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Organic Physics: the concept of life (Enc. §§ 337–376)

The concept of life and the organism: the third division of the Philosophy of Nature. The footnotes to § 47 (Enc. §§ 337 ff.) and to § 278 (Enc. § 371) of the Groundlines refer to this page.

The text follows the third edition of 1830 as given in the Werke. Hegel’s own text and his Remarks are reproduced here; the Additions from the lectures are to be supplied later.

Contents

Third Division. Organic Physics
§ 337

→ Groundlines § 47

The real totality of the body, as the infinite process in which individuality determines itself to particularity or finitude and equally negates this and returns into itself, restoring itself at the end of the process to its beginning, is thereby an elevation into the first ideality of nature; yet in such a way that this ideality has become a fulfilled one and, essentially, as a self-relating negative unity, one that is possessed of self and subjective. The Idea has herewith come into existence, at first into immediate existence, into life. Life is A. as shape, the universal image of life, the geological organism; B. as particular, formal subjectivity, the vegetable organism; C. as singular concrete subjectivity, the animal organism. The Idea has truth and actuality only in so far as it is subjective in itself (§ 215); life as merely immediate Idea is therefore outside itself, non-life, merely the corpse of the life-process, the organism as the totality of a mechanical and physical nature existing as lifeless. Distinguished from this, subjective aliveness begins, what is alive in vegetable nature: the individual, but still as outside itself, dispersing into its members, which are themselves individuals. Only the animal organism is developed into such differences of formation as exist essentially only as its members, and it is through this that it is as subject. Aliveness as natural does indeed disperse into the indeterminate multiplicity of living things, which however are in themselves subjective organisms; and it is only in the Idea that they are one life, one organic system of life.

A. Geological Nature
§ 338

The first organism, precisely in so far as it is at first determined as immediate or as being in itself, does not exist as something living; life, as subject and process, is essentially an activity that mediates itself with itself. Considered from the side of subjective life, the first moment of particularization is that life makes itself into its own presupposition, thereby gives itself the mode of immediacy, and in that mode sets over against itself its condition and its external subsistence. The recollection of the Idea of nature into itself, towards subjective and still more towards spiritual aliveness, is the judgement into itself and into that processless immediacy. This immediate totality, presupposed by the subjective totality, is only the shape of the organism — the body of the earth as the universal system of individual bodies.

§ 339

The members of this organism, which is only in itself, therefore do not contain the life-process within themselves and constitute an external system whose formations exhibit the unfolding of an underlying Idea, but whose process of formation is a past one. — The powers of this process, which nature leaves behind beyond the earth as self-subsistent things, are the connection and position of the earth within the solar system, its solar, lunar and cometary life, the inclination of its axis to its orbit, and the magnetic axis. More closely related to these axes and their polarization are the distribution of sea and land, the coherent extension of the land in the north, the division and tapering constriction of its parts towards the south, the further separation into an old and a new world and the further distribution of the former into continents differing from one another and from the new world in their physical, organic and anthropological character, to which a still younger and immature one attaches itself; the mountain ranges, and so forth.

§ 340

Physical organization, being immediate, does not begin with the simple, enveloped form of the germ, but with a starting point that has fallen apart into a twofold one: into the concrete granitic principle, the mountain core which already exhibits the threefold set of moments developed within itself, and into the calcareous, the difference reduced to neutrality. The development of the moments of the former principle into formations has a graded course in which the further structures are partly transitions in which the granitic principle remains the foundation, only as inwardly unequal and unformed, and partly a dispersal of its moments into more determinate difference and into more abstract mineral moments, the metals and the objects of oryctognosy generally, until the development loses itself in mechanical stratifications and in alluvial deposits devoid of immanent formation. Alongside this the further development of the other, the neutral principle proceeds partly as a weaker formation, and partly the two principles then interlock in concrescent structures to the point of external intermixture.

§ 341

This crystal of life, the dead-lying organism of the earth, which has its concept outside itself in the sidereal connection, but its own proper process as a presupposed past, is the immediate subject of the meteorological process, through which, as the totality of life which is in itself, it is fructified no longer merely into individual formation (see § 287) but into aliveness. — Land, and the sea in particular, being thus the real possibility of life, breaks out endlessly at every point into punctiform and transient aliveness: lichens, infusoria, immeasurable quantities of phosphorescent points of life in the sea. Generatio aequivoca, however, precisely because it has that objective organism outside itself, is confined to such punctiform organizing as does not develop within itself into determinate articulation, nor reproduce itself (ex ovo).

§ 342

This separation of the universal organism, which is external to itself, from this merely punctiform, transient subjectivity sublates itself, by virtue of the identity of their concept which is in itself, into the existence of this identity, into the animate organism, the subjectivity that articulates itself in its own self, which excludes from itself the organism that merely is in itself, physical nature universal and individual, and confronts it, but at the same time has in these powers the condition of its existence, the stimulus as well as the material of its process.

