Hegel’s inverted world of physical law begins in the scientist’s own mind

Evidence

What has less often been realized is that the image has its origin in Hegel himself, in that chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit that deals with “Force and Understanding,” that is to say, with the scientific interpretation of the sensible world. For Hegel, indeed, the evolution from sensory perception of the external world to a scientific investigation of its inner laws is characterized by the creation of an “inverted world” which is precisely the realm of physical law itself. Scientific thinking, in other words, involves the projection of elements from the “real” or sensory universe into that suprasensible realm “inside” or “beyond” phenomena which is the place of abstract natural law in general, and constitutes thereby a kind of optical inversion of the empirical world of which it is at once the reflection and the explanation. But for Hegel such consciousness, scientific though it may be, is naïve insofar as the scientist thinks of that inverted world as a reality in its own right, insofar as he imagines that laws exist somehow “within” the objects of the world and fails to achieve consciousness of his own mind as the very origin of such theoretical models or constructs. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 725

Categorization

• DEFINE: Jameson’s “inverted world” concept here is a key Hegelian term the reader will need when Jameson applies it to the image later.
• XREF: Links to Jameson’s broader totalization method — the naive scientist’s reification of mental constructs is the same blindness dialectical criticism exposes in commodity fetishism. — connects to: For Hegel, science’s appearance is a subjective cognition whose aim is liberty — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 978

Broader Connections

• For Hegel, science’s appearance is a subjective cognition whose aim is liberty #expands (0.82) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 978