The Problem of Nature’s Spurious Infinite within the Register of Animal Life

Moving to Hegel’s writings on “Organics”, this chapter develops an acute sense of the paradoxical implications that follow from the fundamental exteriority and indeterminacy characteristic of Hegelian nature. Concentrating on Hegel’s writings on animal life, the chapter reveals that the organism’s self-referential structure is consistently given over to various forms of external determination that analogically reflect the externality permeating the categories of space and time. This collapse into exteriority proves dangerous to the interiority constituting organic life. By extension, such collapse is dangerous to the animal organism’s status as one of the primary upsurges of freedom within the matrices of material nature. The upshot of Hegel’s account of organic life is revealingly significant: nature’s exteriority and indeterminacy function as crucial preconditions for the emergence of freedom within nature and yet they also serve to perpetually threaten the very reality of that same freedom. This paradoxical tension constitutes a fundamental problem which the remainder of the monograph seeks to systematically explore, both in terms of Hegel’s anthropology and political philosophy.