The Hegelian Treatment of Biology and Life

Abstract

I gave a paper on Hegel’s treatment of the physical sciences at Milwaukee last June (1969), and another not entirely similar paper on the same theme at Stuttgart in July, where I also contended with the German language. On this occasion my theme is Hegel’s treatment of Life and the Life-Sciences. I shall not, however, limit myself to the dialectical analyses which occur in the Philosophy of Nature, but shall go back to the far more fundamental treatments which are to be found in the Science of Logic and the Encyclopaedia. Life is for Hegel a category before it is a physical phenomenon in time and space, and we have to try to understand just what sort of a category it is, and where and how it has its place in the logical array of categories. I also wish to say something about the treatment of Life and Biology which occurs in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where Life is being set forth as one of the objects which the mind contemplates and investigates on its journey to Absolute Knowledge. After these two fundamental treatments I shall consider what Hegel has to say about Life and Biology in the Philosophy of Nature, enquiring, in the end, what he has to say to us in the present stage of development of the biological sciences. I am compelled to leave out the interesting discussions of Life in the various sets of Jena lectures, because I have never been able to give these lectures that complete sentence by sentence scrutiny which is an indispensable preliminary to understanding anything in Hegel.