In brief: Less than one would wish, and more than it first appears. In the Groundlines, § 44 is the opposite of an ecological doctrine of right. In the philosophy of nature, by contrast, stands something one does not expect: the earth as one organism whose stages determine one another reciprocally. Only Hegel does not draw from it the conclusion one would draw today.
1. The finding against Hegel
There is no point in sparing him. In right, nature is what has no purpose in itself:
The person has the right to place its will into any thing, which thereby becomes mine; the thing, since it has no such purpose in itself, receives its determination and soul from my will – the absolute right of appropriation which human beings have over all things.
Groundlines, § 44
A right of nature in its own name, a right of future generations, a limit to appropriation drawn from the matter itself – none of this exists. Where Hegel limits disposal, he does so out of regard for other persons, not for nature. And the philosophy of nature confirms it: the consideration of natural things in terms of utility has „the truth in it that they are not absolute ends in and for themselves“ (Encyclopaedia § 249 Addition).
2. The earth as organism – what actually stands there
All the same, talk of a mere stock is not the whole picture. Hegel’s philosophy of nature begins the section on life not with the plant but with the earth. § 337 names three shapes of life, and the first is „the universal image of life, the geological organism“. § 338 determines it as
the shape of the organism – the body of the earth as the universal system of individual bodies.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 338
The earth is thus expressly thought as a totality and not as a collection of things: its place in the solar system, the inclination of its axis, the distribution of sea and land, the mountain ranges, the magnetic field belong for Hegel in one connection (§ 339). And in the Addition to § 341 the earth is said to be „fruitful – precisely as the ground and soil of the individual life that is upon it“, and this universal life of the earth to have „living parts, which are the elements“.
Closer still to the ecological form of thought is a remark on the relation of the stages to one another:
The one stage is the power of the other, and that is mutual … The inorganic destroys the organic; but equally the organic is in turn the power against its universal powers, air and water, which, however freely left alone, are also reduced and assimilated.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 252 Addition
That is, in Hegel’s language, the reciprocal determination of organism and environment – not a juxtaposition of resource and user, but a relation in which each side works on the other.
3. And why Hegel draws no conclusion from it
At two points he draws the limit himself, and in the direction that is uncomfortable for ecology.
The geological organism is no subject. § 338 says expressly that this first organism „does not exist as something living“; it is living only „in itself“. Its members „therefore do not contain the life-process within themselves and make up an external system“ (§ 339). Precisely the property that would make an earth an organism in the full sense – that its parts exist only as members of a whole – Hegel denies it. That belongs only to the plant and the animal.
Its history is over. The process by which the earth was formed is for Hegel „a past one“ (§ 339). For a science whose object is the ongoing change of the earth system, that is the wrong basic assumption – the same one with which the philosophy of nature also overshoots its mark in the case of the origin of species (see Is Hegel’s philosophy of nature the Achilles heel of the system?).
The honest balance, then: Hegel puts the question of the earth as a whole and answers it in the opposite direction. Whoever claims him for a theory of the living earth must explain § 338 and § 339, not skip them. What remains is the form of thought: that a whole is to be determined before its parts, and that the stages determine one another reciprocally. It is usable even though Hegel’s own application is out of date.
4. The contribution that does not date: disposition is not enough
The strongest Hegelian statement about the ecological crisis is not one about nature but one about morality. The whole analysis of morality (§ 105–§ 141) comes down to this: a will that stops at the ought is sufficient unto itself and effects nothing. The good becomes actual only as ethical life – in arrangements that work even when nobody is thinking about them.
Translated: an environmental policy that relies on insight, renunciation and the right attitude has, in Hegel’s terms, the form of the good that lacks actuality. What counts are prices, rights, competences and procedures – institutions that make the right thing a habit instead of a daily decision. That is unromantic and not unfruitful.
To this comes the critique of the mere understanding, which isolates determinations and loses their connection – the form of thought in which a landscape becomes raw material, a river a drainage channel and a climate a key figure. What Hegel calls speculative is the opposite: thinking what is separated in its connection. That is exactly what every ecological consideration demands.
And the limit
Anything beyond this would be fathered on Hegel. His state knows no natural limit, his world history no end through exhausted resources, his concept of freedom no regard for those born later. With Hegel one can think about the form in which an ecological order would become actual. The content must be found without him.
Sources. Groundlines § 41–§ 46 (property, in particular § 44), § 105–§ 141 (morality, the ought, the good), § 142 ff., § 189–§ 208. – Encyclopaedia (1830), Philosophy of Nature: §§ 245–252 (introduction, the „impotence of nature“), § 249 Addition, § 252 Addition (the reciprocal power of the stages), §§ 337–342 (the geological organism, the earth as a system, its fruitfulness), § 343 (the transition to subjective life). – On how far Hegel’s concept of the organism carries for a present-day philosophy of nature, compare the debate on Hegel’s relation to self-organisation; an appeal to him for the Gaia hypothesis founders on §§ 338 f. – In the glossary: The Ought, Ethical Life, The Understanding, The Speculative. – Literature. Alison Stone, Petrified Intelligence. Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy, Albany 2005; Michael John Petry (ed./trans.), Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, 3 vols., London 1970.