B. Vegetable Nature
§ 343

Subjectivity, in accordance with which the organic being is a singular, develops into an objective organism, the shape, as a body articulating itself into parts that are distinguished from one another. In the plant, which is subjective aliveness as yet only immediate, the objective organism and its subjectivity are still immediately identical, so that the process by which the vegetable subject articulates and preserves itself is a coming-out-of-itself and a falling apart into several individuals, for which the one whole individual is more the soil than a subjective unity of members; the part — the bud, the branch and so forth — is likewise the whole plant. For this reason, moreover, the difference of the organic parts is only a superficial metamorphosis, and the one can readily pass over into the function of the other.

§ 344

In this way the process by which the singular individual is shaped and reproduced coincides with the process of the genus, and is a perennial production of new individuals. The universality that is possessed of self, the subjective one of individuality, does not separate itself from real particularization, but is merely submerged in it. The plant, being a subjectivity that is not yet for itself over against its organism which is in itself (§ 342), neither determines its own place out of itself, nor has any motion from the spot, nor is it for itself over against the physical particularization and individualization of that organism; it therefore has no intermittent intussusception but a continuously streaming nutrition, and relates not to an individualized inorganic being but to the universal elements. Of animal warmth and of feeling it is still less capable, since it is not the process of leading back its members, which are more merely parts and themselves individuals, into negative, simple unity.

§ 345

As an organic being, however, the plant also articulates itself essentially into a differentiation of abstract formations (cells, fibres and the like) and more concrete ones, which nevertheless remain within their original homogeneity. The shape of the plant, as not yet liberated from individuality into subjectivity, also remains close to geometrical forms and to crystalline regularity, just as the products of its process stand nearer to the chemical.

Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants made the beginning of a rational thought concerning the nature of the plant, in that it tore ordinary thinking away from a preoccupation with mere details and towards the cognition of the unity of life. In the category of metamorphosis the identity of the organs predominates; but the determinate difference and the distinctive function of the members, whereby the life-process is posited, is the other necessary side to that substantial unity. The physiology of the plant necessarily appears more obscure than that of the animal body, because it is simpler, because assimilation passes through few mediations and because alteration occurs as immediate infection. — As in every natural and spiritual life-process, the main thing in assimilation, as in secretion, is substantial alteration, that is to say, the immediate transformation of an external or particular material as such into another; there comes a point at which the pursuit of the mediation, whether by way of chemical or of mechanical gradualness, breaks off and becomes impossible. This point is everywhere and pervasive, and it is the ignorance, or rather the failure to acknowledge, this simple identification, as well as this simple diremption, that makes a physiology of the living being impossible. — Interesting information concerning the physiology of the plant is afforded by the work of my colleague, Professor C. H. Schultz (Die Natur der lebendigen Pflanze, oder die Pflanzen und das Pflanzenreich, 2 vols.), which I have the more reason to cite here inasmuch as some of the particular features of the life-process of the plant given in the following paragraphs are drawn from it.

§ 346

The process which constitutes aliveness must, just as much as it is one, unfold itself into the threefold set of processes (§§ 217–220). a) The process of formation, the inner process of the plant’s relation to itself, is, in accordance with the simple nature of the vegetative itself, at once a relation to what is external and an externalization. On the one hand it is the substantial process, the immediate transformation partly of the nutritive inflow into the specific nature of the plant species, partly of the inwardly transformed fluid (the sap of life) into structures. On the other hand, as mediation with itself, α) the process begins with a diremption directed at the same time outwards, into root and leaf, and with the inner, abstract diremption of the general cellular tissue into woody fibre and into the vessels of life, of which the former likewise relate outwards while the latter contain the inner circulation. The self-preservation which herein mediates itself with itself is β) growth as the production of new formations, diremption into the abstract relation to self, into the hardening of the wood (to the point of petrifaction in tabasheer and the like) and of the other parts, and into the bark (the enduring leaf). γ) The gathering together of self-preservation into unity is not a closing together of the individual with itself, but the production of a new plant individual, the bud.

§ 347

b) The process of formation is immediately bound up with the second, the process of specification directed outwards. The seed germinates only when stimulated from without, and the diremption of formation into root and leaf is itself a diremption into the direction towards earth and water and that towards light and air, into the absorption of water and into the assimilation of it mediated by leaf and bark as well as by light and air. The return-into-self in which assimilation concludes does not have as its result the self in inner subjective universality over against externality, does not have a self-feeling as its result. The plant is rather torn outwards by the light as by its own self external to it, and climbs towards it, ramifying into a multiplicity of individuals. Into itself it takes from the light its specific fiery character and invigoration: the aromatic quality, the spirituous character of smell and taste, the brilliance and depth of colour, the compactness and vigour of shape.

§ 348

c) But the plant also brings forth its light out of itself as its own self, in the blossom, in which the neutral green colour is for the first time determined to a specific one. The process of the genus, as the relation of the individual self to self, checks, being a return-into-self, that growth which for itself is the measureless sprouting from bud to bud. The plant, however, does not attain to the relation of individuals as such, but only to a difference whose sides are not at the same time whole individuals, do not determine the whole individuality, and which therefore comes to no more than a beginning and an intimation of the process of the genus. The germ is here to be regarded as one and the same individual, whose aliveness runs through this process and by the return-into-self has preserved itself just as it has ripened into a seed; yet on the whole this course is a superfluity, since the process of formation and of assimilation is already itself reproduction, production of new individuals.

