Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Moss, Gregory S.

Titel

Relativizing the Absolute: Empiricism, Judgment, and Inference

Ist Teil von

• Hegel’s Foundation Free Metaphysics, 2020, p.445-481

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Are empirical determinations concepts? Hegel’s answer can be gleaned from the following passage: With respect to completeness [Vollständigkeit], we have just seen that the determinate moment of particularity is complete in the difference of the universal and the particular, and that only these two make up the particular species. To be sure, there are more than two species to be found in any genus in nature, and these many species cannot stand in the same relation to each other as we have shown. This is the impotence of nature [Ohnmacht der Natur], that it cannot abide by and exhibit the rigor [Strenge] of the concept and loses itself in a blind manifoldness void of concept. We can wonder at nature, at the manifoldness of its genera and species, in the infinite diversity of its shapes, for wonder is without concept and its object is the irrational. It is allowed to nature, since nature is the self-externality of the concept, to indulge in this diversity [Verschiedenheit], just as spirit, even though it possesses the concept in the shape of concept, lets itself go into pictorial representation and runs wild in the infinite manifoldness of the latter. The manifold genera and species of nature must not be esteemed to be anything more than arbitrary notions of spirit engaged in pictorial representations [Vorstellen]. Both indeed show traces and intimations of the concept, but they do not exhibit it in trustworthy copy, for they are the sides of its free self-externality; the concept is the absolute power precisely because it can let its difference go free in the shape of self-subsistent diversity, external necessity, accidentality, arbitrariness, opinion [selbständiger Verschiedenheit, äußerlicher Notwendigkeit, Zufälligkeit, Willkür, Meinung],—all of which however, must not be taken as anything more than the abstract side of nothingness. 1