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EIGHT HEGEL, DELEUZE, AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE ORGANISM INTRODUCTION In the previous chapter, we looked at some of the criticisms that Deleuze levels at Hegel’s logic. It became clear that we could not determine which ontological approach to follow simply by looking at possible incoherencies in their different logical systems. In order to provide a more definite appraisal of the merits of Hegel and Deleuze’s logics, we need to look at how these logics describe actual features of the world. In this final chapter, I therefore want to look at another area of their philosophies, namely, their accounts of the structure of the organism. As we shall see, for both Hegel and Deleuze, the organism embodies the key notions of their respective philosophies. Thus, for Hegel, the animal organism will embody the good infinite, consisting of parts that cannot exist except in a teleological relation to the whole. A similar relationship will be formed between the individual organism and the species. Deleuze likewise takes the organism to be the expression of the Idea and understands the species to be a transcendental illusion. The focus of this chapter will be the question of evolution, or more particularly, the compatibility of Hegel’s conception of the organism with evolutionary theory. I argue that according to various comments by Hegel that he himself was convinced that evolution was not possible, and so, rather than address the question directly, as many authors have done,1 I want to look instead at whether Hegel’s concept of the organism necessarily precludes an understanding of the transformation of species. I will therefore follow Ospovat’s insight that the key distinction in nineteenth-century biological thought is not between evolutionary and nonevolutionary accounts, but between teleological and nonteleological accounts.2 211 212 HEGEL, DELEUZE, AND THE CRITIQUE OF REPRESENTATION I will look at a key debate in nineteenth-century biology between Georges Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. This discussion is relevant for two reasons. First, Hegel and Deleuze both talk about one of these key figures, Hegel siding with Cuvier’s comparative anatomy, Deleuze instead defending Geoffroy’s philosophical or transcendental anatomy. By looking at the relation between each philosopher and his preferred model of anatomy, we can therefore gain some insight into how these different conceptions of the organism relate to one another. Second, as both Cuvier and Geoffroy wrote before Darwin, we can to some extent bracket the question of belief in evolution and concentrate on the question of compatibility with evolution . To this purpose, we will look at two major prerequisites for evolutionary theory: the theory of homologies, which allows us to posit connections between different organisms, and the theory of teratology, which allows us to understand variability positively. The final aim will be to see whether Deleuze’s three charges are valid: that Hegel only presents a false movement, that Hegel’s logic problematically revolves around a single center, and that the dialectic does not provide the necessary precision in its characterization of the world. We will begin by looking at Hegel’s account of the structure of the organism, as presented in the Philosophy of Nature. THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE At the end of the Logic, we discover that the Idea is in fact, self-determining reason. More than this, through the recognition that the Idea relates to itself, much as the moments of infinity did in the doctrine of being, we come to realize that the Idea itself is “the One Totality” (EL, § 242). That is, it forms a self-referential whole. The precise details of the transition from the Logic to the philosophy of nature are somewhat obscure.3 We can note, however, that Hegel argues that while this idea of a unified totality is already nature, as a strict unity, it represents an immediacy and is therefore a one-sided determination of nature. In order to counteract this one-sidedness, the Idea “resolves to release out of itself into freedom the moment of its particularity or of the initial determining and otherness, [that is,] the immediate Idea as its reflexion, or itself as nature” (EL, § 244). In order to thus become determinate, the Idea therefore becomes the other of itself as immediate unity. Nature is thus first presented as multiplicity, or pure externality. As Houlgate notes, this moment of otherness does not mean that nature is not governed by reason.4 Rather, the Idea becomes other than itself by becoming reason expressed in a form other...

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