§ 349

What has been posited in the concept, however, is that the process exhibits an individuality that has gone together with itself, and shows the parts, which at first are as individuals, to be also moments belonging to the mediation and transient within it, and thus shows the immediate singularity and the asunderness of vegetable life to be sublated. This moment of negative determination grounds the transition into the true organism, in which the external formation accords with the concept, so that the parts are essentially members and subjectivity exists as the pervading one subjectivity of the whole.

C. The Animal Organism
§ 350

Organic individuality exists as subjectivity in so far as the shape’s own externality is idealized into members, and the organism, in its process directed outwards, preserves within itself the unity possessed of self. This is animal nature, which, in the actuality and externality of immediate singularity, is equally, over against these, a self of singularity that is reflected into itself, a subjective universality that is in itself (§ 163).

§ 351

The animal has contingent self-movement, because its subjectivity, like light, which is the ideality wrested from gravity, is a free time which, being withdrawn from real externality, determines its own place out of itself according to inner contingency. Bound up with this is that the animal has voice, in that its subjectivity, as actual ideality (soul), is the mastery over the abstract ideality of time and space and exhibits its self-movement as a free trembling within itself; — it has animal warmth, as the continuing process of dissolving the cohesion and the self-subsistent subsistence of the parts within the continuing preservation of the shape; — further, intermittent intussusception, as a comportment towards an individual inorganic nature in which it individualizes itself; — but above all feeling, as the individuality that in its determinateness is immediately universal, that simply remains with itself and preserves itself: the existing ideality of being determined.

§ 352

The animal organism, as living universality, is the concept, which runs through its three determinations as syllogisms, each of which is in itself the same totality of substantial unity and at the same time, in accordance with the determination of form, the transition into the others, so that out of this process the totality results as existing; only as this self-reproducing being, not as something that merely is, does the living being exist and preserve itself; it is only in so far as it makes itself into what it is; it is an antecedent purpose which is itself only the result. — The organism is therefore to be considered a) as the individual Idea which in its process relates only to itself and closes together with itself within itself — the shape; b) as the Idea which comports itself towards its other, its inorganic nature, and posits it ideally within itself — assimilation; c) the Idea as comporting itself towards the other which is itself a living individual, and thus towards itself in the other — the process of the genus.

a. Shape
§ 353

Shape is the animal subject as a whole only in relation to itself. It exhibits within itself the concept in its developed determinations, which exist within it. These, although concrete in themselves, as in subjectivity, are α) the simple elements of the concept. The animal subject is therefore 1. its simple, universal being-within-itself in its externality, whereby the actual determinateness is immediately taken up as particularity into the universal, and the latter is in it the undivided identity of the subject with itself — sensibility; 2. particularity as excitability from without and as the counter-action directed outwards which proceeds from the receiving subject — irritability; 3. the unity of these moments, the negative return to itself out of the relation of externality, and thereby the generating and positing of itself as a singular — reproduction, the reality and foundation of the former moments.

§ 354

These three moments of the concept are β) not only concrete elements in themselves, but have their reality in three systems, the nervous, the blood and the digestive system, each of which, as a totality, differentiates itself within itself according to the same determinations of the concept. 1. The system of sensibility thus determines itself αα) into the extreme of the abstract relation of itself to itself, which is thereby a passing over into immediacy, into inorganic being and into absence of sensation, though not a having passed over into it — the osseous system, which towards what is within is an envelope, and outwardly the firm support of the inner against the outer; ββ) into the moment of irritability, the system of the brain and its further divergence into the nerves, which are equally nerves of sensation inwardly and of movement outwardly; γγ) into the system belonging to reproduction, the sympathetic nerve with the ganglia, into which falls only a dull, indeterminate and involuntary self-feeling. 2. Irritability is just as much excitability by another and the counter-action of self-preservation against it, as conversely an active self-preserving and therein a surrendering of itself to another. Its system is αα) abstract (sensible) irritability, the simple alteration of receptivity into reactivity — muscle in general, which, gaining in the skeleton its external support (immediate relation to itself for its own division), differentiates itself first into extensor and flexor muscle and then develops further into the distinctive system of the extremities. ββ) Irritability, relating itself concretely to itself for itself and in difference from others, and holding itself within itself, is activity within itself, pulsation, living self-movement, whose material can only be a fluid, the living blood, and which can only be circulation — a circulation which, specifying itself in the first instance to the particularity from which it derives, is within itself twofold and therein at the same time directed outwards: as the pulmonary and the portal system, in the former of which the blood is set on fire within itself, in the latter against another. γγ) Pulsation, as the irritable totality closing together with itself, is the circulation which returns into itself out of its centre, the heart, in the difference of arteries and veins, and which is just as much an immanent process as a universal surrendering to the reproduction of the remaining members, so that these take their nourishment from the blood. 3. The digestive system is, as the glandular system together with skin and cellular tissue, immediate, vegetative reproduction, but in the proper system of the viscera it is mediating reproduction.

