In brief: More seriously than the charge assumes. Experience stands at the beginning in Hegel, and philosophy would not come about at all without it – he says so more than once and without reservation. What he denies is not experience but the assumption that it is sufficient unto itself. His sharpest sentence is accordingly aimed not at empirical inquiry but at the empiricism that fails to notice its own metaphysics.
„Philosophy essentially needs experience in order to be“
The sentence comes not from a concession in a subordinate clause but from the lecture itself. In Pinder’s transcript of 1825/26 Hegel answers this very charge:
Philosophy is reproached with giving itself airs over not needing experience. Philosophy proceeds from concepts, but not in such a way that it has no need of what is perceptible. – Philosophy essentially needs experience in order to be. Thought itself is essentially a result.
Lectures on the Philosophy of Nature, transcript by Pinder, 1825/26
And because that might sound like an embarrassment, he adds that „being a result“ and „being self-subsistent“ are no opposites: everyone who has been educated is a result of his time and his people, and his cultivation consists precisely in this, „that he has become self-subsistent, has sublated his own becoming“. The same holds for a science:
the philosophy of nature too has come to be, in that it started out from physics. No present-day philosophy of nature could have existed without physics.
Transcript by Pinder, 1825/26
In the printed text of the Encyclopaedia the same thought stands in the stricter form:
Not only must philosophy be in agreement with the experience of nature; the emergence and formation of philosophical science has empirical physics for its presupposition and condition.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 246 note
The following sentence is where the paths divide: „But the course of the emergence of a science and its preparatory work are one thing, the science itself another.“ Experience is the condition of its coming about, not the ground of proof in its exposition. Whoever sees a sleight of hand in that has an objection; whoever recognises in it the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification has met an old acquaintance.
The great principle of empiricism
Before Hegel contradicts, he concedes the empiricist two things, and with an emphasis rare in him:
There lies in empiricism this great principle, that what is true must be in actuality and must be there for perception. This principle is opposed to the ought, with which reflection puffs itself up and treats actuality and the present with contempt in the name of a beyond that is to have its seat and existence only in the subjective understanding. Like empiricism, philosophy too knows only what is; it does not know such things as only ought to be and are therefore not there. – On the subjective side, the important principle of freedom that lies in empiricism is likewise to be acknowledged, namely that what a human being is to let count in his knowing he is to see for himself, and to know himself present in it.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 38 note
Neither is mere politeness. The first sentence is the one with which the Preface to the Groundlines argues against the world-improvers of the mere ought; the second is the right of the subjective will to let count only what it sees to be right – in the philosophy of right, § 132. Here the empiricist and Hegel stand on the same side.
The fundamental delusion
The contradiction follows immediately, in the same paragraph, and it concerns not observing but self-image:
The fundamental delusion in scientific empiricism is always this: that it uses the metaphysical categories of matter, force, and of course of one, many, universality, and infinity too, and so on; that it goes on drawing inferences on the thread of such categories, presupposing and applying the forms of inference in doing so; and that through all of this it does not know that it thereby itself contains and practises metaphysics, and that it is using those categories and their connections in a wholly uncritical and unconscious manner.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 38 note
In the lecture he becomes concrete and names the addressees:
Newton says: physics, beware of metaphysics. The French say, when they arrive at certain determinations: mais c’est la métaphysique. But the human being is thinking once and for all; and determinate thinking means categories, metaphysics.
Transcript by Pinder, 1825/26
His example is inconspicuous and all the better for it. A flower has colour; the colour is then expressed as a colouring matter, the scent as an essential oil – and a property has quietly become a component. „The flower consists of such things. This consisting is a very inconspicuous category, and yet the flower is one living thing, and so we sublate all these separations.“ The Addition to § 246 adds the sentence Goethe might have written and nearly did: „but even if we bring together all those ingredients of the flower, no flower comes out of it.“
„All human beings are mortal“
Hegel strikes empiricism hardest where it feels safest: in the universality of the empirical proposition.
If a law of physics rests on experience and is nevertheless to be universal, what lies in this is that it has been observed in all cases. But it goes without saying that one has not observed all cases. All human beings are mortal. But one has not observed all human beings. Those now living are also included among all human beings, and so are those to come. And yet one asserts the universality of the experience. Either an analogy is being used, or the deeper concept is at work in it. That all human beings are mortal lies in the concept of the individual.
