In denying that reality and nature are rational, Schopenhauer anticipates the naturalistic, harder-headed outlook on nature that gained ground in the mid-to-late nineteenth century (discussed in section 16.4). The proponents of this outlook endorsed varying combinations of empiricism and mechanistic materialism; amongst them, Naturphilosophie fell out of favor. Nonetheless, significant aspects of Naturphilosophie persisted into the later century—in Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos of 1845–62, for instance. Indeed, there are ways in which philosophy of nature remains relevant today, as I will note in conclusion.
16.2 SCHELLING’S PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE
Schelling took the lead in defining the philosophy of nature, in works including the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature of 1797 (hereafter Ideas), On the World-Soul of 1798, and the First Outline of a System of Philosophy of Nature of 1799 (hereafter Outline).4 Schelling was motivated to write these works by problems in both science and philosophy (fields, after all, that were not sharply demarcated in his time). Regarding science, Schelling believed that magnetic, chemical, electrical, and biological processes could not be satisfactorily explained in mechanistic terms, by reduction to underlying mechanical interactions amongst their component parts—as had been the explanatory program of the Enlightenment materialists. Schelling believed that understanding these processes required understanding their connections with one another (connections that he thought had been demonstrated by the phenomenon of galvanism),5 and thus required recognition of the priority of the whole of nature over its parts.
In the Ideas, Schelling criticized various mechanistic theories, above all the accounts of universal gravitation and attraction championed by the materialist Georges-Louis le Sage and his followers.6 For le Sage, all bodies are constantly being impinged upon from all sides by a torrent of atomic particles or corpuscles. But when two bodies partially screen one another from these surrounding currents (as if casting a shadow upon one another), an imbalance results in the forces acting on each body, so that they are drawn together as a result. This mechanism is the basis of universal gravitation and of chemical attraction, which le Sage explains from the different degrees to which different sorts of material particle are permeable by the impinging corpuscles (for example, two particles of water or of oil attract one another—unlike oil and water—because they are porous to the same degree).7
Schelling rejected as an arbitrary postulate le Sage’s basic hypothesis of a universal ether composed of atomic particles.8 To Schelling, this was just one instance of the inadequacy of mechanism generally to explain the complex interrelations amongst natural bodies. He therefore sought to provide a non-mechanistic framework within which to make sense of these processes.
The particular non-mechanistic framework that Schelling evolved reflected his philosophical concerns. Along with many others at the time, Schelling was dissatisfied with what he saw as the unresolved dualisms in Kant’s philosophy—between intuition and understanding, theoretical and practical reason, and in particular between the freedom of human agents and the causal determination of nature. According to Kant in his theoretical philosophy, we are obliged to think of ourselves as free subjects, but we cannot know whether we really are so; equally, we cannot know that we are not. This ignorance created the space for Kant to argue in his Critique of Practical Reason that, given the fact of our subjection to moral obligations, we are justified in assuming (annehmen) that we really are free, rational subjects.9 Under this assumption, which for Kant we must make as a matter of practical necessity, human agents are ultimately separate from nature, as free agents who stand out from the realm of causal determination. Thus Kant maintained in the Introduction to his Critique of Judgment that “an immeasurable gulf is fixed between the domain of the concept of nature, as the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, as the supersensible…just as if they were two different worlds.”10
This gulf left Schelling dissatisfied. On the one hand, we are to assume that we are free; on the other hand, we know that everything in nature is causally determined, including all the movements of our own bodies and all that we do as empirically existing entities. So how can we justifiably believe that we really are free? Schelling reasons that our free agency in the midst of nature is only possible if nature already exhibits a form of freedom that foreshadows human agency. In that case, our belonging to nature will not threaten but, precisely, enable our free agency.
The idea that nature exhibits a form of freedom may seem strange, and its meaning is not immediately clear. It is not obvious that there is any nature as a whole, over and above all the myriad particular kinds of natural thing—plants, animals, stones, chemical processes, electrical reactions, and so on. It also seems clear that (except perhaps for some animal species) none of these determine how they act on the basis of rational principles. Yet self-determination from rational principles is the sort of freedom with which Schelling, following Kant, is concerned. This leaves it uncertain in what sense nature can exhibit freedom. Nonetheless, Schelling sets himself to provide a comprehensive account of nature as a realm in which freedom is present in a form that prefigures rational human self-determination—in which “universal life…reveals itself in manifold forms, in progressive developments, in gradual approximations to freedom.”11
One might think that this project of understanding nature as a realm of freedom is so unpromising that it is better simply to accept a gulf between two perspectives from which we must look at the world: a practical-moral perspective under which we are free agents, and a theoretical-scientific perspective under which all is causally determined. But for Schelling, this acceptance conflicts with (what Kant himself had recognized to be) a basic requirement of our intellect: that our knowledge should be systematically ordered and unified.12
Yet the demand that our knowledge must form a systematically ordered whole need not lead us towards the philosophy of nature. That demand could lead elsewhere—as it did for Fichte, motivating him to reconstruct idealism based on a first principle from which all knowledge could be systematically derived. His principle was that “I am I,” the self knows itself—according to the successive versions of his Wissenschaftslehre of the 1790s. Since Schelling was for a time enamored of Fichte and retained important ideas from him, we must briefly reconsider Fichte’s idealism.