§ 355

γ) But for the shape the differences of the elements and of their systems are just as much united into a universal concrete interpenetration, so that every structure of the shape contains them conjoined within it, as they themselves divide 1. into the centres of the three systems (insectum), head, thorax and abdomen, to which the extremities, serving mechanical movement and grasping, add the moment of singularity positing itself as differentiated outwards. 2. The shape differentiates itself according to the abstract difference into the two directions, inwards and outwards. To each shape there is allotted, out of each of the systems, the one side going inwards and the other going outwards, of which the latter, as the differentiated side, exhibits this difference in its own self through the symmetrical duality of its organs and members (Bichat’s “vie organique et animale”). 3. The whole, as a shape completed into a self-subsistent individual, is in this self-relating universality at the same time particularized within itself into the relation of the sexes, turned outwards into a relation with another individual. The shape, closed within itself as it is, points in its own self to its two directions outwards.

§ 356

δ. The shape, as living, is essentially process, and as such it is the abstract process, the process of formation within its own self, in which the organism makes its own members into its inorganic nature, into means, feeds upon itself and produces itself, that is, just this totality of articulation, so that each member, reciprocally purpose and means, preserves itself out of the others and over against them — the process which has simple immediate self-feeling as its result.

b. Assimilation
§ 357

The self-feeling of singularity is, however, just as immediately exclusive and strained against an inorganic nature as against its external condition and material. Since α) the animal organization in this external relation is immediately reflected into itself, this ideal comportment is the theoretical process, sensibility as an outward process, and indeed as determinate feeling, which differentiates itself into the multiplicity of senses answering to inorganic nature.

§ 358

The senses and the theoretical processes are therefore 1. the sense of the mechanical sphere — of gravity, of cohesion and its alteration, of warmth — touch as such; 2. the senses of opposition, of particularized airiness and of the likewise realized neutrality of concrete water and of the oppositions involved in the dissolution of concrete neutrality — smell and taste. 3. The sense of ideality is likewise twofold, in so far as in it, as an abstract relation to self, the particularization which cannot be wanting to it falls apart into two mutually indifferent determinations: αα) the sense of ideality as the manifestation of what is external for what is external, of light in general and, more closely, of light as it becomes determined within concrete externality, of colour; and ββ) the sense of the manifestation of inwardness, which as such makes itself known in its utterance, of sound — sight and hearing.

What has been indicated here is the way in which the threefold set of moments of the concept passes over into a numerical fivefold set; the more general reason why this transition occurs here is that the animal organism is the reduction of an inorganic nature fallen apart into asunderness into the infinite unity of subjectivity, but is at the same time within this subjectivity the developed totality of that nature, whose moments, because subjectivity is here still natural, exist in particularized form.

§ 359

β. The real process, or the practical relation to inorganic nature, begins with a diremption within itself, with the feeling of externality as the negation of the subject, which at the same time is the positive relation to itself and the certainty of that relation over against this its negation — it begins with the feeling of a lack and with the drive to sublate that lack, in which drive there appears the condition of being stimulated from without, and the negation of the subject posited therein in the manner of an object against which the subject is strained.

