Abstract

I show that the fundamental conceptual and ontological categories of mechanism that were established in the seventeenth century continue to serve as theoretical underpinnings in modern biological thinking, for philosophers as well as scientists. In particular, a tacit reliance upon mechanistic categories can be seen in many who regard themselves as having gone beyond mechanism in their conceptualization of life. I show that the reason for this inadvertent reliance is that these very categories have not been made explicit or thoroughly thought through as such. Hegel's contribution in the Science of Logic is precisely that they are made explicit. Whereas many criticisms of mechanistic reduction are carried out by opposing to it an account that is said to be more ontologically, definitionally, or empirically adequate, Hegel shows that these mechanistic categories are self-undermining in their own terms. Furthermore, the Logic shows that rendering them explicit necessarily entails their own supersession or negation in such a way that they develop into categories that are appropriate to living process, both ontologically and conceptually. For this reason, mechanistic categories do not remain fixed determinations, and so cannot provide a basis for the conceptualization of life. For this reason also, the categories appropriate to life are rigorously irreducible to mechanism. I further show the ethical implications of this thesis--specifically, that the idea of life articulated in the Logic provides a powerful justification for the preservation of species and their ecosystems, a justification much sought after by many environmentalists but hard to come by, I argue, without something like Hegel's systematic derivation of categories