Systematically reinterpreting the internal dynamics of Hegel's Naturphilosophie, in an attempt to explore what such an interpretation must signify within the coordinates of the rest of the final system, is, as we have already noted, at significant odds with the resounding scorn it has received for the better part of two centuries. Bolzano, Hegel's contemporary, rejected it, as did the sober-minded scientist Helmholtz. Despite Hegel's insistence that it was Schelling who constituted, and perpetuated, the problematic reception of Naturphilosophie, he himself was dismissed along similar lines. The last two hundred years is littered with no shortage of bewilderment, though a very specific strand has been reserved for those who have confronted Hegel's writings on nature.

We can historically trace the philosophical rejection of Hegel's Naturphilosophie at least as far back as Schelling's scathing criticisms, in and around 1833–34, regarding what he saw as the unbridgeable void separating the register of Hegel's Logic from the domain of nature. Feuerbach developed his own unique variation of dissent in terms of ‘the absolute’ being nothing other than consciousness's self-alienation. Marx and Engels developed their set of criticisms of Hegel's writings on nature by elaborating, as some commentators have argued, on the criticisms first generated by Schelling. In attempting to counter what they saw as the Hegelian system's barring of dialectical-historical developments within the natural register, Marx and Engels iattempted to interpret scientific findings and phenomena in term of a distinct dialectical materialism, arguing that there could be no real sense of history that was not already an outgrowth of natural history. Therefore, part of their objective of developing a complete world outlook, not only in terms of philosophy and political economy, meant that ‘they inevitably had to arrive at the necessity … [of] generalizing in philosophical terms the main achievements of natural science, to disclose the dialectical character of the development of nature and thereby show the universality of the basic laws of materialist dialectics’.