The mechanistic theories that dominated science for two centuries after Newton were first seriously challenged in the field of biology by the revolutionary discoveries of Charles Darwin. Darwin’s theory of evolution showed that life could originate and develop without the need for Divine intervention, on the basis of the laws of nature. At the end of the 19th century the idea of the “arrow of time” was put forward by Ludwig Boltzmann in the second law of thermodynamics. This striking image no longer presents time as a never-ending cycle, but as an arrow moving in a single direction. These theories assume that time is real and that the universe is in a continual process of change, as old Heraclitus had foreseen.

Almost half a century before Darwin’s epoch-making work, Hegel had anticipated not only him, but many other discoveries of modern science. Boldly challenging the assumption of the prevailing Newtonian mechanics, Hegel advanced a dynamic view of the world, based on processes and change through contradiction. The brilliant anticipations of Heraclitus were transformed by Hegel into a completely elaborated system of dialectical thought. There is no doubt that, had Hegel been taken more seriously, the process of science would have advanced far more rapidly than it did.

The greatness of Einstein was to get beyond these abstractions and reveal their relative character. The relative aspect of time was, however, not new. It was thoroughly analysed by Hegel. In his early work The Phenomenology of Mind, he explains the relative content of words like “here” and “now”. These ideas which seem quite simple and straightforward turn out to be very complex and contradictory.

To the question, what is the Now? we reply, for example, the Now is night-time. To test the truth of this certainty of sense, a simple experiment is all we need: write that truth down. A truth cannot lose anything by being written down, and just as little by our preserving and keeping it. If we look again at the truth we have written down, look at it now, at his noon-time, we shall have to say it has turned stale and become out of date.[31]

It is a very simple matter to dismiss Hegel (or Engels) because their writings on science were necessarily limited by the actual state of science of the day. What is remarkable, however, is how advanced Hegel’s views on science actually were. In their book Order out of Chaos, Prigogine and Stengers point out that Hegel rejected the mechanistic method of classical Newtonian physics, at a time when Newton’s ideas were universally sacrosanct:

The Hegelian philosophy of nature systematically incorporates all that is denied by Newtonian science. In particular, it rests on the qualitative difference between the simple behaviour described by mechanics and the behaviour of more complex entities such as living beings. It denies the possibility of reducing those levels, rejecting the idea that differences are merely apparent and that nature is basically homogeneous and simple. It affirms the existence of a hierarchy, each level of which presupposes the preceding ones.[32]

Hegel wrote scornfully about the allegedly absolute truths of Newtonian mechanics. He was the first one to subject the mechanistic approach of the 18th century to a thorough criticism, although the limitations of the science of his day did not allow him to put forward a worked-out alternative. For Hegel, every finite thing was mediated, that is, relative to something else. Moreover, this relationship was not merely a formal juxtaposition, but a living process: everything was limited, conditioned and determined by everything else. Thus, cause and effect only hold good in relation to isolated relations (such as we find in classical mechanics), but not if we regard things as processes, in which everything is the result of universal interrelations and interactions.

Time is the form of existence of matter. Mathematics and formal logic cannot really deal with time, but treat it merely as a quantitative relation. Now there is no doubt about the importance of quantitative relations for understanding reality, since every finite thing can be approached from a quantitative point of view. Without a grasp of quantitative relationships, science would be impossible. But in and of themselves they cannot adequately express the complexity of life and movement, the restless process of change in which gradual, smooth developments suddenly give rise to chaotic transformations.

Purely quantitative relations, to use Hegel’s terminology, present the real processes of nature “only in an arrested paralysed form.”[33] The universe is an infinite, self-moving whole, which is self-establishing and contains life within itself. Movement is a contradictory phenomenon, containing both positive and negative. This is one of the fundamental propositions of dialectics, which are closer to the real nature of things than the axioms of classical mathematics.

Only in classical geometry is it possible to conceive of completely empty space. It is yet another mathematical abstraction, which plays an important role, but only approximately represents reality. Geometry essentially compares different spatial magnitudes. Contrary to what Kant believed, the abstractions of mathematics are not “a priori” and inborn, but derived from observations of the material world. Hegel shows that the Greeks had already understood the limitedness of purely quantitative descriptions of nature, and comments:

How much further had they progressed in thought than those who in our day, when some put in the place of determinations of thought number and determinations of numbers (like powers), next the infinitely great and the infinitely small, one divided by infinity, and other such determinations, which often are a perverted mathematical formalism, take the return to this impotent childishness for something praiseworthy and even for something thorough and profound.[34]

These lines are even more appropriate today than when they were written. It really is incredible when certain cosmologists and mathematicians make the most preposterous claims about the nature of the universe without the slightest attempt to prove them on the basis of observed facts, and then appeal to the alleged beauty and simplicity of their equations as the final authority. The cult of mathematics is greater today than at any time since Pythagoras who thought that “all things are Number”. And, as with Pythagoras, there are similarly mystical overtones. Mathematics leaves aside all qualitative determinations except number. It ignores the real content, and applies its rules externally to things. None of these abstractions have real existence. Only the material world exists. This fact is all too frequently overlooked with disastrous results.

  1. Hegel, G. The Phenomenology of Mind, p. 151.

  2. Prigogine, I. and Stengers, I. op. cit., p. 89.

  3. Hegel, G. The Phenomenology of Mind, p. 104.

  4. Hegel, G. Science of Logic, Vol. 1, p. 229.