Transcript by Pinder, 1825/26
That is the problem of induction, eighteen years before Mill’s System of Logic and in three sentences. Hegel’s conclusion is not that experience is worthless, but that a concept is already at work in what presents itself as mere experience. „Empirical universality“, he says, „is really allness“ – and allness is something other than universality.
Physics and the philosophy of nature do not differ as perceiving and thinking
From this follows the determination of the relation, and it comes out otherwise than the cliché expects:
Physics and natural history are called empirical sciences and profess to belong wholly to perception and experience … But in fact the first thing to be shown against empirical physics is this: that there is far more thought in it than it admits and knows; that it is better than it supposes – or, if thinking in physics were to count as something bad, that it is worse than it supposes. Physics and the philosophy of nature therefore do not differ from one another as perceiving and thinking, but only through the kind and manner of the thinking; both are thinking cognition of nature.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 246 Addition
The printed paragraph says the same soberly: what is called physics is „likewise theoretical, and indeed thinking, consideration of nature“, directed at forces, laws and genera – the philosophy of nature has „the same universal for its object, but for itself“. The difference lies not in the material and not in the attitude to observation, but in whether the categories in use are themselves examined.
The price of thinking
The most honest passage in the whole complex is the one where Hegel names the loss that comprehending brings with it. First the lower limit:
If physics rested only on perceptions, however, and perceptions were nothing but the testimony of the senses, then the activity of physics would consist only in seeing, hearing, smelling and so forth, and animals would in this way be physicists too.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 246 Addition
And then the price:
The more thought there is in representation, the more of the naturalness, singularity and immediacy of things disappears: through the intrusion of thought the wealth of infinitely manifold nature is impoverished, its springs die away, its play of colours pales. What in nature rustles with life falls silent in the stillness of thought; its warm abundance, which shapes itself into a thousandfold attraction of wonders, withers into dry forms and shapeless universalities that resemble a dull northern mist.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 246 Addition
The contradiction he exhibits in this is the real theme: we want to know the nature that actually is, „not something that is not“ – and in thinking it we make it universal; „things, however, are singular, and the lion as such does not exist“. Whoever claims that Hegel took the relation of concept and experience lightly should read this page first.
The limit Hegel draws for himself
The philosophy of nature is not asked to replace the findings. In the note to § 250 Hegel expressly calls it „utterly improper to demand of the concept that it should comprehend such contingencies and, as it has been called, construct or deduce them“. The philosopher who wants to prescribe measurements to the physicist has Hegel against him.
The standard turns against Hegel himself where his philosophy of nature has grown old along with the empirical science of its day – most plainly in § 249 note, where he does not merely leave open whether the sequence of stages in nature is a history in time but denies it. The reserve would have been consistent; the addition was not. Whoever tests Hegel by Hegel finds the fracture here: a philosophy that declares empirical science to be the condition of its own emergence ages with it. In detail: Is Hegel’s philosophy of nature the Achilles heel of the system?
And in the philosophy of right?
The same relation, only on a material every reader knows. § 1 note distinguishes what corresponds to the concept from what merely happens to be there – „transient existence, external contingency, opinion, inessential appearance, untruth, illusion“. § 3 and note grant purely historical research „its merit and value within its own sphere“ and draw only the boundary that it must not „confuse itself with development from the concept“. And § 189–§ 208 work through the empirical material of political economy which Hegel had read in Smith, Say and Ricardo – § 189 note names them.
Whoever wants to know how Hegel stands to empirical inquiry, then, does not need the philosophy of nature: § 243–§ 245 are the test case. There stands a diagnosis that comes from observation, is developed in concepts – and ends without a solution.
Sources. Encyclopaedia (1830) § 38 and note (empiricism), § 12 (experience as starting point), § 246 with note and Addition (physics and the philosophy of nature), § 249 note (no history of nature in time), § 250 note (the contingencies of nature). – Vorlesung über die Philosophie der Natur, transcript by Karl Gustav Julius Pinder 1825/26, ed. Niklas Hebing, Meiner 2014 (the passages on experience, allness and the metaphysics of physics). – Goethe, Faust I, Studierzimmer, ll. 1938–1941 („Encheiresin naturae“) and Zur Morphologie I/3, 1820 („Into nature’s inner core“). – Groundlines § 1 note, § 3 and note, § 132, § 189–§ 208, § 243–§ 245. – In the glossary: The Concept, Actuality and Rationality, The Understanding, The Speculative. – See also Why should an empiricist read Hegel – and how does he „prove“ any of it?