Nature with and against spirit: the absolute idealist view

Sebastian Stein (Heidelberg University, Universität Stuttgart)

NB This talk is an additional out-of-semester session. The official seminar series finished at the end of the semester.

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Abstract: Recent (logico-)naturalist, neo-Marxist and Neo-Aristotelian readings of Hegel’s absolute idealism suggest that he either argues that nature grounds spirit or that spirit is a ‚second nature‘ in the sense that spiritual beings are natural beings with the added feature of (self-)consciousness.

Against these interpretations, it will be argued that Hegel relies on three connected syllogisms to describe the relationship between nature and spirit. According to the first syllogism, nature’s particularity forms part of spirit’s individuality so that nature truly is spirit. This entails the problem that spirit’s individuality requires a contrast with nature’s particularity that cannot be realised if sprit’s individuality is all there is. To avoid this, the second syllogism contrasts the first syllogism’s nature-containing spirit with spirit-independent ‚nature as such‘. This raises the question why nature and spirit are compatible in the first place. This motivates the third syllogism according to which both nature-containing spirit’s individuality and the particularity of non-spiritual ‚nature as such‘ are forms of the metaphysical truth’s concrete universality that Hegel calls ‚the absolute idea‘. Since the third syllogism conceptually contains the first two, Hegel’s final word on the relationship between spirit and nature is speculative: while spirit contains nature, nature also differs from spirit while both the identity of spirit and nature and their difference are rooted in their shared status of being non-reductive forms of metaphysical truth’s concrete universality. This entails that 1. natural beings are spiritual 2. natural beings are not just spiritual and 3. nature and spirit are how the idea’s ontological truth freely manifest itself. The talk ends with a discussion of whether this interpretation entails an idealist reduction of nature to spirit or a metaphysical reduction of nature to ‚truth as such’.