In brief: It is the part of the system that has aged most — but not for the reason usually given. Hegel did not want to invent nature out of the concept. He said expressly that natural science precedes the philosophy of nature, and that nature precisely cannot be comprehended without remainder. What really catches up with him is the developmental history of life – and even there not as an error about facts, but as a decision about what a genus is.
The charge
It runs roughly thus: Hegel believed one could derive the laws of nature at one’s desk from the concept, held Newton for a bungler and Goethe’s theory of colours for correct, and incidentally proved that there could be only seven planets. The last point is a legend and is taken apart elsewhere. The first two deserve a more exact answer.
What Hegel himself says about the relation to experience
Right at the beginning of the philosophy of nature stands a sentence that removes the ground from the charge:
Not only must philosophy be in agreement with the experience of nature, but the emergence and formation of the philosophical science has empirical physics for its presupposition and condition.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 246 Remark
The philosophy of nature therefore invents nothing; it takes the material that natural science supplies and asks after its order. Hegel distinguishes strictly between the emergence of a science, in which experience is the basis, and the finished science, in which the necessity of the concept establishes the order. Whoever overlooks this distinction reads each of his derivations as a claim about how nature was made.
The „impotence of nature“ — Hegel’s own limit
The decisive paragraph is § 250. It says that nature precisely does not sustain the concept:
It is the impotence of nature to preserve the determinations of the concept only abstractly, and to expose the working out of the particular to external determinability.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 250
From this he draws the consequence himself — and against the philosophy of nature of his contemporaries, not against its critics:
That impotence of nature sets limits to philosophy, and it is most improper to demand of the concept that it should comprehend such contingencies and, as it has been called, construct or deduce them.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 250 Remark
In a footnote he becomes impolite. A critic had demanded that the philosophy of nature kindly deduce his pen:
Herr Krug once, in this and at the same time in another respect quite naive sense, called upon the philosophy of nature to perform the feat of deducing merely his pen. – One might have given him hope of this achievement […] once science had advanced so far […] that there was nothing more important left to comprehend.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 250 Remark, footnote
The man who supposedly wanted to derive everything from the concept declared the deriving of the singular to be „most improper“.
Where Hegel is wrong – and where he is not
Two things have to be kept apart here that are usually named in one breath.
The reserve. § 249 says that the stages of nature proceed from one another –
but not in such a way that the one were naturally produced out of the other, but rather in the inner Idea that constitutes the ground of nature.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 249
That is the same rule that holds in the Groundlines, § 32 note: the conceptual order is not the temporal one. The family logically presupposes the concept of property and was historically there first all the same. Whoever holds that rule to be right in the sphere of right cannot hold it against Hegel in the sphere of nature. It is consistent, not evasive.
The addition. But he does not stop there. In the same paragraph he adds:
It has been a clumsy representation of older, and also of more recent, philosophy of nature to regard the development and transition of one natural form and sphere into a higher one as an externally actual production, which, however, in order to make it clearer, has been relegated to the darkness of the past … Thinking consideration must rid itself of such nebulous, at bottom sensuous representations, such as in particular the so-called emergence of plants and animals out of water, and then the emergence of the more developed animal organisations out of the lower ones.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 249 Remark
That is no longer a methodological reserve but a claim about what happened – and it is false. His own procedure did not require this addition. He could have said: the temporal question is not mine. Instead he says: that is not how it was.
What the polemic is aimed at
The addition is nevertheless intelligible. What Hegel had before him was no research programme but speculative philosophy of nature, which took the sequence of stages for an actual production and, as he says mockingly, „in order to make it clearer, relegated it to the darkness of the past“. Against Oken and his kin the contempt is earned.
The evolutionary idea itself is older than both – Anaximander has human beings emerge from fish, Empedocles has limbs join together by chance, Lucretius transmits it – and Hegel knew it. But it shares with the nature-philosophising of his own day exactly the defect he censures: it asserts a succession and names no mechanism. Nobody had heredity and selection in 1830. Twenty-nine years after this edition Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared – and the succession was suddenly no longer an intimation but something explained. What Hegel rejected was an evolutionism without a mechanism, and that was fit to be rejected.
The fork in the road: § 250 Remark
So far the matter would be a mere lag. It is more than that, and a passage seldom read in this connection shows it. Hegel knows very well what the findings yield:
Nature everywhere blurs the essential limits by intermediate and defective formations, which always furnish instances against every fixed distinction – even within determinate genera (for example that of human beings) by monstrosities, which on the one hand must be counted to that genus, while on the other they lack determinations that would have to be regarded as the essential peculiarity of the genus. – In order to be able to regard such formations as defective, bad, misshapen, a fixed type is presupposed; but this type could not be drawn from experience, for it is experience that furnishes those so-called monstrosities, deformities, intermediate things and so forth.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 250 Remark
That is the same finding from which Darwin sets out: the blurred limits, the intermediate forms, the impossibility of obtaining the type from the material. The inferences run in opposite directions. Hegel: therefore the type does not come from experience but from the concept. Darwin: therefore there is no fixed type, the intermediate things are what is real, and the species is the abstraction.
The same finding, two decisions. At this point the dispute is no empirical lag but a philosophical fork – and the question at issue is not whether species have changed, but what a genus is.
What the dispute really costs
Less than it looks, and in a different place more.
Less at the level of the great stages. That nature falls apart at all into mechanics, physics and organics, into geological, vegetable and animal nature, is no claim about descent, and the theory of descent does not touch this order. And at the level of species Hegel has already vacated the field: the „impotence of nature“ leaves „the working out of the particular to external determinability“. In the lecture he puts it in passing and more sharply: „From the determination of matter I cannot develop what kinds of matter there are.“ From the concept of the animal one cannot develop which animals there are. That is exactly where evolution works – in the zone Hegel had already withdrawn from the concept himself. There it costs him nothing.
More at the concept of the genus. For Hegel it is a standard on which the singular fails:
Its inadequacy to universality is its original disease and the innate germ of death.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 375
The animal dies because it does not suffice for the genus. In Darwin the genus is conversely a result: what the surviving populations share. Ground against result. The two can be brought closer by saying that the theory of descent makes productive, over time, the inadequacy of the singular to the universal that already stands in Hegel. That is attractive, but it turns the genus from an ought into a statistic. At this point a present-day reader has to decide something and not merely reinterpret.
What remains of Hegel’s basic motive is independent of this: that a temporal succession is not yet an explanation but itself needs explaining. The theory of evolution has not refuted that motive but fulfilled it – it supplied the mechanism that Hegel found missing in his contemporaries.
Why the Groundlines do not depend on it
The philosophy of right does not stand on the philosophy of nature but beside it. It begins expressly where nature leaves off:
The ground of right is the realm of spirit in general; its more precise location and point of departure is the will, which is free, so that freedom constitutes its substance and determination, and the system of right is the realm of actualized freedom, the world of spirit produced from within itself as a second nature.
Groundlines, § 4
What the Groundlines need from the philosophy of nature is exactly one sentence: that nature is not the ground of right. The arguments about property, contract, punishment and the state hang on no physical assumption whatever. One can strike out the philosophy of nature without a single sentence in the Groundlines falling over — and therefore the Achilles heel, if it is one, is at any rate not the heel on which the thinking about right depends.
Sources. Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), Part Two: The Philosophy of Nature, §§ 245–251 (Introduction), in particular § 246 Remark, § 249 with Remark (sequence of stages and metamorphosis) and § 250 with Remark and footnote (impotence of nature; the blurred limits of the genera) – TWA 9, 11–37; further § 375 (inadequacy to universality as the germ of death). The footnote is aimed at Wilhelm Traugott Krug and takes up Hegel’s essay How the Ordinary Human Understanding Takes Philosophy (Kritisches Journal der Philosophie, 1802). – Groundlines § 4 on the „second nature“. – On the planet legend, the answer to Did Hegel claim that there could be only seven planets? – Literature. Michael John Petry (ed./trans.), Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, 3 vols., London 1970 — still the fullest commentary; Bertrand Beaumont, „Hegel and the Seven Planets“, Mind 63 (1954); Alison Stone, Petrified Intelligence. Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy, Albany 2005. – On the ancient evolutionary idea Anaximander (DK 12 A 30) and Empedocles (DK 31 B 57–61), transmitted by Lucretius, De rerum natura V; on the counter-position Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, London 1859.