In order to correct what I fear may have been an unfair caricature of Hegel presented in some of my posts earlier this year (HERE and HERE) after reading Iain Hamilton Grant‘s Philosophies of Nature After Schelling, I’ve sought out perspectives from thinkers more sympathetic to Hegel’s approach.
First on the list was the integral philosopher Sean Kelly, under whom I study at CIIS. Sean wrote his dissertation on Hegel and Jung, and though he thinks Hegel is more systematic than Schelling, he agreed with me that Schelling’s nature philosophy may benefit from being brought out from beneath Hegel’s shadow to be recognized as a distinct project. Sean also recommended a book edited by George R. Lucas, Hegel and Whitehead: Contemporary Perspectives on Systematic Philosophy (1986). I’ve read several essays in it so far, but the one by J. N. Findlay called “Hegel and Whitehead on Nature” seems most relevant to the issues at stake when thinking the differences between Schelling and Hegel.
Findlay focuses in on the relationship between Logic and Nature in Hegel’s system, showing that, although the Concept or Universality as such ranks supreme, it includes Specificity and Singularity (phylogeny and ontogeny, or the species and the individual) within itself as essential moments of its concrete realization.
“Hegel’s philosophy,” says Findlay,
…starts with a ‘realm of pure categories’ which anticipate the specificities that will afterwards be actualized in the objective world and in the subjective experiences of that world… The Absolute Idea is the Idea of an exhaustively specific Universality which also has indefinitely many actual and contingent instantiations and, being what it is, must accordingly be actively dynamic and not abstract, have all the wealth of concrete instantiation that fulfills it, and represent its notional inwardness completely brought to outwardness and actuality (p. 157).
In other words, as Findlay goes on to say, Hegel’s Logic requires supplementation by both his philosophies of Nature and of Spirit. The relation of Logic, Nature, and Spirit in Hegel is strikingly similar to Whitehead’s depiction of an immanent, bi-polar God: the realm of pure categories is equivalent to God’s primordial envisagment of the eternal objects, the Idea’s self-externalization as Nature is equivalent to the objective satisfactions of finite actual entities, and the process of externality’s return to itself as Spirit is equivalent to God’s consequent apprehension of the Universe’s concrescence.
The otherness of Nature, in Hegel, Schelling, and Whitehead, is necessary for God to come to know itself as Spirit. Nature is God’s mirror image, allowing the “everywhereness and everywheness of [ideal categories]” to find the immediacy of “the hereness and nowness of the instance” (ibid., p. 159). This scheme seems to me to transcend the dichotomy between idealism and realism, since universals are merely virtual without becoming realized in concrete particulars, just as particulars are unintelligible without some relevance to universals. This shade of black that I experience here and now may be particular, but its thisness participates in concrete actuality rather than emerging from it. This black may appear again in a different circumstance as the same black, making it as much the ingression of an idea as the prehension of a instance.
Hegel, like Whitehead and Schelling, overcomes the subjectivism of Kant by positing space and time as constitutive elements of Nature itself, rather than forms of intuition imposed upon it by consciousness.
The one area where Hegel may diverge from Schelling, and especially from Whitehead, is in his preference for a logical, rather than temporal conception of evolution.
“Hegel asserts,” writes Findlay,
that Nature essentially reveals itself in a ladder of forms from the most self-external to the most organically unified, since the ladder is that of the logical dialectic. But he repudiates the notion that this dialectical ladder must be turned into a historical temporal ladder… Hegel holds that all stages of the ladder coexist in time: their order is logical, not temporal. This position was modified when Hegel, compelled by the facts of the geological record, was forced to admit that life at least, in its higher vegetable and animal forms, emerged out of mere chemistry at a definite point in cosmic history. But even then he preferred to think of all species emerging together much as Pallas emerged fully armed from Zeus’ forehead… The earth is presupposed by life as having a long pre-vital history, but Hegel does not believe that many of the fossils found in early geological strata ever really lived, [rather] they are products of an organic-plastic impulse in inorganic matter which anticipated the lightning stroke of life (p. 161).
Despite much cognitive stress on my part, and several conversations with Sean Kelly, I’ve yet to comprehend what exactly Hegel is getting at as regards his denial of temporal evolution, short of offering a form of creationism that contradicts all empirical scientific study. I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt here, but try as I may, it just sounds absurd. No doubt deep time and cosmic evolution are difficult to imagine, but even more so is the creation of a diversity of biological forms ex nihilo.
Jonael Schickler argues in his dissertation that Hegel’s account of the difference between the organic and inorganic realms (between life and chemistry) is underdetermined. Nonetheless, Schickler agrees with Hegel that individual organisms perish as a result of being unable to reconcile their individuality with their universality (a feat achieved concretely in Christ’s resurrection, but only abstractly in the inner life of Spirit). Hegel conceives of Spirit’s initial emergence as a potentiality seeking actualization (he calls Spirit in its potential phase the “natural soul” that relates to Nature through feelings rather than thought) (ibid., p. 163).
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I’ll have to post another essay wherein I more fully draw out how Schelling differs from Hegel, but I’m far less certain now that the two had fundamentally opposed projects. Whitehead, due to his empirical bent, seems like the perfect mediator to bring the two into fruitful conversation.
More soon…
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?