general terms' (Locke 2004:III:vi: § 30). The work of the
understanding 'is not exactly conformable' to the work of nature (ibid.). Otherwise stated, nature
makes many particular and similar things, 'but 'tis not this real Essence that distinguishes them
into Species', it is men, who range their similar qualities 'into Sorts in order to their naming' for
the understanding's convenience (Locke 2004:III:vi:§ 36). In Leibniz's Nouveaux essais Theophile
challenges Philalethe's approach that nodiing is essential to the individuals (Leibniz 1979: § 4),
arguing that our uncertainty about drawing border lines among the species neither prevents
things to have real essences independendy from our understanding, nor our understanding to
know them at least provisionally (§ 27), for the advancement of learning in the genesis of the
species and the ways of plant's reproduction will represent a progress towards our cognition of
the natural order, providing a natural foundation to classificatory systems (§ 13).
25
On the influence on botanical theory of Locke's criticism of essential classification, see Morton
1981:235ff. On Goethe's views, which oscillated between accepting Spinoza's monistic
metaphysical principle that nature forms a single unique totality within which all finite existences
partake of infinity and Leibniz's monadistic terminology when dealing with individual
phenomena, see Bell 1984:159-161 and Richards 2002: 376-380. On Goethe's general dismissal
of the concept of individuality for understanding organic nature, see Moiso, 1998: 316. On
holism and empiricism in Goethe's methodology in respect to Hegel's own methodology in Jena
(viewed in terms of 'influence") see Hahn 2007: 9-19.
26
As is well known, Hegel speaks of empirical science's knowledge as presupposition and
condition for the birth and formation of the conceptual way of considering nature, proper to the
philosophical science (see IT 9: §246:15, JV:6). In Ferrini 2008: 282-284 I take into account what
Hegel says in 1805/6 about the opposition between philosophical realism and philosophical
idealism (W 20: 66), that is, between knowing from experience (das Rasonnieren) and knowing
from the concept (from the speculative). He holds that the two directions meet (begegnen sich), just
because experience wants to derive (ableiten) universal laws from its observation (W20: 67-68; see
also W 20: 78-79). I suggest that this statement reflects a more nuanced, sensed aspect of the
analytical method of knowing in the Encyclopaedia Logic (introduced by oder.W 8:§227: 380),
according to which the concrete has not only the meaning of being dissolved into its separate
aspects (in a Lockean fashion: IF8:§227:379 and Z.:380. See also De orbitir. 21,5-7). On my view,
Hegel's compressed text hints at a second characterization (the higher limit of the natural science
as Reflexion), which is coherent with the praise of Baconian empiricism, Galileo's 'sensate
esperienze e certe dimostrazioni', Kepler's empirical and inductive method (W 20: 66; W
9:§270Z: 94-96), Blumenbach's and Treviranus's approaches. It consists in leaving the concrete
as ground (Grand) and, by abstracting from the unessential appearing particularities (durch
Abstraktion von den unwesentlich scheinenden hesonderheiten), to extract (heramûheberi) a concrete
universal (the reference is to: genus, or force and law). The English translation in EL offers a
different reading, rendering what I regard to be the 'higher' form of analytical method as the
simple restatement of the 'lower' activity of dissolving the concrete that is given into its abstract
components, to be considered in their isolation, bestowing the form of abstract universality and
formal identity upon it.
27
See MittelstraB 1972: 306-307.
28
The 'a-posteriori' procedure was as follows: given the weight of a body (a ball of clay of 8 oz.)
and a measure of time (50'"), Riccioli and Grimaldi tried at first to find out the height from
which that body would have had to fall to reach the ground in the given time. Afterwards, they
calculated the height to which another body of similar weight and matter should have had to fall
to reach the ground in double time, in three times and so on.
29
Galilei 1967:166. See also Dinis 2002:63ff. For a recent assessment of Riccioli's and Grimaldi's
experiments see Borgato 2002: 79-118.