For Fichte, the single principle underlying all knowledge is that the self knows itself.13 For in any knowing, the self also implicitly knows itself to be engaged in this knowing, tacitly conceiving itself as the agent doing the knowing. This, for Fichte, is a necessary precondition of all knowledge, and of all conscious experience insofar as in having experience one is in a cognitive state. Moreover, for Fichte, it is only by knowing itself that the self is a self: for a necessary condition of being a self, not an object, is that one be self-conscious or self-knowing. Thus, in knowing itself, the self makes itself into the very self it knows itself to be: it produces (or “posits”, setzt) itself, and it only exists as a self insofar as it continuously does this self-positing.
Now, the self cannot know itself in this way, as it must if it is to know anything at all, unless it is able to grasp itself as a finite—determinate and limited—agent.14 So the self can only know itself if it is situated within an outer, surrounding world of objects that limits or checks it. Equally, the self-knowing self is necessarily an agent, so the world must limit its agency but not reduce it to nothing. The self, therefore, must assert its agency against the limits imposed by objects, by striving to transform those objects so that they embody the self’s agency.15 Thus, the self must inhabit a world of objects that it seeks to remodel in its own image—for only on condition of this exercise of practical efficacy is any experience possible. Fichte spelled out the practical consequences in his popular essay The Vocation of Humankind:
Nature must gradually enter a condition which…keeps its force steady in a definite relation with the power which is destined to control it—the power of man. …Cultivated lands sha
ll animate and moderate the inert and hostile atmosphere of primeval forests, deserts, and swamps. …nature is to become ever more transparent to us until we can see into its most secret core, and human power…shall control it without effort and peacefully maintain any conquest once it is made.16
In sum, Fichte attempted to overcome the Kantian gulf between theoretical and practical reason by reconstructing all knowledge from one principle (I = I) that enshrines the unity of knowledge and practical freedom (I know what I make). Fichte also sought to bring together freedom and nature by maintaining that human freedom is only possible within a natural world that opposes it—but thus also on condition that human agents constantly strive to remodel the natural world. The insistence that we must practically transform nature is thus integral to Fichte’s philosophy.
Troubled by this insistence, Schelling wrote to Fichte in October 1801 that: “It is sufficiently known to me in what small region of consciousness nature must fall according to your concept of it. It has for you no speculative significance at all, only a teleological one.”17 Schelling believes, pace Fichte, that if mind and agency really depend on nature, then this dependency must be understood in non-oppositional terms, such that nature does not merely limit but rather prefigures and enables human agency—thus occupying a very extensive region of consciousness: its entire set of background preconditions.
Nevertheless, Schelling retained some extremely important lessons from Fichte. Above all, Schelling maintained the idea that self-knowledge is the paradigm of knowledge. I can know myself, Schelling believes, because in this case knower and known are identical. This gives us the following principle: for me to be able to know something, it must be identical to me.18 I can know nature, then, only if it has an identical structure to that of knowing human subjectivity: “so long as I myself am identical with Nature, I understand what a living nature is as well as I understand my own life.”19 Moreover, we can and do know about nature, as evidenced by the dramatic increase in scientific knowledge in the modern era. Since this knowledge is only possible if nature is identical to the knower, it must be the case that nature really does have an identical structure to the knowing subject: “Nature…itself…must not only express, but realize itself, the laws of our mind.”20 Even if this identity of structure is not immediately apparent, it must really exist. This sets a task for the philosopher of nature: to re-examine scientific findings and bring out the evidence of underlying identity of structure which these findings provide, which will often require re-interpretation of these findings.
This line of thought informs Schelling’s Ideas. Surveying the sciences of his time, he concludes from them that all natural forms and processes are constituted by a polar opposition between two forces of attraction and repulsion. He criticizes Newtonian atomism, arguing that even supposedly basic units of matter are “originally a product of [these] opposed forces.”21 So too is the “diversity of matter,” the whole array of complicated forms into which matter is structured. Vast as this array is, there are discernible parallels between all the natural forms—between gravitational attraction, magnetism, and chemical affinity, for example. The parallels do not arise because all these processes take place within the same ether of minute corpuscles, as for le Sage. Rather, for Schelling, the parallels arise because all these processes manifest the same basic structure—opposition between polar forces—at different levels. Nature is composed not from material atoms but polar forces.
Methodologically, Schelling does not proceed in the Ideas by stipulating that these polar forces exist and then trying to deduce empirical natural forms from them. Rather, he takes empirical findings as his starting-point and concludes that, to understand these findings adequately, we must recognize that polar forces pervade nature. Schelling is not advancing a purely speculative account of nature, but setting out an interpretive framework in which to make sense of empirical findings. Insofar as these findings can be made sense of within his framework (better sense, he hopes, than rival mechanistic frameworks permit), this justifies the overall view that polar forces structure the natural world.