Only a living being feels a lack; for only it is, in nature, the concept, which is the unity of itself and of its determinate opposite. Where there is a limit, it is a negation only for a third, for an external comparison. It is a lack, however, in so far as in one and the same thing the being beyond it is equally present, the contradiction as such being immanent and posited within it. Something capable of having and of enduring the contradiction of itself within itself is the subject; this constitutes its infinity. — Even when one speaks of finite reason, reason proves itself to be infinite precisely in this, that it determines itself as finite; for negation is finitude, is a lack, only for that which is the being-sublated of finitude, the infinite relation to itself. (Cf. § 60 Remark.) — Thoughtlessness stops short at the abstraction of the limit and likewise fails to grasp the concept in life, where the concept itself steps into existence; it holds to the determinations of ordinary thinking, such as drive, instinct, need and so forth, without asking what these determinations are in themselves; an analysis of the notion of them will show that they are negations posited as contained within the affirmation of the subject itself. That, for the organism, the determination of being stimulated by external potencies has taken the place of the action of external causes is an important step towards a true conception of it. Idealism begins therein: that nothing whatever can have a positive relation to the living being whose possibility the living being does not have in and for itself, that is to say, which is not determined by the concept and thus utterly immanent in the subject. But as unphilosophical as any scientific brewing-together of determinations of reflection is the introduction of such formal and material relationships as have long passed for philosophical in the theory of excitation: for instance the wholly abstract opposition of receptivity and capacity for action, which are supposed to stand to each other as factors in an inverse ratio of magnitude, whereby every difference to be grasped within the organism has fallen into the formalism of merely quantitative diversity, of heightening and diminution, strengthening and weakening, that is to say, into the highest possible absence of concept. A theory of medicine built upon these barren determinations of the understanding is complete in half a dozen propositions, and it is no wonder that it found rapid diffusion and many adherents. The occasion for this confusion lay in the fundamental error that, once the absolute had been determined as the absolute indifference of the subjective and the objective, all determination was now to be only a quantitative difference. The absolute form, the concept, and aliveness have rather for their soul the qualitative difference alone, the difference that sublates itself in its own self, the dialectic of absolute opposition. In so far as this true infinite negativity is not recognized, one may suppose that the absolute identity of life cannot be held fast — as with Spinoza the attributes and modes occur within an external understanding — without making the difference into something merely external, belonging to reflection; whereby life lacks the punctum saliens of selfhood, the principle of self-movement, of the diremption of itself within itself as such. Further, that procedure is to be held wholly unphilosophical and crudely sensuous which put in the place of determinations of the concept nothing less than carbon and nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen, and determined the difference previously called intensive as now the more or less of the one or the other material, and the effective and positive relation of external stimuli as an adding of a material that was lacking. In an asthenia, for example, a nervous fever, nitrogen is said to have the upper hand in the organism, because the brain and the nerve generally are said to be potentiated nitrogen, since chemical analysis shows nitrogen to be the chief constituent of these organic structures; the addition of carbon is thereby indicated, in order to restore the equilibrium of these materials, that is, health. The remedies which have shown themselves empirically effective against nervous fever are for just this reason regarded as belonging to the side of carbon, and such superficial juxtaposition and opining is given out as construction and proof. — The crudity consists in this, that the utmost caput mortuum, the dead material in which chemistry has killed a life already extinct a second time, is taken for the essence of a living organ, indeed for its concept. Ignorance and disregard of the concept in general give rise to the convenient formalism of using sensuous materials such as the chemical substances, and further relationships belonging to the sphere of inorganic nature, such as the north and south polarity of magnetism or even the difference between magnetism itself and electricity, instead of determinations of the concept, and of comprehending and developing the natural universe in such a way that a schema made ready out of such material is externally pinned on to its spheres and differences. A great variety of forms is possible here, since it remains a matter of choice whether one adopts for the schema the determinations as they appear in the chemical sphere, say, oxygen, hydrogen and so forth, and transfers them to magnetism, mechanism, vegetation, animality and so on, or instead takes magnetism, electricity, the male and the female, contraction and expansion and the like — in general, whether one reaches for the oppositions of any other sphere and then employs them in the rest.

§ 360

Need is something determinate, and its determinateness is a moment of its universal concept, although particularized in infinitely manifold ways. The drive is the activity of sublating the deficiency of such determinateness, that is, of sublating its form of being at first only something subjective. Since the content of the determinateness is original, preserves itself in the activity and is only carried out by it, it is purpose (§ 204), and the drive, as occurring only in the living being, is instinct. That formal deficiency is the inner stimulation, whose determinateness, specific as regards content, appears at the same time as a relation of the animal to the particular individualizations of the spheres of nature.

The mysteriousness supposed to constitute the difficulty of grasping instinct lies solely in this, that the purpose can be grasped only as the inner concept, and that merely intellectual explanations and relationships therefore soon show themselves inadequate to instinct. The thorough determination which Aristotle grasped concerning the living being, that it is to be regarded as acting in accordance with purpose, was in more recent times almost lost, until Kant, in inner purposiveness — that the living being is to be regarded as an end in itself — reawakened this concept in his own way. What chiefly creates the difficulty here is that the relation of purpose is commonly conceived as external, and that the opinion prevails that purpose exists only in a conscious manner. Instinct is purposive activity operating in an unconscious manner.

§ 361

In so far as the need is a connection with the universal mechanism and with the abstract powers of nature, instinct is only an inner stimulation, not even a sympathetic one (as in sleeping and waking, in climatic and other migrations, and so forth). But as the relation of the animal to its own inorganic, singularized nature, instinct is determinate throughout, and in accordance with further particularity only a restricted compass of universal inorganic nature is its own. Towards this nature instinct is a practical comportment, an inner stimulation bound up with the semblance of an external one, and its activity is partly formal, partly real assimilation of inorganic nature.

§ 362

In so far as instinct is directed to formal assimilation, it impresses its own determination upon external things, gives them, as material, an external form conformable to the purpose, and lets the objectivity of these things subsist (as in the building of nests and other resting places). But it is a real process in so far as it singularizes inorganic things, or comports itself towards those already singularized, and assimilates them by consuming them and annihilating their distinctive qualities — the process with air (breathing and the process of the skin), with water (thirst) and with individualized earth, namely with particular structures of it (hunger). Life, the subject of these moments of the totality, is strained within itself as concept and into those moments as a reality external to it, and is the continuing conflict in which it overcomes this externality. Because the animal, which here comports itself as an immediate singular, is able to do this only in singular fashion according to all the determinations of singularity (this place, this time and so forth), this realization of itself is not adequate to its concept, and out of satisfaction it continually returns into the condition of need.

§ 363

The mechanical seizure of the external object is the beginning; assimilation itself is the conversion of externality into the unity possessed of self. Since the animal is subject, simple negativity, this assimilation can be neither of a mechanical nor of a chemical nature, since in those processes the materials as well as the conditions and the activity remain external to one another and lack the living absolute unity.

§ 364

Assimilation is, in the first place, because the living being is the universal power over its external nature which is opposed to it, the immediate going-together of what is inwardly taken up with animality; an infection with animality and a simple transformation (§ 34 Remark, § 346). Secondly, as mediation, assimilation is digestion, the opposing of the subject to what is external, and, according to the further difference, a process of animal water (of the gastric and pancreatic juice, of animal lymph generally) and of animal fire (of the bile, in which the being turned into itself of the organism is determined, out of the concentration it has in the spleen, into being-for-self and into active consuming) — processes which, however, are equally particularized infections.

§ 365

This engagement with what is external, the stimulation and the process itself, has, however, over against the universality and simple relation of the living being to itself, likewise the determination of externality; this engagement itself therefore properly constitutes the object and the negative over against the subjectivity of the organism, which the organism has to overcome and to digest. This inversion of the point of view is the principle of the organism’s reflection into itself; the return into self is the negation of its outwardly directed activity. It has the twofold determination that the organism, on the one hand, excretes from itself the activity it has brought into conflict with the externality of the object, and, on the other, having become for itself as immediately identical with this activity, has reproduced itself in this means. The outwardly directed process is thus transformed into the first, formal process of simple reproduction out of itself, into the closing together of the organism with itself.

The chief moment in digestion is the immediate efficacy of life as the power over its inorganic object, which it presupposes as its exciting stimulus only in so far as it is in itself identical with it, while being at the same time the ideality of it and its being-for-self. This efficacy is infection and immediate transformation. It corresponds to the immediate seizure of the object shown in the exposition of purposive activity (§ 208). — The experiments of Spallanzani and others and more recent physiology have also established empirically, and exhibited in conformity with the concept, this immediacy with which the living being, as universal and without further mediation, through its mere contact and through taking the nutriment into its warmth and sphere generally, continues itself into that nutriment — as against the conception of a merely mechanical, fictitious extracting and separating out of ready-made, usable parts, as well as against that of a chemical process. Investigations into the mediating actions, however, have not yielded any more determinate moments of this transformation (as, for example, a series of fermentations presents itself in the case of vegetable substances). On the contrary, it has been shown, for instance, that much passes into the mass of the juices from the stomach onwards without having to go through the remaining stages of mediation, that the pancreatic juice is nothing other than saliva and that the pancreas could well be dispensed with, and so forth. The final product, the chyle which the thoracic duct takes up and pours into the blood, is the same lymph which is excreted by every single viscus and organ, which is everywhere obtained by the skin and the lymphatic system in the immediate process of transformation, and which is everywhere already prepared. The lower animal organizations, which in any case are nothing but a lymph congealed into a membranous point or little tube — a simple intestinal canal — do not go beyond this immediate transformation. The mediated process of digestion in the higher animal organizations is, in respect of its distinctive product, just such a superfluity as is, in plants, their production of seed mediated by the so-called difference of sex. — The faeces show, especially in children, in whom the increase of matter is after all most conspicuous, the greater part of the nutriment frequently unaltered, mixed chiefly with animal substances, with bile, phosphorus and the like, and show as the chief effect of the organism the overcoming and removal of these its own productions. — The syllogism of the organism is not the syllogism of external purposiveness, because it does not stop at directing its activity and form against the external object, but makes into an object this very process, which on account of its externality is on the point of becoming mechanical and chemical. This comportment has been expounded as the second premiss in the universal syllogism of purposive activity (§ 209). — The organism is a going-together of itself with itself in its external process; it takes and gains from it nothing but chyle, that universal animalization of its own, and so, as the living concept existing for itself, it is just as much a disjunctive activity, which removes this process from itself, abstracts from its rage against the object, from this one-sided subjectivity, and thereby becomes for itself what it is in itself — the subjective, not neutral, identity of its concept and its reality — and thus finds the end and product of its activity to be what it already is from the beginning and originally. Through this the satisfaction is rational; the process that goes out into external difference turns round into the process of the organism with itself, and the result is not the mere bringing forth of a means but of the purpose, a closing together with itself.

§ 366

Through the process with external nature the animal gives to the certainty of itself, to its subjective concept, truth and objectivity, as a singular individual. This production of itself is thus self-preservation or reproduction; but further, in itself subjectivity, having become a product, is at the same time sublated as immediate; the concept, having thus gone together with itself, is determined as concrete universal, as genus, which enters into relation and process with the singularity of subjectivity.

c. The Process of the Genus
§ 367

The genus is in implicit simple unity with the singularity of the subject, whose concrete substance it is. But the universal is judgement, in order to become, out of this its diremption, a unity existing for itself in its own self, in order to posit itself in existence as subjective universality. This process of its closing together with itself contains the negation of the merely inward universality of the genus as well as the negation of the merely immediate singularity in which the living being, as still natural, exists; the negation of that singularity shown in the preceding process (preceding §) is only the first, only the immediate one. In this process of the genus the merely living being merely perishes, for as such it does not step beyond naturality. The moments of the process of the genus, however, since they have as their foundation a universal that is not yet subjective, not yet one subject, fall apart and exist as several particular processes which issue in modes of the death of the living being.

