Hegel and Ecologically Oriented System Theory

Introduction Hegel like Goethe and many thinkers of the Romantic period describes numerous systems as "organisms," "organic wholes," "living wholes," etc. Among these are the discipline of the history of philosophy, which he considers an "organic developing whole," (1) the discipline of physics, which also is "organic whole," not a simple "aggregate," (2) the "organism of the state," (3) and even geological nature, which he refers to as "the primary organism." (4) In various contexts he also speaks of the "living development" of the Idea or of Mind. (5) In all of these cases, one may wonder whether Hegel is simply using a popular metaphor of his time, as Rolf-Peter Hostmann argues, (6) or whether he intends to define systems more concretely. While I will argue that Hegel in fact understands these "organisms," "living wholes," and so on more strictly in accord with a definition of the living being, which he outlines in the Science of the Logic, in the end a serious metaphor can do much the same work. In any case, where Hegel refers to a system as organic without making some further qualifications, he appears to be pretty strictly characterizing it in accordance with the view of the organism laid out in his works on logic. Accepting Kant's view, in these texts he describes an organic system as a whole in which the parts and whole are reciprocally means and ends. (7) Here Hegel's basic view of organic systems will be described, and it will be shown that, in expanding on Kant's view of the organism in the Encyclopedia treatment of the logic, Hegel characterizes an organic system in accord with findings of the early nineteenth century life sciences in ways that anticipate many ideas developed not only by early general systems theory but also by later system thinkers. In this article similarities between Hegel and systems theoreticians will be pointed out, especially with a concentration on the ecologically oriented theoreticians. In the last section of the paper some key differences between their views will be noted. Hegel on Organic Systems The task in Hegel's logic is to describe the basic categories of human thinking, much in line with Kant's project. In Hegel's case, these are of course also the categories of the Absolute. Hegel lays out a philosophically reflective view of an "organism" in the logic, specifically in the section on "Life." Here Hegel is describing the formal character of Idea, i.e., the network of basic concepts that structure thought that he has been describing in the logic up to this point, the final section of the book. The "unmediated Idea" has been described as "Life." Now he says that as objective--thus mediated--it is an organism. This objectivity of the living being is the organism; it is the means and instrument of the end, perfect in its purposiveness since the Notion constitutes its substance; but for that very reason this means and instrument is itself the realized end, in which the subjective end is thus immediately brought into unity with itself. In respect of its externality the organism is a manifold, not of parts but of members. (8) Here Hegel does three things: (1) He includes the living being as a constitutive Idea in the logic while (2) explicating the concept and (3) arguing that it is the thought determination that allows us to make clearest sense of our basic conceptual scheme, the Idea in its formal nature. That scheme, like other organic systems, is a whole with interrelated specific concepts as its parts. Hegel describes the Idea as an interdependent connected whole, constituted by the very concepts that he has laid out in the logic. He is also addressing perhaps his fundamental concern with the Kantian project. Reason, he is telling us, is not just unified under a regulative idea, as Kant had maintained in his description of the architectonic of reason. (9) The unity of reason is constitutive of reality. …