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Concepts with Teeth and Claws. On Species, Essences and Purposes in Hegel’s Organic Physics

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Life, Organisms, and Human Nature

Part of the book series: Studies in German Idealism ((SIGI,volume 22))

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Abstract

In this chapter I argue that Hegel is not an ‘essentialist’ when it comes to living nature. Hegel does not have a conception of species that fits essentialism, in the sense that this term has for historians of systematics and philosophers of biology: for him, there are no species that constitute the essence of living beings and the purpose of living beings is not to perpetuate the species which they are instantiations of.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Devitt 2008 agrees on this being the common view and gives many examples of its supporters. For an exception, see Okasha 2002.

  2. 2.

    As Walsh 2006 has done with Aristotle.

  3. 3.

    Knappik claims (2016, 763) that Hegel takes sides with Linné on this, and not Buffon, but Buffon’s position is controversial. Knappik follows Mayr 1982 on this account.

  4. 4.

    As Buffon seems to believe, even if this is, as I said, debatable (see Zammito 2018, 176).

  5. 5.

    This line does not appear in Petry’s edition (so, I translated it myself). It was added to the 1830 Encyclopaedia.

  6. 6.

    See Stern 2007, 116–22, where the attribution of a confusion of this sort to some British idealists, namely Francis H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet, is discussed, but Hegel is declared innocent of this confusion, since he had merely adopted the hardly controversial position that particulars are examples of universals.

  7. 7.

    I do not imply that a compelling understanding of natural functionality and purposiveness is only available to an organizational account of biological organisms (however, see Maraguat 2020 for a defense of a Hegelian organizational account of biological functionality). Mine is here an exegetical point about theoretical resources in Hegel’s philosophy of natural life. For interesting up-to-date reflections on the context-specific value of different causal accounts of organisms and natural purposiveness, see Andrew Cooper’s contribution to this volume in Chapter “Rethinking Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature Through a Process Account of Emergence”.

  8. 8.

    Cf. Rand 2013, 70, on which he claims that the species produces itself through its individual members and, coherently, sexual reproduction, a sub-process of the generic process, is said to be an activity of reciprocal production and differentiation of the species and its members. I reckon that this is not a language entirely alien to Hegel (see for example Enc2 § 371).

  9. 9.

    While working on the final draft of this contribution, Luca Corti drew my attention to Martin Krahn’s paper on ‘The Species Problem in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature’ (2019). Unfortunately, my argument had already advanced to such an extent, that I could not incorporate his insights into it. As a matter of fact, Krahn has built an independent case for the pre-Darwinian character of Hegel’s views on species.

  10. 10.

    Work on this chapter has been funded by the Spanish Research Agency (Research Project PGC2018-093363-B-I00). I would like to thank audiences in Bochum and Valencia, as well as the editors of this volume and an anonym reviewer, for numerous suggestions that have improved a previous draft.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain

    Edgar Maraguat

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  1. Edgar Maraguat
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Philosophy Department and Padua Research Group on Classical German Philosophy, University of Padua, Padua, Italy

    Luca Corti

  2. Philosophy Department 1 and Research Center for Classical German Philosophy, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    Johannes-Georg Schülein

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Maraguat, E. (2023). Concepts with Teeth and Claws. On Species, Essences and Purposes in Hegel’s Organic Physics. In: Corti, L., Schülein, JG. (eds) Life, Organisms, and Human Nature. Studies in German Idealism, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_5

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