Guest lecture by Myriam Gerhard (June 29th, 2016): The Nature as Man's Oldest Riddle. Hegel – a Critical Philosopher of Nature?

On June 29^th, 2016, Myriam Gerhard gave a guest speech. She lectures in philosophy at the Carl von Ossietzky Universität in Oldenburg and is the new chairwoman of the International Hegel-Society (Internationale Hegel-Gesellschaft). Her speech shed light on the problem of Hegel's passage from logic to Realphilosophie from different perspectives. The question on how the passage from the absolute idea to nature should be conceived of calls into question especially the status of nature in Hegel's philosophy as such.

First, Gerhard discussed to what extent reason (Vernunft) is real and reality reasonable. This goes hand in hand with the question whether reason is limited or whether it ultimately always just deals with itself, in which case nature would not be endowed with autonomy. The second section revolved around the question to what extent freedom acts as the hinge between logic and Realphilosophie. Because, in contrast to other passages of the Logic, at the passage from the idea to nature the absolute idea dismisses itself freely from and out of itself, but still rests in itself. The third part on the “riddle of nature” established that nature nevertheless remained the opposite of the concept (Begriff) and that its contingency could not be entirely assimilated to logic.

The discussion revolved around the questions whether Hegel only transposed Kant's distinction between the ground of knowledge and the ground of existence onto the passage from logic to Realphilosophie and thus his system somehow contained a Critique of Pure Reason; and whether the passage from logic to nature was already implicitly contained inner-logically and therefore the logicity of nature consisted in nature's not being entirely “logifiable”.