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© 2025. All rights reserved.
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Hakyll.
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Lanyon.
Hans Christian Ørsted (1777–1851) was born in Rudkøbing on the island of Langeland, the son of an apothecary. He and his younger brother Anders Sandøe Ørsted (later a prominent jurist and briefly Prime Minister of Denmark) were largely self-taught before entering the University of Copenhagen, where Hans Christian took a degree in pharmacy in 1797 and a doctorate in philosophy in 1799 — his dissertation engaging with Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science.
He traveled to Germany and France from 1801 to 1803, a formative period in which he encountered the intellectual world of German Romanticism and Naturphilosophie at first hand. On his return he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Copenhagen, a position he held for the rest of his life. He was also a gifted popularizer and institution-builder: he founded the journal Tidsskrift for Naturvidenskaberne (1822) and the Society for the Dissemination of Natural Science (Selskabet for Naturlærens Udbredelse), which ran public lectures for a broad audience and remains active today.
His major philosophical work, Aanden i Naturen (The Spirit in Nature), appeared in 1850, the year before his death. He was by then a celebrated figure — the discoverer of electromagnetism, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the most prominent natural scientist in Danish history.
On 21 April 1820, during a lecture demonstration, Ørsted placed a magnetic compass needle near a wire carrying an electric current and observed that the needle deflected. The effect disappeared when the current was interrupted and reappeared when it was restored. This was the first experimental demonstration of a connection between electricity and magnetism — two forces that had been treated as entirely separate.
Ørsted published his findings immediately in Latin: Experimenta circa effectum conflictus electrici in acum magneticam (1820). The paper was quickly translated and circulated throughout Europe. Within months, Ampère had developed the mathematical theory of electrodynamics on its basis, and within a decade Faraday had used it to produce the first electric motor.
The discovery was not accidental in the way legend sometimes implies. Ørsted had been looking for a connection between electrical and magnetic phenomena for years, guided by his Naturphilosophie conviction that nature’s fundamental forces are expressions of a single underlying unity. The experiment confirmed what he had philosophically expected. This is philosophically important: the discovery is inseparable from the theoretical presuppositions that motivated the search.
Ørsted’s starting point is Kantian. His 1799 dissertation engages directly with Kant’s Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (1786), which grounds natural science in rational principles rather than pure empiricism. For Kant, matter is constituted by two fundamental forces — attraction and repulsion — and the task of natural philosophy is to show how the phenomena of nature follow from these rational foundations.
Ørsted accepts this framework but pushes it in a more speculative direction: if nature is rationally structured, then the human mind, which grasps that structure, must itself be continuous with nature. The laws of thought and the laws of nature cannot ultimately be disjointed. This is the kernel of Aanden i Naturen.
A tension at the core of Ørsted’s position. But this move creates a philosophical difficulty that Ørsted never fully resolved. Kant had been careful to limit the reach of rational science: the categories of the understanding apply to phenomena — to nature as it appears to us — but not to the Ding an sich, the thing-in-itself that underlies appearance. For Kant, this limit is not a temporary deficiency to be overcome by better science; it is a constitutive feature of human cognition. The rational structure we find in nature is structure that we bring to experience. Nature as it is in itself — virkelighed in the fullest sense — remains, in principle, beyond the reach of systematic thought.
Ørsted’s ambition in Aanden i Naturen strains against this limit. His claim that the laws of thought and the laws of nature are ultimately one implies that thought does not merely organize appearance but penetrates to the real itself. This is no longer Kantian — it is Hegelian. For Hegel, the Kantian Ding an sich is a philosophical abstraction that dissolves under scrutiny: genuine philosophical thought does not merely order phenomena but grasps virkelighed — actuality — through and through. The real is the rational, and the rational is the real.
Ørsted never explicitly commits to Hegel, and his scientific instincts kept him closer to empirical practice than Hegel’s speculative logic. But the logic of Aanden i Naturen pulls him in a Hegelian direction: if spirit is truly expressed in and through nature, then there can be no residue of virkelighed that is opaque to thought. This is exactly what Kierkegaard will attack — and what the Breakthrough generation, under the influence of Darwin and the natural sciences, will transform into something unrecognizable: a nature that is fully real, but rational in no conventional sense at all.
Henrik Steffens (1773–1845) — Norwegian by birth, Danish by formation, eventually a professor in Germany — was Ørsted’s closest intellectual companion in this period. Steffens had studied with Schelling in Jena and returned to Copenhagen in 1802 to deliver a series of lectures on Naturphilosophie that made an enormous impression. (Among those in the audience for one of the early Steffens lectures was Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, the philosopher’s father.)
