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8/8/2019 The Philosophy of Change by Dwayne Schulz
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The Philosophy of Change
by Dwayne Schulz
Part 1. Things and Events
The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus once famously remarked It is not possible
to step twice in to the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.
What he meant was that all things are in constant flux; just as a river consists of a
flow-through of different waters, so everything else in the cosmos is in a state of
perpetual change, of birth, growth, decay and death. This was summed up by a
famous expression panta rhei attributed to Heraclitus meaning everything flows.
But other ancient Greeks like Zeno argued that change was impossible and thought
up some of the most devious logical paradoxes to prove it. In one Zeno asks us to
imagine an arrow in flight. He considers the fact that the period during which the
arrow is in flight consists of an infinite series of instants and argues thus: (1) At any
given instant the arrow occupies a single spaceand no other, and (2) during that
instant the arrow is stationary. How then, Zeno asks, if the arrow is stationary at
every instant during its trajectory can it be said to have moved? Zeno concluded
that motion and change were illusions masking a deeper unchanging reality below.
The paradoxical nature of change which so troubled Zeno can be illustrated with a
few more thought experiments. Consider the fact that every single molecule in the
human body, every atom in every cell, is replaced by different ones every few yearsor so. How can you be the same person if, like Heraclituss river, the stuff of which
you are made is constantly turning over and changing?
Or take Plutarchs mythical Ship of Theseus, the old planks of which are not only
replaced over the years but gradually re-assembled to form the original ship. Which
is the true ship - the old new one or the new old one?
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Part 2. Essence
Parmenides and Zenos notion that change was impossible was taken up byPlato in
his theory of Forms. He argued that the idea of change without a real thing simply
led to confusion. In his book Cratylus, Plato argues in support of Parmenides and
Zeno that below the world of apparent change is a world of timeless unchanging
essences which are templates for ordinary objects on earth, that for each actual
horse there exists somewhere a perfect horse Form of which real horses are but
imperfect imitations.
Plato has Socrates say:
How can that be a real thing which is never in the same state?
knowledge too cannot continue to be knowledge unless continuing always
to abide and to exist, and if the transition is always going on there will always
be no knowledge and according to this view there will be no one to know and
nothing to be known.1
Everyday thought and language seem to support Platos notion that somehow an
unchanging essence must underpin or ground apparent change. We tend to speak
about ordinary objects being subjected to accidental variations or changes of form.
Objects have propertiesand events happen tothem. For example, in declarative
sentences like Johnis sick or My car was in a smash or Venus is in orbit, we
tend to think of the predicates being sick, being in a smash and being in orbit as
incidental properties or states that the objects (John, My car and Venus) are
subjected to. This manner of thinking lends itself to a model of change in which the
subject is static and change is inessential, occurring as an externalforce.
This object-property model was formalised by Aristotle who argued that all things
were a combination of matter and form, a theory called hylomorphism. In Aristotles
theory matter was a passive substance or patient which changed when acted upon
1Cratylus Paragraph 440 sections c-d.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cratylus_(dialogue)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cratylus_(dialogue)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato8/8/2019 The Philosophy of Change by Dwayne Schulz
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by an external force or agent which gave it form. Ultimately all effects in Aristotles
schema could be traced back to some original First Cause or God he called the
Prima Mobileor Prime Mover.
The idea of substance or matter deriving its form from some external agent of
change was adopted by medieval theologians like Aquinas who used it in support of
the Church doctrine that the bodys soul derived from God. The substance-form
distinction also informed modern mechanical theories espoused by people like
Descartes and Newton who disagreed with Aristotles physics but retained the idea
that modes [properties] cannot be clearly conceived apart from the really distinct
substances of which they are the modes.2 For Descartes, all the properties of
nature could be reduced to the quantitative (mathematical and measurable)
movements of matter whose fundamental property was extension in space or res
extensa. Scientists like Newton and Boyle agreed with Descartes principle
interpreting it in atomistic terms (contra Descartes who subscribed to something like
an ether theory), arguing that nature was nothing but arrangements of impenetrable
corpuscles within the void of space.
The mechanistic idea left little or no place for real chance or novelty in the world.
Effects were totally determined by their causes and if you only had enough
information and processing power, you could predict with total precision all future
change in what they saw as a clockwork universe. Newtons contemporary the
French mathematician and astronomer Laplace summed up the mechanistic attitude
when he said,
[For] an intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set
nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed,
2Descartes, Principles of Philosophy LXI.
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nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present
before its eyes.3
Newton and Laplace believed in a clockwork universe
The first philosopher of modern times to revive Heraclituss idea ofpanta rheiand to
mount a systematic critique of the mechanists was the early 19th Century German
philosopher Hegel. Hegel too argued that Becoming or change was fundamental.
However, for him change as it manifested itself in nature and history revealed the
story of an inner essence he called the World Spirit or the Absolute gradually
unfolding itself through a process he called the dialectic (i.e. the clash of binary
opposites. in in war, politics and science) culminating in a state of perfect freedom
and unity with God.
In my opinion Hegels Absolute plays the same role as Substance in the philosophyof the mechanists, and his dialectic is just as deterministic, proceeding as it does
along a singular narrow path towards a pre-determined end. Hegels dialectic
constricts the scope of change choking the multiple and diverse alternatives that
history can take. I will return to this idea soon but the same criticism can be applied
to all theories of history and change which tell a story of uni-linear progress. For
3Laplace, "A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities.
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example 19th Century anthropologist Henry Morgan asserted that humankind
progressed through a series of stages from savagery through barbarism to reach
its apogee in civilization. Marx also adopted this view arguing that history
progressed from the primitive tribalism via class society and ultimately to
communism. Modern right-wing commentators like Francis Fukuyamas also adopt
this view when they say that free-market liberalism represents the end of history.
Such views pretend to a philosophy of change but at the end of the day preach
different versions of mechanism in which change proceeds towards some pre-figured
image in an isomorphic movement from same to same, where there really is nothing
new under the sun.
However, the idea that there is more to change than the expression of unchanging
essences, principles or substances, the idea that that the cosmos is animated by a
kind of change which is more unpredictable, diverse and creative has persisted
through the ages. To my mind the first modern thinker who really put this kind of
change at the centre of their philosophy was the French intellectual Henri Bergson.
Part 3. Bergson
At the end of the 19th Century, Bergson argued that the object-property model
misconstrues becoming (or what he called duree,i.e. duration) because it tries to
think the unstable by means of the stable, the moving by means of the immobile.
But in reality the body is changing form at every moment; or rather, there is no
form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the
continual changeof form: form is only a snapshot viewof a transition.
Therefore, here again, our perception manages to solidify into discontinuous
images the fluid continuity of the real. When the successive images do not
differ from each other too much, we consider them all as the waxing and
http://images.google.com.au/imgres?imgurl=http://noelpecout.blog.lemonde.fr/files/2008/04/henri-bergson-giclee-print-c12062710.1208367733.jpg&imgrefurl=http://noelpecout.blog.lemonde.fr/2008/04/16/cinq-rires-1-bergson-on-sadapte-on-en-rie/&usg=__B3Z-fyyYsyjqWHaxF70L_S08Jug=&h=450&w=337&sz=18&hl=en&start=3&itbs=1&tbnid=zKsEpiM9DhDkIM:&tbnh=127&tbnw=95&prev=/images?q=Henri+Bergson&hl=en&gbv=2&tbs=isch:18/8/2019 The Philosophy of Change by Dwayne Schulz
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waning of a single meanimage, or as the deformation of this image in
different directions. And to this mean we really allude when we speak of the
essence of a thing, or of the thing itself.4
In other words, in speaking about an object and its forms we are abstracting out
idealized entities from a continuous stream of change, trying to cut out and arbitrarily
privilege one stage above the whole process. This procedure is equivalent to saying
to an 80 year old man that he is but a diminished representation of his true self as a
teenager. In reality Bergson would argue, the 18 year old and the 80 year old are
equally necessary and valid parts of a single and indivisible process.
Bergson therefore does more than just assert the internal or necessary nature of
change. What he does is to abolish objects and forms altogether arguing that both
are fictional entities invented by our intellect to fix or screen out the fact of perpetual
flux. Bergson argues that that we have a bad habit of distorting the truth of our own
inner experience of time, of treating it like space, as something that is homogenous,
measurable, and divisible.
In contrast to thinking about time in terms of space, Bergson urges us to think about
how our inner sense of time arises from experiencing the flow of heterogenous
qualities or intensities of feeling in what he calls a confusedor qualitative multiplicity.
Bergson gives the example of watching the graceful movements of a dancer, and
how our aesthetic experience gradually unfolds from one set of qualities to others.
Thus the perception of ease in motion passes over into the pleasure of
mastering the flow of time and of holding the future in the present. A third
element comes in when rhythm and measure [allow] us to foresee to a still
greater extent the movements of the dancer. . Thus the increasing
intensities of aesthetic feeling are here resolved into as many different
4Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
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feelings, each one of which, already heralded by its predecessor, becomes
perceptible in it and then completely eclipses it.
Series of heterogenous intensities ground our inner sense of time
Bergson is encouraging us to pay attention to how we actually experience change asa continuous stream of different qualitative states merging into each-other, as a flow
of heterogeneous but fused feelings which cannot be analyzed as a series of merely
quantitative or discrete changes. He is highlighting the fact that no situation is ever
truly repeated in consciousness, that every experience is qualitatively unique and
that this perpetual newness or creativity constitutes our sense of the passing of time.
In his book Creative Evolutionpublished in 1907, Bergson argued that our inner
experience of duration, of qualitative multiplicity, was not just a subjective viewpoint
but an objective fact about the behavior and evolution of life in general. He
postulated a universal tendency amongst living things, contrary to the second law of
thermodynamics, towards the production of novelty and diversity, a tendency he
dubbed the elan vitalor vital force or as he put it a ceaseless upspringing of
something new.
Despite great popularity in his early career, in the inter-war period, Bergsons views
were increasingly marginalised as merely poetic, mystical, feminine and out of
touch with hard science. Bergsons claim about the elan vital was misconstrued as
an argument for some kind of ectoplasm. For these and various other reasons
Bergson faded into relative obscurity.
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sensible quality consists in this repetition of movements, as the persistence of
life consists in a series of palpitations.5
Atomic phenomena seem to be the result ever more subtle and elusive processes
But Bergson saw the elan vitalas manifesting itself mainly in living organisms. He
called living organisms zones of indetermination, more than simple robots which
reacted automatically to chemical and physical forces. So, somewhat ironically
Bergson was accepting the picture that had been passed down from Aristotle and
Descartes of matter as a passive and brute substance requiring an external agent to
animate and organise it. Had Bergson studied the revolution in quantum physics
unfolding in his own time he may have been tempted to abandon that picture, and to
generalise the elan vitalto the matter in general and the cosmos as a whole.
Part 4. Whitehead
One philosopher who did believe that matter and nature were processes rather than
substances was Alfred North Whitehead, a younger contemporary and fellow travelerof Bergsons. Whitehead was famous as a mathematician and logician before he
turned to metaphysical philosophy in the 1920s. In his view an ordinary thing of the
world like an atom, a person, a chair or a planet is not a static and homogenous
object but a relatively stable balance of forces, a coalition of divergent tendencies or
processes in temporary equilibrium, what he called an event.
5Bergson, op cit.
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AN Whitehead
Whitehead gave the example of Cleopatra's Needle on the Victoria Embankment in
London as an example of an apparently static object that is actually a series of
events cascading through time and history. One writer summaries Whiteheads
lesson about Cleopatras Needle thus:
Its granite was sculpted by human hands, sometime around 1450 BCE. It was
moved from Heliopolis to Alexandria in 12 BCE, and again from Alexandria to
London in 1877-1878 CE. And some day, no doubt, it will be destroyed, or
otherwise cease to exist. But for Whitehead, there is much more to it than
that. Cleopatra's Needle isn't just a solid, impassive object upon which certain
grand historical events being sculpted, being movedhave occasionally
supervened. Rather, it is eventful at every moment. From second to second,
even as it stands seemingly motionless, Cleopatra's Needle is activelyhappening. It never remains the same. "A physicist who looks on the part of
the life of nature as a dance of electrons, will tell you that daily it has lost
some molecules and gained others, and even the plain man can see that it
gets dirtier and is occasionally washed" (ibid., 167). At every instant, the mere
standing-in-place of Cleopatras Needle is an event: a renewal, a novelty, a
fresh creation.6
6Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead Deleuze and Aesthetics.
http://images.google.com.au/imgres?imgurl=http://www.illc.uva.nl/~seop/archives/sum1999/entries/whitehead/whitehead.jpeg&imgrefurl=http://www.illc.uva.nl/~seop/archives/sum1999/entries/whitehead/&usg=__LfqlwaE9w1UDpFIIJ-Io8SVMbVA=&h=522&w=390&sz=81&hl=en&start=1&itbs=1&tbnid=eP9mTEP4yGWULM:&tbnh=131&tbnw=98&prev=/images?q=AN+Whitehead&hl=en&gbv=2&tbs=isch:18/8/2019 The Philosophy of Change by Dwayne Schulz
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insoluble problem of the Virtual which exceeds its limited manifestations like a river
that is forever bursting its banks. In some sense the Virtual contains all the multiple,
divergent and opposing directions selected by the Actual. It is therefore like a
dynamo that not only works to produce the seemingly regular, repetititious, and
cyclical changes underpinning identity but also the irregular and aberrant changes
which lead to branching and genuine differences.
Ultimately what people like Bergson, Whitehead and Deleuze are arguing for is the
idea that creative change is a fundamental and ubiquitous tendency in nature that
nothing is ever truly repeated, and is as Locke once said of time a perpetual
perishing as well as a new creation, that every morning and every breath is unique,
unprecedented and new. On this view, an effect is only partlydetermined by its
antecedent causes. There is always an aspect of the unfolding present which
cannot be traced back to the past, an aspect which is unprecedented and truly
different from any thing that came before. In Whiteheads words, Creativityis the
universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact.9
Part 6. Instants and Duration
I think we are now in a position to resolve some of the paradoxes mentioned at the
beginning of this talk. Bergsons advice about the follies of trying to think the mobile
in terms of the immobile is the key. Bergsons diagnosis of Zenos arrow is that we
simply cannot divide an event or a process into a series of instantaneous points of
zero duration, that the concept of a moving arrow being at an instant is a fiction to
begin with. Instants are frozenabstractions, attempts to capture the moving by
means of the immobile. Once we realise that time cannot be decomposed into a
series of instants, that all parts of a duration are themselves durations, that in any
given period during the arrows flight it is never stationary, the paradox disappears.
9 Whitehead, AN. Process & Reality, 1929, Pt. I, ch. 2, sec. 2
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As for human identity, the Ship of Theseus, and the loop of string paradoxes, I think
Bergson would say something similar that there is no one true form that can be
isolated as the essence of a sequence of different forms in a process of continual
change. No inner soul which survives changes in bodily and mental composition, no
Real Ship of Theseus that persists through the ship-building process, and no self-
same Loop that survives the flow of different string parts10. To assert the existence of
an essence is merely to abstract out an idealised form from a process of continual
transformation the only reality is the whole and indivisible process of change itself.
Part 7. Vibrant Matter & Creative Change
Another important aspect of a substance or essence based ontology which can be
criticised is that it tends to rank phenomena hierarchically. If we assert the existence
of an inner essence or substance we privilege one form above others, that is we set
up a hierarchy in which one form is the true and the others merely derivative
imitations or primitive precursers.
For example in the now outdated medieval notion of a Great Chain of Being,revived by 19th Century naturalists, nature and evolution are portrayed as moving
from more primitive forms towards more complex and sophisticated ones reaching its
apogee with the human civilization and consciousness. All organisms are ranked on
a scale with simple organisms like bacteria at the bottom, more complex beings like
mammals in the middle and humans at the top.
Evolutionary biology however teaches us that there is no march of progress in
nature, that each organism is more or less successful in its own terms and ecological
niche. Also recent biology points to the importance of phenomena such as
horizontal gene transfer between species by viruses and a process called endo-
symbiosis.11 These discoveries are breaking down the idea of completely separate
10So either we have A=B or A=C but not both, the notion of A persisting through a change in string parts is true
only ideally, as a useful fiction, a manner of speaking, or a facon de parler.
11 Frank Ryans recent book Virolutiontells how the presence of foreign DNA in the genomes of every
creature testifies to the importance of symbiotic relationships especially those involving viruses and
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species or a tree of life in which genes are exclusively passed down the generations
through distinct lineages. A new image of the evolutionary process is emerging as
an impenetrable thicket of interrelatedness12 where species lines regularly merge
and hybridize. Biological science is now telling us that life cannot be organised into
sharply differentiated species let alone a hierarchy because every organism is
deeply enmeshed in inter-species genetic flows. Life is a messy network rather than
a neat hierarchy. The idea that humans are at the pinnacle of evolution is now
defunct, we are just one creature amongst many and may like 99% of every species
that has existed one day disappear into the evolutionary night.13
These findings show that the forms of nature are rheamorphs which have a
tendency to flow and blend into eachother via what Deleuze and his sometime
collaborator Felix Guattari referred to as rhizomorphicor transversalflows which link
them up into dynamic and heterogenous multiplicities, networks, ecologies or
assemblages.
The structure of life: Darwins tree or a dense thicket of inter-relatedness; a rhizomorph?
bacteria. See also biologist Lynn Margulises work on symbiosis in the evolution mitochondria and
eukaryotic cells.
12Lawton, Graham, Why Darwin Was Wrong About The Tree of Life, New Scientist, 21 January
2009.
13See the works of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould
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The hierarchic model of nature not only motivated a great deal of 19th and 20th
century biology but anthropology, criminology, eugenics and politics as well. It led to
the ranking of people according to their distance from an arbitrarily elevated
archetype (the white, middle-class European). Those down the scale were treated
as if they were mere castoffs, inferior imitations, deformations or primitive precursors
of the real thing. As one anthropologist puts it,
A ladder to success arose from the primitive to that of the civilized, from the
tribal village of Africa to London and the splendour of the Strand. The cultures
of the world came to be seen as a living museum in which individual societies
represented evolutionary moments captured and mired in time, each one a
stage in the imagined ascent to civilization. 14
The above ideas ultimately led to the Holocaust. The genetic and historical truth of
course is that transversal flows between different human races and cultures bind us
into a single albeit internally differentiated continuum.
The genetic endowment of humanity is a single continuum. From Ireland to
Japan, from the Amazon to Siberia there are no sharp genetic differences
among populations. There are only geographic gradients. The most remote
society on earth contains within its people fully 85 percent of our total genetic
diversity.15Science in general is now disproving the hierarchic model which posits dead and
unorganised matter at the bottom, complex and dynamic life in the middle and
human consciousness at the top. Take chaos theory, it demonstrates that even the
simplest of non-linear physical processes can generate startling levels of
unpredictable and complex behaviour. Mandelbrots fractals for example suggest
bedazzling levels complexity to the material world and show us that repetition or
iteration of very simple algorithms generate spirals of self-similarity, of branching and
diversification at every turn rather than homogenous regularity or sameness. I spoke
14Wade Davis, The Wayfinders.
15Ibid
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about how advances in quantum physics destroyed mechanistic substance based
accounts of change showing that even at the smallest scale matter exhibits qualities
like unpredictability and deep connectedness. Some modern cosmologists like Lee
Smolin see cosmic structure as fundamentally life-like, as an open process of
creative evolution and ongoing development rather than the result of a strictly
repetitious application and unfolding of eternal law.16 The discovery of dark flow in
the cosmic microwave background also suggests massive entities beyond the
horizon of the visible universe and the possibility that the cosmos is a vastly bigger,
more complex and open process than current theories allow.
The mechanistic ideas of unilinear progress, hierarchy and deterministic change
therefore seem redundant in the light of todays biology and physics which are
revealing more and more that the domain of matter is not dumb, inert, unchanging
and lifeless but intelligent, eventful, creative and vibrant, a rejuvenation in modern
form perhaps of the ancient Greek idea of hylozoism- that a degree of sentience and
vital life permeates the whole cosmos down to the lowliest stone. 17
I think the philosophic lesson of this vibrant materialism18 is that we are not
separate from nature but just one amongst many of its teeming and interdependentcollectives. A metaphysics which understands creative change as a fundamental
force of nature and the cosmos does justice to the fact that agency is not a uniquely
human trait but one common to all life forms and matter in general facilitating a more
respectful approach to the cosmic, terrestrial, ecological and biotic assemblages
from which we emerged and in which we are embedded.
16Smolin, L. The Life of the Cosmos, 1997 argues that physical law and constants evolve. and
massive entities beyond the horizon of the visible universe and an open cosmic meta-structure
bending into other scales and dimensions.
17Merchant, C.The Death of Nature, 1980: 278)
18Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. 2009.
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Some quotes on change and vibrant matter
Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its
adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.
Whitehead, Part 5, 337, Process & Reality
This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made. But it always
was and will be: an ever-living fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going
out.
Heraclitus
I maintain also that substances, whether material or immaterial, cannot be conceived
in their bare essence without any activity, activity being of the essence of substance
in general. I even hold, with the majority of the ancients, that the whole of nature is
full of force, of life and of souls.
Leibniz to the Electress Sophe
I believe that as long as the world has lasted and will last, it has always had and will
have forms of matter that are more or less subtle in an infinity of degrees, and that
what is subtle in our view is always crude in comparison to an infinity of other forms
that are more subtle. Also, I do not believe that there is a primary element, as
Descartes imagined.
Leibniz to Andre Morell
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We are aware that everything finite, instead of being inflexible, is rather changeable
and transient; and this is exactly what we mean by the dialectic of the finite, by which
the finite, as implicitly other than it is, is forced to surrender its own immediate or
natural being, and turn suddenly into its opposite.
Hegel
Everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance
but as Subject as well.
Hegel, Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)
In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with
something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
What happens `really' in an atomic event?' Observation ... selects of all possible
events the one that has actually happened ... Therefore, the transition from `possible'to `actual' takes place during the act of observation'.
Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy 1958, p.54
This existence of ours is as transient as Autumn clouds. To watch the birth and
death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance. A lifetime is a flash of
lightning in the sky. Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.
The Buddha
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm#m017http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm#m017