Conceptual Analysis and Scientific Theory in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature (With Special Reference to Hegel’s Optics)

Abstract

In a popular textbook on physics, written with an historical and philosophical bias, when turning to the chapters devoted to the subject of ‘colour’, we all of a sudden light upon a section entitled ‘The Estrangement between Science and Philosophy’.¹ Prior to this, the reader has been taken through the properties of the refraction and reflection and propagation of light, lenses, mirrors, rays of light, angles of incidence, image formation, and so on. Here the text interrupts, and the author turns to Hegel, quoting from the Zusatz to § 275 of the Philosophy of Nature the ‘definition of light’:Light is the enclosed totality of matter, only as pure force, the intensive life sustaining itself within itself, the celestial sphere which has withdrawn within itself, whose vortex is just this immediate opposition of directions of the self-relating motion, in whose flux and reflux all distinction is extinguished. As existent identity, it is a pure line which refers only to itself. Light is this pure existent force of space-filling, its being is absolute velocity, present pure materiality, real existence which is in itself, or actuality as a transparent possibility (PN, § 275, Z, p. 87).²