Steffens gave Ørsted the Schellingian vocabulary for what he already believed: that nature is not a dead mechanism but the living self-expression of spirit (Geist), and that the scientist who uncovers nature’s laws is participating in nature’s own self-comprehension. The close Ørsted–Steffens friendship lasted decades; their correspondence is one of the richest sources for the Naturphilosophie milieu in Scandinavia.
The relationship is one of productive opposition. Kierkegaard knew Ørsted personally — Copenhagen’s intellectual world was small — and treated him with a certain respect as a scientist. But he was alert to the philosophical implications of Aanden i Naturen and rejected them.
For Kierkegaard, the decisive move of Ørsted’s Naturphilosophie is the identification of rational structure in nature with the structure of spirit, and thus the assimilation of the existing individual into a rational whole. This is precisely what Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy resists. The Øjeblik — the instant of decision, of faith, of becoming a self — is not a moment within nature’s unfolding. It ruptures it. The self is constituted by a quality of inwardness that no natural-scientific account can reach.
His Johannes Climacus manuscript (unpublished in his lifetime) explicitly stages this conflict: the Naturphilosophie assumption that thought and being are continuous is, for Kierkegaard, the deepest philosophical illusion of the age.
Nature as non-rational. It is worth pressing this point further, because it anticipates one of the defining themes of twentieth-century existentialism. For Ørsted, the scientist who discovers a law of nature is not imposing order on a recalcitrant world but reading off an order that was always already there — nature is, at bottom, rational all the way down. Kierkegaard denies this. Nature, for him, is not a transparent medium of rational necessity but something opaque, indifferent, and resistant to the categories with which we try to master it. The world does not answer back. It does not validate the existing individual’s longing for meaning or coherence.
This thought — that reality as such is not structured to meet the demands of human reason or human longing — runs directly into the tradition of French existentialism. Sartre’s concept of la nausée, the visceral sense of the sheer brute thereness of things that resists all conceptual domestication, is a secular radicalization of Kierkegaard’s insight. Camus’s absurde names precisely the collision between the human demand for rationality and a world that is constitutionally silent on the matter. What Camus calls the absurd is not irrationality in nature per se, but the gap between the human need for clarity and the world’s indifference to that need — an indifference Ørsted’s Naturphilosophie had refused to acknowledge.
The line from Kierkegaard to the French existentialists thus runs through a shared rejection of the Naturphilosophie inheritance: the world is not a rational whole in which the individual finds a prepared place. It is something the individual must confront without that assurance.
Rasmus Nielsen (1809–1884), professor of philosophy at Copenhagen from 1841, attempted to make the opposition between Ørsted and Kierkegaard into a stable philosophical system. Nielsen argued that faith and science occupy logically separate domains: science operates within the space of natural reason and cannot contradict faith, because faith makes claims of a wholly different kind. Darwin’s theory of natural selection, on this view, poses no threat to Christian belief — the two simply do not touch.
This position drew on both Ørsted (the positive valuation of natural science as a domain of genuine knowledge) and Kierkegaard (the insistence on faith’s incommensurability with natural reason). But Kierkegaard himself repudiated Nielsen’s appropriation, precisely because he thought Nielsen had domesticated the radicalism of the existential demand.
Georg Brandes’s early essay Dualismen i vor nyeste Philosophie (1866) subjects Nielsen’s synthesis to withering criticism. The key passage:
“Hele [Nielsens] Lære bestod jo væsenligt deri, at man tog Kierkegaards ‘Øieblikket’ i den ene Haand, Ørsteds ‘Aanden i Naturen’ i den anden, klappede dem sammen og indbandt dem i Eet.”
“The whole of [Nielsen’s] teaching essentially consisted in taking Kierkegaard’s ‘The Instant’ in one hand, Ørsted’s ‘The Spirit in Nature’ in the other, clapping them together and binding them into one.”
Brandes’s point is not merely polemical. He is identifying a genuine philosophical problem: Ørsted and Kierkegaard represent irreconcilable visions of the relationship between nature and spirit. For Ørsted, spirit is expressed in and through nature; the discovery of electromagnetism is, in a deep sense, nature becoming aware of itself. For Kierkegaard, spirit is constituted against nature, by a leap that no natural continuity can accommodate.
Nielsen’s attempt to hold both is, for Brandes, a symptom of a generation unwilling to accept the consequences of either position. The Breakthrough generation — Brandes’s own — must choose: if Darwin is right, then the naturalistic picture of the world is not merely one domain among others but a total vision, and Kierkegaard’s leap of faith is an evasion, not a solution.
This makes Dualismen a pivotal text for the course: it shows the Breakthrough generation defining itself against the Golden Age synthesis, and it identifies Ørsted’s legacy as one of the two poles that synthesis tried to hold together.
Discussion question: Is Brandes’s reading of Nielsen fair? Could one argue that Nielsen’s separation of domains is not a mere clapping-together but a principled philosophical position — one that anticipates later demarcationist views in the philosophy of science?