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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.

This chapter intensifies the problem of the animal organism’s over-determination by external variables. The chapter concentrates on Hegel’s analyses of eating, sex, violence, sickness and, ultimately, death. These phenomena exemplify how the animal organism is perpetually given over to external circumstances that threaten its self-perpetuating activity. Taken together they indicate, for Hegel, the truth of organic life: it must die. Organic life must prove a necessary yet insufficient condition for the life of conceptuality proper. In other words, the life of spirit requires embodiment and more. Conceptuality can only come into a robust self-relation in something that is, simultaneously, anticipatorily grounded in nature and yet, irreducible to those grounds. The space in which such self-mediation occurs is what Hegel refers to as the life of spirit (Geist). The self-grounding system of thought proper does not find sufficient existence in the natural world because the radical exteriority of the latter is hostile to the auto-dictates of conceptuality, its self-grounding basis. The chapter concludes with a question: what must this ‘monstrous’ conception of nature mean for human culture, specifically finite subjectivity and socio-political freedom?

This chapter considers the sentimental attachments that Russians claim to feel for their dachas and for the countryside more generally, which take the form of nostalgic reminiscences and encapsulate a larger and more contentious set of debates about the nature and direction of the past, present, and future in today's Russia. The unpleasant reality faced by many dachniki is that there may come a day when they must dispose of their dacha property. Narratives about change and transformation cohere around mythologies of “disappearing dachniki.” Dachniki did not deny that change could bring tremendous improvements in their lifestyles at the dacha, even though they might grumble about the change. The challenges of authenticity facing dachniki are then reported. Nostalgia is both a commentary on social change and a form of social change itself, just as the organic life is as much a state of mind as it is a lifestyle.

This chapter examines Nigel Walmsley's space odyssey in In the Ocean of Night and Across the Sea of Suns, which span the dates from 1999 to 2061. By the end of the first novel, Nigel has discovered a cosmic struggle between machine intelligence and organic life that will soon engulf Earth. Through several contacts with alien artifacts and entities that had come to Earth in both prehistoric and recent times, he predicts the coming of the machines. In Across the Sea of Suns, Nigel does battle with the machines with the help of organic life forms he finds on the moon of a planet in distant Epsilon Eridani. In the process, he reaffirms what he had earlier discovered on Earth: that, in the evolutionary sense, the boundary between machine and organism is not clear cut. The stamp of Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey is clearly on both In the Ocean of Night and Across the Sea of Suns. The chapter analyzes the two novels in order to understand how Gregory Benford launched his space epic.

This chapter examines the conceptualization of life as formative form around 1800. Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment is the first book in the German tradition to articulate the new dynamic notion of life as a convergence of mind and nature. For Kant, aesthetic experience is important because it involves an intensification of the life of the mind (including the social dimension of mind as sensus communis) and enables us to develop a regulative notion of organic life. Kant's claim is that to understand the peculiar organization of natural beings, we must view them as products of an intrinsic formative activity, and hence as in some way analogous to the mind's power of cognitive and perceptual synthesis, which we experience most vividly in our encounter with beauty. Aesthetic experience allows us to grasp the nature of human, or symbolic, life and its place within the natural world.

This chapter shows through an extended example how organic life and activity enjoy finality and sense. Ruyer further discusses the locus of instinct between organic activity and intelligent finalist activity.