Hegel and Heidegger on Nature

In Hegel and Heidegger On Nature and World, Raoni Padui explains why these philosophers reject naturalism, subjective idealism, and dualism in their conjunction with nature and the world. Hegel and Heidegger are holistic thinkers of Platonic and Aristotelian thought, which alters how they view the natural world; this classical way of thinking becomes detrimental as the philosophers “are satisfied with the various forms taken by the modern dichotomy, nor to the reduction of each domain to the other, and seek to incorporate nature into their philosophies while responding to the modern revolution in the concept of nature proposed by the natural sciences.” The essence of philosophy, to Hegel and Heidegger, is the automatic necessity to include nature in every part of life. Rectification between nature and the world is plausible, but it projects its limits once ambiguity arises, primarily from a human’s conscious, intelligibility to fully comprehend the natural world.

Hegel wholeheartedly argued for a human’s ability to live in two worlds, not universes, at once. The first world, nature, “determines materially, sensibly, and naturally, and another that pulls the human beyond these material conditions toward the domains of thinking, meaning, and freedom.” To Hegel, he calls this notion the amphibian condition. Hegel says, “spiritual culture, the modern intellect, produces this opposition in man which makes him an amphibious animal, because he now has to live in two worlds which contradict one another.” The other world is “portrayed by Hegel as the domain in which the human attempts to transcend these natural conditions and strives to be a free and thinking being.” Man intends to hypothetically raise himself up to eternal ideas, which is intellectual thought, to another realm of the world’s “enlivened and flowering reality and dissolves it into abstractions.” A human’s inherent intellectualism occurs when various levels of intelligibility are activated “within nature and within spirit, or Geist.” Padui says, “Hegel attempts to mediate between the realm of nature and the realm of spirit by arguing for their unity and distinctness, and by mediating between the teleology found in nature and the historical teleology of freedom that is the work of spirit.” Nature has the ability to be separated into various categories of intelligibility. These “spheres” can be measured by “negative self-relation,” a central counterpart to how mankind can seek reconciliation with nature through inward determination and intentionality to produce a relationship with the outside world.

On the other hand, Heidegger refers to the Greek’s interaction with nature’s detachment among members of society, a direct contradiction of Hegel’s view. Heidegger “therefore seeks a different comportment to the concept of nature in the history of metaphysics.” Thus, both philosophers, in Padui’s terms, present a problem within the confines of nature— that the world does not feel comfortably inhabitable if we do not treat it as such. Heidegger’s uncomfortableness with nature helps readers realize “the struggle in his engagements with the concepts of worldliness, life, animality, and a brief supplementary project to fundamental ontology that he called metontology.”

Through studying metaphysics, Padui says that Heidegger believed withdrawing from nature would produce an intelligible encounter, or what the Romantics in the nineteenth century believed one should not act upon. Heidegger primarily escapes from nature due to its complexity, which scares him. Padui writes, “for Heidegger, a stone is without the world because it does not relate to entities as entities, it does not have. Meaningful relationship to its environment and to the events and occurrences that happen to it.” Heidegger’s fear is exemplified through a stone. He can see the stone on the ground, it is an entity, but it is not a proper noun for it shows relationship to the earth— it is only there in the present. The earth is touching it, though the stone is not touching the earth. Regardless of the stone’s placement, it has no world. Heidegger’s understanding is that any object in nature has no world; so sitting in nature is not satisfyingly pleasant if there is no world to enjoy (flowers, rivers, or stones, etc.).

“If Hegel is correct,” Padui summarizes, “in his assessment, it ought to continue to have a strong relationship to the natural sciences and to the direct empirical investigations of nature found therein. But if Heidegger’s assessment of the natural sciences as implicated in the modern spirit of the manipulation and exploration of nature is to be believed, then this relationship must be thoroughly rethought from the ground up.” Padui’s argument neither proves nor disproves Hegel’s or Heidegger’s perspective thought processes. However, he instills in readers the idea that man must be in nature to survive emotionally and mentally. Nature is “a domain in which the human attempts to transcend these natural conditions and strives to be a free and thinking being. On the opposite side, separating oneself from nature will ultimately become problematic, causing “man to be imprisoned in the common world of reality and earthly temporality, born down by need and poverty, hard pressed and carried away by natural impulses and passions.”

Hegel and Heidegger On Nature and World
By Raoni Padui
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023; 280pp

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