§ 368

In its implicit universality the genus first of all particularizes itself into species in general. The different structures and orders of animals have as their foundation the universal type of the animal determined by the concept, which nature exhibits partly in the various stages of its development, from the simplest organization up to the most complete, in which it is the instrument of spirit, and partly under the various circumstances and conditions of elemental nature. Developed into singularity, the species of the animal distinguishes itself from the others in and through itself and is for itself through their negation. Thus, in a hostile comportment which degrades others to inorganic nature, violent death is the natural destiny of individuals.

In zoology, as in the natural sciences generally, the concern has been rather to find, for subjective cognition, secure and simple marks of the classes, orders and so forth. Only since this purpose of so-called artificial systems has been more lost sight of in the cognition of animals has a larger view opened up, one directed to the objective nature of the structures themselves; among the empirical sciences there is hardly one which in recent times has gained such great extensions — not preeminently in the mass of observations, for in that no science has been wanting, but in respect of its material having worked itself towards the concept — as zoology through its auxiliary science, comparative anatomy. Just as a discerning contemplation of nature (that of the French naturalists above all) took up the division of plants into monocotyledons and dicotyledons, so it has taken up the striking difference which the absence or the presence of vertebrae makes in the animal world; the basic division of animals has in this way been led back essentially to that which Aristotle already saw. More closely, the habitus has then been made the chief matter in the individual structures, as a connection determining the construction of all the parts, so that the great founder of comparative anatomy, Cuvier, could boast of being able to recognize the essential nature of a whole animal from a single bone. In part, too, the universal type of the animal has been pursued through the various structures, however imperfect and disparate they appear, and has been recognized in the barest beginnings of indication — as also the significance of organs and functions in their intermixture — and precisely thereby has been raised above and out of particularity into its universality. — A principal side of this consideration is the recognition of how nature shapes and adapts this organism to the particular element into which it casts it, to climate, to the range of its nourishment, in general to the world in which it arises (which may also be a single genus of plant or of other animals). But for specific determination a sound instinct has hit upon taking the distinguishing determinations also from the teeth, claws and the like — from the weapons; for it is by these that the animal itself posits and preserves itself over against others as something existing for itself, that is, distinguishes itself. It is the immediacy of the Idea of life that the concept does not exist as such in life, that its determinate being therefore subjects itself to the manifold conditions and circumstances of external nature and can appear in the poorest forms; the fruitfulness of the earth lets life break out everywhere and in every manner. The animal world can still less than the other spheres of nature exhibit an inwardly independent rational system of organization, hold fast to forms determined by the concept, and preserve them against the imperfection and intermixture of conditions from confusion, stunting and transitions. — This weakness of the concept in nature generally subjects not only the formation of individuals to external contingencies — the developed animal (and man most of all) is exposed to monstrosities — but subjects the genera too entirely to the alterations of the external universal life of nature, whose changes the animal lives through with it (cf. Remark to § 392) and which for it is therefore only an alternation of health and sickness. The environment of external contingency contains almost nothing but what is alien to it; it exercises a continual violence upon its feeling and a continual threat of dangers, so that its feeling is an insecure, anxious, unhappy one.

§ 369

This first diremption of the genus into species, and the further determination of these to the immediate exclusive being-for-self of singularity, is only a negative and hostile comportment towards others. But the genus is just as essentially the affirmative relation of singularity to itself within the genus, so that, while as exclusive it is one individual over against another individual, it continues itself into this other and has feeling of itself in this other. This relation is a process which begins with need, in that the individual as singular is not adequate to the immanent genus and is at the same time the genus’s identical relation to itself in one unity; it therefore has the feeling of this lack. The genus within it is accordingly, as a tension against the inadequacy of its singular actuality, the drive to attain its self-feeling in the other of its genus, to integrate itself through union with that other, and through this mediation to close the genus together with itself and bring it into existence — copulation.

§ 370

The product is the negative identity of the differentiated singulars, and as the genus become actual it is a sexless life. But on its natural side it is this genus only in itself, distinct from the singulars whose difference has perished in it, while being itself an immediate singular, which has the determination of developing into the same natural individuality, the same difference and transience. This process of propagation thus issues in the spurious infinity of the progress. The genus preserves itself only through the perishing of the individuals, which in the process of copulation have fulfilled their determination and, in so far as they have no higher one, thereby go towards death.

§ 371

→ Groundlines § 278

In the two relations considered, the process by which the genus mediates itself with itself proceeds through its diremption into individuals and the sublating of their difference. But in so far as the genus further (§ 357) assumes the shape of external universality, of inorganic nature over against the individual, it brings itself into existence within the individual in an abstract, negative manner. In that relation of the externality of its determinate being, the single organism can just as well fail to correspond to its genus as preserve itself in it by returning into itself (§ 366). — It finds itself in the state of disease in so far as one of its systems or organs, stimulated in conflict with the inorganic potency, establishes itself for itself and persists in its particular activity against the activity of the whole, whose fluidity and whose process running through all moments is thereby checked.

§ 372

The distinctive appearance of disease is therefore that the identity of the whole organic process exhibits itself as a successive course of the movement of life through its differentiated moments, sensibility, irritability and reproduction, that is, as fever, which however, as the course of the totality against the isolated activity, is just as much the attempt at and the beginning of healing.

