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2012, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Special Issue: Life and Ontology
Although Hegel's absolute idealism is often presented as solipsistically self-grounding, the Realphilosophie offers us an another image of Hegel that not only challenges standard interpretations but, more importantly, gives us valuable resources to rethink living being. The zero-level determinacy (Bestimmtheit) of nature as “the idea in its otherness” has two important consequences. First, the starting point of any philosophy of nature must be a realism insofar as nature's material constitution shows itself as non-thought-like. Second, if idealism is to be viable, it must be able to show how nature becomes idea through her own immanent auto-movement. Taking as my guide the category of “trembling” (Erzittern) and exploring its intimate connection with the emergent ideality of bodies producing sound, the chemical process, and the voice of animals, I aim to show how the Realphilosophie is a reconstruction of the painful odyssey of the material genesis of the autopoietic self-referentiality of the concept as it is paradoxically begotten by a self-caused immaculate conception in the pure extimacy of nature. Rather than being a naturephilosophical theory of material being as an implicit, self-unfolding productivity that leads to life via an intrinsic teleology, the dialectics of nature is an account of the contingent emergence of unpredictable kinds of ontological determinacies from within the immanent field of mechanical nature. Only a naturalised idealism/idealised naturalism is capable of arguing for the ontological irreducibility of living being while simultaneously articulating the latter's dependence upon different empirical-material domains which form its ontogenetic ground, thereby avoiding both eliminative materialism and naïve vitalism.
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