Hegel's philosophy of natural and human spaces

Part I elucidates the significance of the immediate determination of space as the indifferent extension that characterizes the systematic definition of nature’s self-external being (§1), and examines the transition from space as simple juxtaposition (§2), to space in individualized matter (§3). Part II follows the progressive subordination and declining significance of mechanical relations within space and time for philosophical comprehension of natural life’s externality and finitude. In §4 I focus on space as spontaneous determination of an animal’s own place, and in §5 I account for the immediate relation between terrestrial geology and biological individuals: the determinate place inhabited by organisms is no longer an ‘external’ place, for distinctive of living individuality is to adapt and appropriate its habitat, to make its own space and its own time. By highlighting the identity and the differences between physical geography and the geographical basis of world history, I claim that Hegel is able to show that for self-conscious concrete spirit there is neither spiritual significance nor power in the abstract determinations of space and time constitutive of the mechanism of nature, and that Hegel paves the way for a philosophy of environmental spaces informed by the influences of basic natural configurations of space upon our soul and activities. Finally, Part III focuses on space in the phenomenality of spirit, against the background of the transition from the natural life of the human soul described in the Anthropology to the “I” that opens the encyclopaedic Phenomenology, examining the analogy Hegel draws between the abstract universality of the “I” and the spatial unity of light (§6).