§ 373

The remedy stimulates the organism to sublate the particular excitation in which the formal activity of the whole is fixed, and to restore the fluidity of the particular organ or system within the whole. The remedy effects this by being a stimulus, but one difficult to assimilate and to overcome, so that something external is thereby offered to the organism against which it is compelled to summon up its strength. Directing itself against something external, the organism steps out of the restrictedness which had become identical with it, in which it was entangled and against which it cannot react in so far as that restrictedness is not an object for it.

The chief point of view under which remedies must be considered is that they are something indigestible. But the determination of indigestibility is relative, yet not in the indeterminate sense that only what weaker constitutions can tolerate is called easily digestible; such things are rather indigestible for the more vigorous individuality. The immanent relativity of the concept, which has its actuality in life, is of a qualitative nature and consists — expressed in quantitative terms, in so far as these hold here — in a homogeneity which is the higher, the more self-subsistent in themselves the opposed terms are. For the lower animal structures, which have arrived at no difference within themselves, only the neutral substance devoid of individuality, water (as for the plant), is digestible; for children what is digestible is partly the wholly homogeneous animal lymph, mother’s milk, something already digested or rather only immediately and generally transformed into animality and not further differentiated within itself — and partly, among differentiated substances, those that have least ripened into individuality. Substances of this kind are, on the contrary, indigestible for natures that have grown strong. For these, on the other hand, animal substances, as what is individualized, or those vegetable juices which the light has ripened into a more vigorous self and which are therefore called spirituous, are more digestible than, for example, those vegetable productions which still stand within the neutral colour, and nearer to chemism proper. Through their more intensive selfhood those substances constitute an all the stronger opposition; but precisely thereby they are more homogeneous stimuli. — Remedies are to this extent negative stimuli, poisons; something exciting and at the same time indigestible is offered to the organism that has become estranged from itself in disease, as something alien and external to it, against which it must gather itself together and enter into a process by which it may again attain to self-feeling and to its subjectivity. — Empty a formalism as Brownianism was, if it was to be the whole system of medicine, and if the determination of diseases was reduced to sthenia and asthenia, and perhaps further to direct and indirect asthenia, and the efficacy of remedies to strengthening and weakening, and if these differences were further reduced to carbon and nitrogen together with oxygen and hydrogen, or to the magnetic, electrical and chemical moment and the like — formulas supposed to make it a philosophy of nature — it has nonetheless surely contributed to widening the view beyond the merely particular and specific, in the case of diseases as of remedies, and to recognizing in both the universal rather as the essential. Through its opposition to the previous, on the whole more asthenizing method, it has also become apparent that the organism reacts to the most opposed kind of treatment not in a correspondingly opposed way, but frequently in a way that is at least the same in its final results and therefore universal, and that its simple identity with itself proves itself to be the substantial and truly effective activity against a particular entanglement of single systems of it in specific stimuli. — Universal as the determinations put forward in this § and in the Remark are, and therefore inadequate in comparison with the manifold phenomena of disease, it is only the firm foundation of the concept that is able both to lead through the particular and, above all, to make intelligible what appears extravagant and bizarre, in the phenomena of disease as in modes of healing, to a habit of mind sunk in the externalities of the specific.

§ 374

In disease the animal is entangled with an inorganic potency and is held fast in one of its particular systems or organs against the unity of its aliveness. Its organism, as determinate being, has a quantitative strength, and is capable of overcoming this division within itself, but equally of succumbing to it and of having therein a mode of its death. In general, the overcoming and passing away of a single inadequacy does not sublate the universal inadequacy which the individual has in this, that its Idea is the immediate one, that as animal it stands within nature, and that its subjectivity is the concept only in itself and not for itself. The inner universality therefore remains, over against the natural singularity of the living being, the negative power from which it suffers violence and perishes, because its determinate being as such does not itself have this universality within it and thus is not the reality corresponding to it.

§ 375

The universality in accordance with which the animal as a singular is a finite existence shows itself within it as the abstract power in the issue of the process, itself abstract, which goes on within it (§ 356). Its inadequacy to universality is its original disease and the innate germ of death. The sublating of this inadequacy is itself the carrying out of this destiny. The individual sublates it by impressing its singularity upon universality; but since universality is abstract and immediate, it thereby attains only an abstract objectivity, in which its activity has become blunted and ossified and life has become a processless habit, so that it kills itself out of its own self.

§ 376

But this attained identity with the universal is the sublating of the formal opposition of the immediate singularity and the universality of individuality, and this is only the one, and indeed the abstract, side — the death of what is natural. Subjectivity, however, is in the Idea of life the concept; it is thus in itself the absolute being-within-itself of actuality and the concrete universality; through the sublating of the immediacy of its reality shown above, it has gone together with itself; the last being-outside-itself of nature is sublated, and the concept, which in nature is only in itself, has thereby become for itself. — Nature has thereby passed over into its truth, into the subjectivity of the concept, whose objectivity is itself the sublated immediacy of singularity, the concrete universality, so that the concept is posited which has the reality corresponding to it, the concept, for its determinate being — spirit.

DE