[Natural Science and Philosophy]¶
Core Argument¶
Natural Science and Philosophy¶
The chapter examines the fraught relationship between natural science and philosophy in the mid-nineteenth century, arguing that German philosophy’s decline into shallow materialism during the 1850s and 1860s reflected the broader degradation of bourgeois Germany. Thinkers such as Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner, emboldened by Darwinism, abused philosophy by presumptuously applying natural theories to society and socialism, producing what the text dismisses as materialist nonsense.
The core argument contrasts two opposing philosophical tendencies: the metaphysical method, which operates with fixed, rigid categories, and the dialectical method, which grasps categories as fluid and interconnected. In Hegel, dialectics remained mystical because categories appeared as pre-existing entities; in reality, the dialectics of the mind reflects the motion of the real world. Natural scientists managed adequately with old metaphysics while working within mechanics, but the development of higher mathematics, chemistry, physiology—particularly the discovery of the cell—and the convertibility of natural forces progressively undermined fixed categories. Dialectics, stripped of its mystical shell, has become an absolute necessity for natural science.
The text advances a polemical claim: philosophy takes revenge on science for deserting it. Thinkers such as Leibniz, Kant, Oken, and Hegel achieved more in natural science than the materialist nonsense that followed. The chapter criticises Büchner’s social Darwinism, Haeckel’s confusion of causality, and the false separation of force and matter. Natural scientists who ignore philosophy become enslaved by its worst relics; only when science is imbued with dialectics will philosophical rubbish disappear into positive science.
A notable clarification concerns Haeckel’s misreading of Kant’s Critique of the Teleological Faculty of Judgement. Haeckel reduces teleology to a doctrine of external aims and external expediency, opposing it to Kant’s mechanical methods. Hegel, by contrast, foregrounds Kant’s concept of “inner expediency,” wherein in organic beings “everything is purpose and reciprocally also means.” A footnote distinguishes between the old meaning of “metaphysics” as philosophical thought in general—the sense used by Newton—and its modern meaning, which refers to the metaphysical method of thought. The chapter draws on Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, using the 1841 edition of Hegel’s Werke, Volume V.