18
Cinzia Ferrini
30
Gren's original text runs as follows: 'Aber diese Resultate treffen ohngeachtet des
Widerstandes der Luft, auf welchen doch in der Theorie selbst keine Riicksicht genommen
worden ist, so genau mit dieser selbst zusammen, daB schon deshalb mit Recht MiBtrauen in die
Zuverlassigkeit der Beobachtung gesetzt werden kann'.
31
Elsewhere, Dahlstrom sees that Stone's description of the 'metaphysics of natural science' (see
supra note 4) does appeal to Hegel's authority. Indeed, though aknowledging that 'Hegel's
account of the rational necessity of natural forms is informed by the results of scientific
progress', Dahlstrom criticizes Stone for accepting 'without qualification a Hegelian, monolithic
reading' which cannot be generalized, and in contrast he highlights the features of our
contemporary science (Dahlstrom 2005: 19). On the contrary, the references I have provided to
Blumenbach's, Treviranus's and Gren's texts show how Hegel's reading of the 'metaphysics of
the natural sciences' is in no way monolithic. On my view, he rather takes into account a plurality
of nuanced degrees of the working scienrists's methodological self-awareness and analytical way
of knowing (see supra note 12), which he is able to interpret, evaluate, select (therefore also
exclude, see Dagognet 2007: 407-08) in the light of the emergence of the concept. My paper
contends that in 1807 Hegel's confrontation with natural sciences does provide the
presuppositions for the mature system's view - as it is seen by Houlgate - according to which
'the philosophy of nature is historically dependent on, but structurally and logically independent of,
empirical science at one and the same time' (Houlgate 2005: 116), with the proviso that 'the
philosophy of nature does not derive a priori the empiricalphenomena of nature themselves' (ibid.:
117): see below.
32
See 'this or that single perception is distinct from experience, and Empiricism elevates the
content that belongs to perception, feeling and intuition into the form of universal representations
[Vorste/lungen, EL: notions], propositions [Satê, EL: principles] and laws, etc' (W 8:§ 38:107-108,
EL 77). See also: 'This only happens, however, in the sense that these universal determinations (for
instance, 'force") are not supposed to have any more significance and validity on their own account than that
which is taken from perception, and no justification save the connection that can be demonstrated in experience'
(ibid., my italics).
33
See Posch and Marmasse 2005:163.
34
See for instance Aristode, Parts ofAnimals I (A) 1, 639bl5ff: 'Clearly the first is that which we
call the 'Final' cause — that for the sake of which the thing is formed-since that is the logos of the
thing-its rational ground, and the logos is always the beginning for products of Nature as well as
for those of Art'; see also: 639b 20-21; 641b 11-12; 641b 24-642a 1; 5, 645a 24-25.
35
See on the point Moretto 2004: 30. In the Logic, Hegel appreciates the formulas of Galileo and
Kepler as to the falling of the bodies and the planetary motion because tfiey raise empirical
quanta into a universal form of determinations of quantity, as moments of a law (GW11, 201,7-
11 and GIF 21: 340,14-18). Moreover, in both cases time and space are measured as ratios of
powers, thus mirroring the concept. On Hegel's view, though neither Galileo's nor Kepler's
'higher' analytical method could provide the (absolute) necessity of the empirical laws they
discovered (while Newton's mathematical proof of the first Keplerian law rests upon pure
abstraction and contingency: W 9: §270:86), nevertheless they provided the ground for the
philosophical-speculative proof of their findings (Ferrini 2004: 86-90). See Houlgate 2005: 116-
117: 'Hegel demonstrates a priori that such laws follow logically from the character of space, time,
motion and matter, but he is able to do so only because diey were first discovered "empirically
by induction".'

19
Hegel's Confrontation with the Sciences in 'Observing Reason1
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Hegel's Confrontation with the Sciences in 'Observing

Reason': Notes for a Discussion

According to a well-known statement in Hegel's Engclopaedia, what differentiates the

Bulletin Of The Hegel Society 0/Gnat Britain

Experience is called an observation {Beobachtung oder Bemerkung (Observatio))

Gren goes on to distinguish another sense of experience as experiment. In Italy, in

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Bulletin Of The Hegel Society Of Gnat Britain

Bulletin Of The Hegel Society Of Gnat Britain

We begin to perceive, we collect cognitions (ivir sammeln Kenntnisse) about

This dissatisfaction drives the inquiry into the being of nature.18

when we see nature's processes and transformations we want to grasp its

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Bulletin Of The Hegel Society Of Great Britain

Bulletin Of The Hegel Society Of Gnat Britain

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University of California Press.

Bulletin Of The Hegel Society Of Gnat Britain

Renault, E. (2001), Hegel. La naturalisation de la dialectique. Paris: Vrin.

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