HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE IS INCORRECT

HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE IS INCORRECT

1. HEGEL HAS NO COHERENT PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE

Frederick Engels, socialist philosopher and economist, LUDWIG FEURBACH AND THE END OF CLASSICAL GERMAN PHILOSOPHY, 1969, p. 25

We have the less reason to reproach the philosophers of the eighteenth century on this account since the same thing is found in Hegel, According to him, nature, as a mere ‘alienation’ of the idea, is incapable of development in time--capable only extending its manifoldness in space, so that it displays simultaneously and alongside of one another all the stages of development comprised in it.

This absurdity of development in space but outside of time--the fundamental condition of all development-­Hegel imposes upon nature just at the very time when geology, embryology, the physiology of plants and animals, and organic chemistry were being built up, and when everywhere the basis of these new sciences brilliant forshadowings of the later theory of evolution were appearing. But the system demanded it; hence the method, for the sake of the system, had to become unn~ue to itself.

MARTIN HEIDEGGER

GERMAN PHILOSOPHER (1889-1976)

Occasionally we are reminded that small questions can become “big”; we think of political issues and then find ourselves thinking of human nature itself. An everyday discussion about some ethical issue suddenly turns into an argument about the existence of divine beings who issue moral commandments. Even a minor scientific disagreement might evolve into a difference of opinion over the underlying, metaphysical “substances” of time and space. We then see that each question involves infinite questions of a deeper and deeper sort.

Martin Heidegger set out to show that all questions are offshoots of the Question, with a capital “Q,” of Being, with a capital “B,” or of existence itself. Although some of the personal paths of his life demonstrate that too much ponderance of big questions can often blind us to small but important everyday details, Heidegger re-awakened the Twentieth Century to concepts and wonders Western philosophy had ignored since shortly after the decline of Ancient Greece. Underlying his “investigation of Being” was a fear that humanity had lost itself in answers and had forgotten the sacred meaning of how to question.

Life And Work

Martin Heidegger was born in Messkirch, near the Rhine, on September 26, 1889. He never aspired to be anything but a thinker. Like many German philosophers, this path to a career of thinking began through theology, and he began his theological studies at the University of Freiburg. Two events altered the course of his studies. First, he read the poet Holderlin, whose works reflected the Germans’ 19th Century obsession with mystical self-definition and power. Second, in 1907 a local pastor gave seventeen year-old Heidegger a difficult but stimulating book by Franz Brentano entitled On the Manifold Meaning of Being According to Aristotle

Aristotle had explored the various meanings of existence itself: being versus non-being, the being of objects, the being of thinking subjects, the general existence of everything and its relation to specific entities which exist. Heidegger realized that his fascination with the book reflected the same emotions he held for Holderlin’s poetry: the image of human beings looking out into infinity and questioning not only who they were, but what sorts of beings they must be in order to question who they were. Although it would be some years before he would have the opportunity to explore these questions fully, the seeds of existential yearning had been planted.
Heidegger began teaching in 1916 and was married in 1917. In 1922, he received a post at the University of Marburg and began lecturing in both philosophy and mathematics. His lectures urged students to go deeper than their textbooks and their lists and their logical games, to peer into the void where nothing was known. He argued that it was always destructive to thinking when people became comfortable with their answers, and that even the most self-confident systems of thought were often precarious.
In 1927, Heidegger published his “masterpiece” which had been forced into publication in order to advance his career. But even though it was incomplete, Being and Time changed the face of Western philosophy in the 20th Century. While Nietzsche had raised vague questions about what humans were, Heidegger in Being and Time systematically laid out every human possibility and traced the paths of consciousness in an eerily intimate fashion, influenced by the radically personal philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard as well as the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.
Kierkegaard wrote about how the lone individual might rebel against the tyranny of public opinion and average everyday-ness through Christian “leaps of faith.” Husserl had developed ‘phenomenology” as a method of the philosophical investigation of data and experience in themselves, without prior reference to broad-based theoretical constructs. Heidegger combined these two ideas to develop an “existential analytic”

in ~ which took the lone individual as a starting point and investigated human attitudes and how they were shaped by other people, the anticipation of death, the tension between the private and public realms, and so on.

The book instantly made Heidegger the most famous and notorious European philosopher of his time. A year after its publication, Heidegger replaced his teacher Edmund Husserl as chair of philosophy at Freiburg. In 1933, he was appointed director of the University. But this appointment would prove more costly than anyone imagined, for it was accompanied by the consolidation of power in Germany by Hitler’s Nazis, who influenced the appointment of Heidegger because they saw him as pro-nationalist and because, unlike many of his colleagues, he was not a Jew.
Perhaps innocently, perhaps pragmatically, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. But a year later, be resigned his directorship and within months he was criticizing the Nazis. While the Second World War was winding down, the Nazis retaliated against Heidegger’s lack of loyalty by sending him to the front to dig trenches (he was over fifty years old), and after the Allied victory, Heidegger’s Nazi membership earned him a sanction against teaching or publishing for a period of five years. He would never publicly discuss his political life thereafter, and sought to distance himself as much as possible from political issues. Although many people have criticized or defended his life, he himself saw silence as the only appropriate response.
For the rest of his career, Heidegger devoted his thinking to thinking itself. Perhaps also a hidden critique of Nazism and other forms of totalitarian thinking, he felt that the obsession with “systematic” and “technological” thinking, which groups and categorizes things according to various “isms~~ and formulas, obscured more “pure” and meditative forms of thought which opened the way to a clearer understanding of existence. His post-war work was characterized by a gentle and provocative, open-ended style which increased his reputation as a founder of existentialism, which he himself had sworn off as early as 1948.
On May 26, 1976, Martin Heidegger died, the most important thinker of the 20th Century. He was buried in the graveyard he had passed every day as a schoolboy. Philosophers with familiar and controversial names like Derrida, Levinas, Gadamer, Fish, Sartre, and Marcuse all began their work in response to the issues raised by this rural German gentleman whose questions were more important than his answers.

Directory: uploads
uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10
uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers
uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It?
uploads -> For want of a nail
uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models
uploads -> Police Militarization
uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016
uploads -> Township of winfield
uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014
uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now!

Download 5.81 Mb.

Share with your friends: