Reflections on Hegel, Art, Quantum Physics, and Dialectics
by Dr. Armin Medosch (†2017)
As philosophy teaches us, and as Franz Xaver’s art object demonstrates, opposites are by no means separate but intrinsically connected. Thinking in opposites that mutually condition each other is called dialectics, and it is as old as the great civilizations. Dialectics existed in early Indian philosophy as well as in Buddhism. In ancient Greece, it was cultivated in the Socratic dialogues and recorded by Plato and Aristotle. It is no exaggeration to say that dialectics is truly universal. White and black, rough and smooth, left and right, warm and cold belong together—not just as two sides of the same coin but as fundamental forms of thought and perception, with a basis in nature.
However, this last statement touches on a fundamental philosophical problem. To what extent are these opposites inherent in things themselves, or are they merely categories of thought? The writings of the great system-builders of European philosophy revolved around these questions concerning the relationship between subject and object—most notably Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Kant, standing in the Platonic tradition, believed in the existence of transcendental categories, meaning that these exist outside an individual’s consciousness, in an eternal ether of ideas. These ideas were universal and eternal; the process of knowledge was based on progressing from sensory intuition to these ideas. However, for Kant, subject and object were fundamentally separated by an insurmountable barrier. We could never truly know the “thing-in-itself” but only our idea of it.
Mind and matter were different levels of one and the same science, with distinct disciplines responsible for them—natural philosophy (what we now call natural science) for matter, and philosophy or metaphysics for the realm of thought. Between them lay the world of sensory experience, and building on Baumgarten’s aesthetics, the idea arose that art played a mediating role. Art was based on sensory impressions, which, in the Greek tradition, were considered “low” compared to the pure world of ideas. The more intellectual something was—meaning the more it was purified from all sensory elements—the higher its status. This differing valuation of knowledge systems is reflected in the enduring distinction between intellectual and manual labor. All of these issues remain fundamental to our knowledge structures, unresolved, and some would argue, unsolvable.
Returning to art, while it was based on the “lower” sensory impressions, it was also capable of conveying beauty, creating a connection to the higher realm of philosophy and the world of ideas. The fundamental problem Kant identified took a new turn during the Sturm und Drang movement and early German Romanticism through the art philosophies of Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (more on this later in the text). They, along with Hegel, belonged to the Jena Circle, a concentration of highly influential intellectuals over a decade in the small town of Jena, whose ideas continue to shape the world.
They were all deeply impressed by the French Revolution but also by the fact that it had descended first into terror and then into Napoleon’s empire. While many wished for a revolution in the German states, this was impossible in the police state of Prussia. Thus, they focused on a revolution of the mind, in art and philosophy. This approach revealed a particular German characteristic: in the early 19th century, Germany was industrially backward compared to France and England. There was no industrial bourgeoisie, nor a strong tradition of ethically grounded rationalism as in France—a rationalism that opposed the irrational dictates of the church and aristocracy and emphasized reason-based decision-making.
Armed with reason and adorned in the attire of Greek and Roman antiquity, the French bourgeoisie had risen as the subject of history in the Revolution of 1789. In Germany, however, reason was regarded more skeptically, seen as an ally of power and bureaucracy. Even in the philosophy of the Jena Circle, pre-modern ideas persisted.
Thus, in a very literal sense—as a ground understood as a fertile soil rather than mere causality—Hegel’s philosophy arose in his first major work, The Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel took dialectical thinking to a new level. While Kant’s conceptual pairs stood in static opposition, Hegel introduced movement by seeing opposites as engaged in constant becoming.
The most famous analogy of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis in Hegel’s work is that of bud, blossom, and fruit. Opposites are not simply poles but engaged in a dynamic process of becoming. Hegel’s Phenomenology begins with consciousness. Initially, this consciousness is mere perception, unaware of itself. It can only become self-aware by moving away from itself—into the world, into the consciousness of things, into nature. For Hegel, this was not only a theoretical movement but a historical process. Driven by desire, humans create themselves through labor.
This self-alienation, which already contains the seed of alienation as later expanded by Karl Marx, is simultaneously an objectification. By applying labor to nature and shaping the objects of life, an external reality is created that also contains something of our essence. In early Prussian capitalism, this externalization manifested as a false consciousness, yet it also contained an anthropological truth. Through this contact with the world, humans gain knowledge about the true nature of things. By externalizing themselves into the world of objects, humans gain self-awareness through the other. Objects can then be reintegrated into consciousness, creating a higher level of awareness—reason, which knows that it knows.
This reason finds confirmation when it interacts with other rational beings. We mirror ourselves in others, and together we produce a reflected world—culture, art, literature—where we encounter the purified, essentialized existence of things.
Hegel had a strong epistemological optimism, as these passages show. His highest priority was the concept, but to reach the concept, he had to think of the world as real. As the German philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote in a commentary on Hegel’s subject-object philosophy:
“True thinking is that of the real, which presses itself into thought. The thought reaches its subject in the same movement in which the subject reaches its thought; both ripen and correct each other.”
At no point did Hegel, unlike Kant, believe that we had no access to the thing-in-itself. It was this world-oriented aspect of Hegel’s thinking that made it so appealing to later social revolutionaries—whether Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Martin Luther King Jr.
For Hegel, not only were conceptual pairs dialectically structured—meaning they conditioned each other, struggled, and transcended themselves—but reality itself was dialectical. Every thing already contains its opposite within it. Being cannot be thought without nothingness. The negation of being by nothingness creates becoming, which can manifest as either emergence (the movement from nothingness to being) or decay (the movement from being to nothingness). However, for Hegel, the key aspect was the movement itself—an eternal flow through the valleys of reality.
As Bloch noted, this aspect of dialectics “is not for the comfortable, but it can be learned.”
Hier ist die Fortsetzung der Übersetzung mit eingefügten Quellen und Links zu den Zitaten:
Nowhere is this more evident than in the dialectic between master and servant, which Hegel presented without any moralizing. The servant has an “unhappy consciousness” because their entire life is spent preparing the beautiful things that their master enjoys without ever being able to partake in them. Yet, in this very function of servitude, the conditions for transcendence are already present.
The master experiences everything only through the labor of the servant. While the master may consume these things, they have no real knowledge of them. This knowledge belongs to the servant, who, through labor, gains access to the inner nature of things. Hegel saw the progression from consciousness to self-consciousness and ultimately to reason as a historical process—one that he ultimately, in a sudden U-turn, let end in the “World Spirit” (Weltgeist).
As consciousness ascends through ever-higher spirals of awareness, realizing itself and all things, it culminates in the highest stage—the World Spirit, which knows itself and all things. Such concepts are difficult to articulate today. The trilogy of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis may even remind some of a religious catechism, as Bloch pointed out. It bears an unsettling resemblance to the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
But what if, instead of “World Spirit,” we say “collective intelligence”? Or, as Marx called it, the “general intellect”? Marx had to “simply” turn Hegel on his head to arrive at a revolutionary philosophy.
“Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.”
—Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845)
(Full Text)
Hegel had let the dialectic of master and servant, capital and labor, play out purely on the side of consciousness, which led him, in his later years, to idealize the state as the highest form of rationality. Marx and Engels, however, transformed this dialectic into class consciousness. The completion of philosophy did not occur in thought but in practice—by abolishing false consciousness through revolutionary action.
According to Marx, capitalism creates the conditions for its own transcendence. This contradiction was to become the driving force of all development from the mid-19th century onward.
Capital develops the means of production—namely, technology. Two factors play a crucial role: the competition between different capitals and the conflict between capital and labor. The development of technology, as driven by capital, aims to weaken the power of workers by deliberately investing in machines.
“The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”
—Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847)
(Full Text)
Machines are reified, dead labor that competes with living labor. One might assume this gives capital a decisive advantage—industrial robots replace workers, or production is simply outsourced and orchestrated via global logistics chains. Machines now replace not just muscle power but also intellectual abilities, perception, and information processing.
Yet this also contains an element of liberation. If machines take over more work, we should theoretically have more time for art, science, conversations, friendships, and family. The development of productive forces creates the conditions to overthrow existing social relations.
“The hand-mill produces feudal society, the steam-mill industrial society, and the Internet?”
—Adapted from Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy
This revolutionary potential arises from the development of productive forces, which cannot be emphasized enough. The objective conditions of the present—such as the internet and digital media—would enable a post-industrial mode of life with entirely new priorities.
However, this potential must be contained in the name of existing social structures. The internet could have created a true sharing economy, an egalitarian peer-to-peer communication model. While some of this exists, it has been captured at another level by informational capital.
Unlike industrial capital, its primary asset is no longer machines but people. But the free play of creative forces must not be too free—it must be channeled into the creative economy, into new products and services.
The product sold by social media is us.
This brief Hegelian view of the present illustrates that history itself unfolds along dialectical lines. The “thorn of contradiction” drives development forward—not in a linear fashion but with a qualitative turning point.
The mistake of Marx and his followers, however, was perhaps to believe too much in the objective necessity of this turning point. In Hegel’s conceptual and historical totality, the end was already inherent in the beginning.
“When all the conditions of a thing are present, it comes into existence. The thing exists before it manifests.”
—G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic (1812)
(Full Text)
Marxists believed that capitalism would create the conditions for socialism. Once those conditions were met, socialism would necessarily emerge. This was considered the historical tendency.
The concept of tendency was something Hegel borrowed from Leibniz and kinetic gas theory. Leibniz already wrote that every society carries within it the embryo of its own future.
Hegel’s philosophy required this circularity. As he wrote in his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences:
“Every part of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a self-contained circle, but the philosophical idea is expressed in each as a specific determination of its elements. Each individual circle, since it is totality in itself, also breaks through the barrier of its element and establishes a further sphere; the whole thus presents itself as a circle of circles.”
—G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences
(Full Text)
The Greek term “Enkyklo-paideia” means nothing more than “circle-teaching.” The most perfect circle is that of the sphere, which is why the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides—one of the first recorded philosophers—was named by Plato as an intellectual predecessor.
Parmenides thought that all being was contained in the cosmic sphere. The changes we observe are merely illusions on the surface. True being is immobile—the world-all sphere at rest within itself.
The sphere that Franz Xaver has placed in Haibach follows its own necessity. It is not an illustration of the philosophies discussed in this text. Similarly, the philosophical ideas here do not serve to explain the artwork.
By the late 18th century, art had become autonomous—meaning it obeyed no laws but its own. Hegel saw art historically, tied to specific social forms. At its highest level, which for Hegel was poetry, art provided a direct connection to the World Spirit—an “all-knowing vision.”
In the context of this article, the most important aspect is the idea of art as reflection and the link, through art, to an idealist philosophy of nature—that is, a philosophy of science.
Franz Xaver’s sculpture invites us to look through a sphere at dialectical concept pairs in mirror writing. The sculpture thus stages a particular vision of knowledge in which reflection plays a crucial role.
Art reflects social conditions—not as an exact representation but in distorted form. Reality does not simply appear mirrored in art but rather through a double negation.
Following Hegel, everything has its opposite. Not only does it have an opposite, but it already contains it within itself. Opposites co-constitute each other.
Great art, therefore, always has a double meaning. It does not merely express one thing but also its opposite. It reflects negation as well. It cannot remain on the surface of things—it must seek out causes, motives, and tendencies, as well as the movements that counteract these tendencies.
For this reason, art can never be merely beautiful—because then it becomes kitsch and bores us.
Hegel’s friend and colleague Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling expressed this idea even more radically in his philosophy of art. If art is to be an adequate reflection of life’s conditions, it must contain fear and terror. However, if tragedy is exaggerated to the extreme, it also ceases to be convincing.
Pure terror—a deep night from which there is no awakening—leaves us cold as well. A world without ugliness would also have no beauty.
Beauty is ultimately more than itself—it is a promise of utopia, a vision of a better life beyond alienation and the suffering of false consciousness.
This kind of art is an Organon of philosophy, as Schelling called it. It expresses in sensory-perceptible, material form what philosophy does through concepts—revealing the essence of things. And these things are not merely objects, but processes, movements, and historical tendencies.
Reflection, however, can also be understood differently—scientifically.
One key aspect of Franz Xaver’s work is his exploration of symmetry. Symmetry and dialectics are related concepts, though not identical. From the structure of the human body to the double-helix symmetry of DNA, symmetry plays a crucial role.
“The laws of physics should be the same in all reference frames.”
—Albert Einstein, Theory of Relativity
(Full Text)
Symmetry is also manifested in Leibniz’s differential calculus, where both sides of an equation balance each other.
As Ernst Bloch reminds us:
“Even differential calculus contains a dialectical seed: it equates straight and curved under certain conditions. It treats the straight line as a curve of first degree with infinitely small curvature; it assumes, in the infinitely small, equality as a special case of inequality, and rest as an infinitely small motion.”
—Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope
(More on Bloch)
Bloch continues by explaining that if we are dealing with discontinuous changes, we must replace differential equations with difference inequalities:
“The only large-scale difference inequality in mathematical physics is that of entropy or the heat death of the universe.”
And here it becomes truly fascinating: this concept is the foundation of the mathematical theory of information.
According to Norbert Wiener, information is negative entropy—the ability of life to resist entropy through its organizing power.
“Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism that does not admit this can survive the present day.”
—Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)
(Full Text)
Dialectical matter is symmetric. Life, on the other hand, organizes itself against entropy—it constructs molecules in a way that resists dissolution.
Ernst Bloch was engaged in an ideological battle with scientific positivism. Using Hegel as his weapon, he accused positivism of maintaining a “frog perspective”—one that only sees details but not the whole.
Hegel’s dialectic, he argued, is above all a theory of motion. But not just mechanical motion (as with Galileo and Newton), but qualitative movement—the movement of real history, in which new things emerge through necessity.
“There are no jumps in nature, it is said; and common sense, when it wants to grasp becoming, believes it has done so by imagining it as a gradual emergence and disappearance. However, it has been shown that the changes of being are not just transitions from one quantity to another but a transformation from quality into quantity and vice versa.”
—G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic
(Full Text)
According to Bloch, it is precisely the specifications of history itself that form the barrier to scientific calculation.
The struggle is not merely rationality versus irrationality but rather:
Which logic?
Scientific logic, Bloch argued, recognizes only empty schemas of thought without content. The postulate of non-contradiction ultimately leads to mere A = A, B = B.
For a long time, this kind of scientific thinking dominated what was considered scientific.
Dialectical thinking, however, thinks in “irreversible inequalities”—the dynamic growth of historical life.
Hegel believed in the primacy of philosophy over natural science. His philosophy of nature, like Schelling’s, often reads as grotesque nonsense—but only if we approach it from a purely mechanistic perspective.
“Qualitative natural philosophy ceases to seem absurd once it is no longer evaluated solely from the standpoint of mechanism.”
—Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope
Sometimes, we only need to exchange words—for instance, if we replace Schelling’s term “innermost principle” with “natural law” or “information”, the concept suddenly begins to make sense.
Friedrich Engels had already noticed this:
“The natural philosophers relate to consciously dialectical science in the same way that the utopians relate to modern communism.”
—Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring
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From Descartes onward, science had been purged of everything that could not be forced into mathematical theorems.
The logical positivism of the Vienna Circle in the interwar period pushed this to its peak. Everything that could not be reduced to scientific English was considered literature or poetry—and thus not a scientific topic.
This program ultimately led to the abolition of philosophy as the queen of sciences. We still suffer from its consequences today.
Thus, the discipline formerly called “philosophy and history of science” was renamed “science studies”—a shift that signaled a great impoverishment.
The philosophy of science once dared to question its foundations. Science studies, by contrast, largely confined itself to ethnographic and sociological methods—studying how scientists practice science, rather than questioning its premises.
Against this gray, compartmentalized world of disciplines, where speculative thought is so heavily restricted, we can now observe two or three interconnected developments:
First, with the emergence of quantum physics, a discipline has arisen at the very heart of the scientific apparatus that cannot function without speculation.
Hegel, as the philosopher of historical qualitative leaps, would likely have taken great delight in the concept of the quantum leap. He might also have been fascinated by wave-particle duality and the uncertainty principle.
“The deeper one penetrates into the quantum world, the more the contradictions between classical concepts manifest themselves. It is not just that one cannot measure the position and momentum of a particle simultaneously; rather, measurement itself alters the object being measured.”
—Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (1958)
(Full Text)
The paradox of a particle being simultaneously a wave forces theoretical physicists into dialectical thinking.
The unity of contradictions has now moved to the center of our understanding of the mechanics of the universe—and suddenly, what was once seen as purely mechanical is no longer machine-like at all.
The fact that we can never know both the mass and velocity of a particle at the same time, and that measurement itself influences the object being observed, seems like a direct illustration of Hegel’s subject-object philosophy.
Up until a few decades ago, people still spoke of the “Veil of Isis”—not in reference to terrorists, but rather to the Egyptian goddess of wisdom.
According to Hegel, we can only lift this veil by passing through it—and what we find on the other side is ourselves once again.
“Nature is not external to us—it is the objectification of the subject.”
—G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences
(Full Text)
Modern physics has spent the last century desperately trying to remove the subject from science—to think of nature as purely objective, as a given, lifeless field that knowledge simply plows through.
Yet now, physics has reached a stage where, at least in the quantum world, it has become pure philosophy—and even aesthetic speculation.
“The universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.”
—James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (1930)
(Full Text)
At the same time, the philosophy of science has so thoroughly mutilated itself that it barely qualifies as philosophy anymore.
No wonder, then, that every theoretical physicist of repute today writes philosophical books—whether Anton Zeilinger or Herbert Pietschmann.
If we understand science as something that we should not just accept passively—as something that should not simply be dictated over our heads, forcing us to endure its benefits and its burdens—then we need visual reflections of what can no longer be directly represented.
The work of artists like Franz Xaver serves to make visible an essential (or inner) reality—one that usually escapes our perception.
This continues the 200-year-old tradition of idealistic art and natural philosophy as formulated by Hegel and Schelling.
It is no coincidence that Jena Romanticism was never very interested in Newton, but deeply fascinated by Giordano Bruno and Johannes Kepler.
Franz Xaver’s sphere stands in the tradition of Kepler’s Harmony of the Spheres and the diagrammatic art of Giordano Bruno.
Bruno hoped to decode the mysteries of the universe through diagrams—by establishing analogies between the “higher truth of the heavens” and the proportions displayed in his visual representations.
Without postmodern charlatanism or mysticism, but also without the neo-positivist prohibition on philosophy, Franz Xaver takes up the increasingly rare freedom of art—one that dares to go beyond itself and formulate connections between work and world.
His reference point is not Hegelian metaphysics, but rather another Bloch—Felix Bloch.
Felix Bloch’s Bloch Sphere represents the probabilistic state of a quantum bit (Qubit).
The cosmic sphere of Parmenides, reduced to the quantum level, now serves as a mathematical model for describing the total states of a quantum system.
“The Bloch Sphere is a powerful representation of quantum states—one that bridges abstract theory and visual intuition.”
—David J. Griffiths, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (1995)
(More on the Bloch Sphere)
Thus, science has become historical—it is on the move.
Whether art will still be able to keep up is another question.
At least some artists are still trying.
The dialectic that Hegel introduced continues to shape art, science, and philosophy today.
It is no longer possible to ignore the fact that the universe itself appears dialectical—with contradictions, negations, and qualitative leaps embedded in its structure.
Whether in quantum physics, where observation influences reality, or in information theory, where negative entropy resists decay, we see dialectical processes at work.
The work of Franz Xaver and his Qubit sculpture reflect these ideas both aesthetically and conceptually.
At the same time, it reminds us that art has the power to visualize what philosophy and science struggle to express.
As Bloch once wrote:
“Philosophy will have its place wherever people refuse to accept reality as a given, but instead seek out its hidden potential.”
—Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope
(Full Text)