Now, this scientific evidence of polarity also provides evidence that nature has the same structure as subjectivity—for subjectivity, Schelling argues, exhibits a version of the polarity of attraction and repulsion.22 The subject first expands outwards to know about objects in the world outside it. Yet in doing so, the subject must also tacitly know itself as the one doing the knowing. To that extent, the subject equally pulls back inwards upon itself. When contemporary science shows that nature is structured by polar forces, then, it equally shows that nature observes the same polarity as the subject does. Nature shares the structure of the mind, which confirms in turn that we can know nature as it really, objectively, is: “The system of nature is at the same time the system of our mind.”23
What Schelling had begun to believe in the Ideas, though, was not only that nature is composed of polar forces, but also that there are manifold levels of nature each embodying a particular level of realization of these two forces. Their polarity at one level gives us gravitation, at the next level magnetism, then electrical affinity, and so on. Thus, nature is a hierarchy in which its more developed manifestations exhibit more dynamic antagonism between their component forces (as opposed to mechanical inertia).
Apparently, then, nature is composed of one single fundamental structure—the interdependence of opposed forces—that elaborates itself at different levels of realization. By implication, nature is one vast self-organizing whole—as Schelling concluded in his next work, On the World-Soul of 1798. For it is the nature of an organism—as Schelling took from Kant—to organize itself, on the basis of its original concept or principle, into a whole ensemble of differentiated yet interlocking members that collectively realize that concept. Insofar as nature organizes itself, it exists as a whole over and above its parts—that is, the various everyday natural things with which we are familiar in experience. Hence Schelling claims that nature as a whole exhibits freedom, ordering itself in line with its concept in a way that approximates to human self-determination.24
Schelling re-organized his approach to nature once again in his Outline. This time, he argues on a priori grounds that nature must originally be pure productive activity—it must be so if any natural items are to come to exist, to be produced, at all. To get from this pure productivity to any determinate natural objects, productive force must limit or fixate itself to constitute these things.25 This is only possible if productivity is limited by an opposing force that inhibits it; otherwise pure productivity would “dissipate itself at infinite speed.”26 To use Schelling’s own analogy, a river only forms eddies when its flow encounters resistance. Necessarily, then, all natural forms are composed from varying proportions of productive and inhibiting force.
A whole gamut of natural forms then arises, because productive force always bursts beyond any form in which it becomes confined. The outcome is, again, that nature is a hierarchy, “a dynamically graded series [Reihe] of stages in nature.”27 Since productive force reasserts itself more forcefully each time it bursts beyond its former boundaries, natural forms arise in which productivity increasingly prevails over inhibition, which therefore are increasingly dynamic and alive. At the highest level of this hierarchy, productive force passes over into human agency: the highest level of nature is simultaneously the lowest level of mind.
The overall vision that emerges from these works by Schelling is that nature is an organic, self-organizing whole. Nature organizes itself by dividing itself into polar forces that interact antagonistically to produce a hierarchy of kinds of natural product. Although Schelling now (in the Outline) advances his idea of these opposed forces on a priori grounds, he does not attempt to deduce from this idea what natural forms exist. Rather, he uses this a priori idea as a basis for reviewing and reinterpreting scientific findings. Inasmuch as this idea enables him to reinterpret scientific findings so that they make good sense and cohere as a whole, th
is provides further, empirical warrant for his a priori claims. Reciprocally, his re-interpretation of scientific findings gives them further non-empirical justification: a priori and empirical considerations thus work together.28
In this as in other respects, there is a marked optimism in Schelling’s approach to nature. We can understand nature, and nature in itself is such that we can understand it. Because “the system of nature is the system of our mind” we find ourselves everywhere in nature—we are at home in it. And nature makes possible our own freedom: although we depend on nature, this dependency is the source of our very capacity for rational self-determination. This optimism reflects the way that Schelling regards nature as at once energetically creative and rational. Because it is structured by polar forces (creative energies), nature shares the (rational) structure of the human mind, so that we can know it. And in structuring itself into polar forces, nature is doing what it rationally must do to realize its purpose—which is to be productive. Nature thus organizes itself in a way that is at once rational and embodies productive energy. This emphasis that nature is rational was taken further by Hegel.
16.3 HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE
Hegel’s mature, definitive view of the natural world is presented in his Philosophy of Nature. This is the middle volume of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, published in outline first in 1817 then, with revisions, in 1827 and 1830.
Hegel’s philosophy of nature—like Schelling’s—has two fundamental elements, epistemological and metaphysical. Epistemologically, Hegel maintains that the philosopher of nature must take up empirical scientific findings and re-establish them on an a priori basis. In its “origin and formation,” he says, philosophy of nature depends upon empirical science, but it then reconstructs scientific findings on the new basis of “the necessity of the concept”:
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Page 61
