This chapter aims to demonstrate that Hegel’s notion of organism involves what we today would call “strange loops”—an entangled hierarchy where closed loops of containment occur. That is closely related to the very concept of “true infinity,” which is the basis of the Hegelian notion of freedom. What Hegel calls “self-relating negativity,” the process of active self-limitation, is the basic structure shared both by the organism and by the self. That is precisely what makes reductive materialism untenable. Dialectical materialism, discredited by doctrinaire vulgarization as an “official ideology,” is quietly making a comeback in the natural sciences—not as a schematic procedure to deduce a priori the “laws of matter” but as a way to think through the inner interconnections of evolving complex systems.
