Iain Hamilton Grant: Reconstructing Schelling's Naturephilosophy for Contemporary Philosophy
"...it is an argument of this book, as it was of Schelling’s, that metaphysics cannot be pursued in isolation from physics."
- Iain Hamilton Grant
I'm enjoying my late night readings of Schelling's original works on naturephilosophy, which was instigated recently by the enlightening, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling, by Iain Hamilton Grant, which with its lucid, engaged, and... shall I say it - engrossing style continues to amaze me by the simplicity and power of its argument regarding the need for a contemporary revival of Schelling's naturephilosophy as both a goad and a project. These are just a few notations from my careful perusal of Grant's work. It's more of a notebook of his ideas rather than a commentary on them, and will hopefully consolidate certain motifs within my current understanding of his unique philosophical reconstruction of Schelling's naturephilosophy in the light of postkantian philosophies.
Grant abrogates the whole post-Cartesian philosophical heritage that has not only eliminated the concept of 'nature' from its horizon, but from its veritable 'existence', too. [1] He tells us that at the heart of our contemporary philosophical debate between speculative realism and anti-realism (or correlationism) "are two models of metaphysics: a one-world physics capable of the Idea, and an eliminativist practicism. The contrast could be neither more overt nor more pressing: ethicism is purchased at the cost of the elimination of nature" (ix).
Grant notes that Schelling's naturephilosophy was "synthetic with regard to the departments of the special sciences entails not that naturalists’ work submitted to the imperatives of their philosophical master’s ‘encyclopaedism’, but rather that naturalistic enquiry is indissociable from philosophizing" (ix). He sets out to "rescue Platonism from modern anti-physics"; reconstruct Schelling's dynamic physics as seen through his use of Kant and Fichte, as well as Oken and Carus; and, trace the problem-sources of transcendentalism in naturephilosophy through the perspective of both philosophers and physicists; as well as, explore the diverse conceptions that derive from Schelling's inquiries into nature and intelligence. In a final chapter he explores the work of Schelling in light of Gilles Deleuze's naturephilosophy.
1
We are always and at all times bound to the Void. With each exposition we generate the possibilities of nature from within the unconditioned ground of its generative potentiality. Like nautical pilots of some philosophical starship we launch our thought experiments from within the "universal and impersonal" medium of the Absolute. This is done through a generative, not demonstrative, process "through which productive nature itself acts on, or produces, itself: "To philosophise about nature means to create nature" (1). Nature becomes the ground of our philosophical musings, and all philosophical thought is constrained by a 'naturalistic and physicalist' ground of philosophy (2). There is no need for a transcendental subject, or big 'Other', behind the manifold workings of Nature, instead "Schelling arrives at a conception of ‘nature as subject’ ...: this infamous characterization is not a ‘senseless . . . Romantic anthropomorphism’ ..., but affirms the autonomy of nature; nature, then, not as it appears to Mind, but nature itself"(2)
Naturephilosophy is "a naturalistic ‘empiricism extended to the absolute’" (5). Schellingianism "is resurgent every time philosophy reaches beyond the Kant-inspired critique of metaphysics, its subjectivist-epistemological transcendentalism, and its isolation of physics from metaphysics" (5). Grant affirms the proposition that we should not consider Schelling’s own works the exhaustion but rather the inception of naturephilosophy, ‘Schellingianism’ designates the philosophical project of unconditioning the metaphysics of nature" (6).
1.1
Ideas of organization have been with us for some time now, but it was Schelling's "organic physics" that introduced into philosophy a "physics of organization" (11). Schelling also introduced the concept of recapitulation or "self-organization" that achieves a naturephilosophical treatment of recapitulation which is a successive unconditioning of the concept of recapitulation as regards the unit of recapitulation, which, rather than being located in a particular body, whether an atom, a chemical compound, an organism, or a planet, is itself the dynamic process of the self-construction of matter.(13) As Grant tells us this "...has far-reaching consequences concerning the reducibly naturalistic use of the concept of recapitulation: identifying a recapitulation event, in other words, is dependent upon first identifying what it is that is being recapitulated" (13). This leads to Schelling's theory of identity which "Schelling will work through successive unconditionings of the unit of recapitulation in order to reach the self-construction of matter, which is nothing other than ‘recapitulation itself’" (14). Against Kant's injunctions Schelling will reject "any naturephilosophy premised on the determination of nature in accordance with its appearing-to consciousness" (14). Grant tell us that unlike the critical philosophy of organism, Schelling is concerned with bodies, i.e., with physically determinable units of recapitulation"(14).
1.2
It is the separation of the inorganic from the organic within the philosophies of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel which centers all postkantian discourse as an 'antiphysics': "as we have already found, the basis of two-worlds metaphysics lies in a two-worlds physics: the inert, inorganic world of external nature, and the organic world from which ‘nature has withdrawn her hand’, leaving humanity free to articulate the organic body"(15). Because of this the philosophy of organism "does not provide the ground uniting nature and freedom, but merely the locus of a failed attempt to accommodate physics" (15). At the root of this organicism will be the natural law concept that "nature is determined immediately by and for intelligence’, and this "naturephilosophical contradiction will subsequently inform the bedrock of most phenomenological and all ethico-political philosophy, alongside the linguistic idealism that represents ‘nature’ as determined solely in and for language" (15).
Grant goes on to detail out the false ascription of a 'subjectivity' to nature, which is asserted by most post-Kantian philosophies in their misreading of early Schelling on the subject and "leaves the naturephilosophy prey to subsumption under the general clichés surrounding Idealism: that it anthropomorphizes nature, or that it consists solely in the determination of nature by intellect, so that nature is reduced to a nature of the phenomenalizing conscious subject’s own manufacture in accordance with essentially ethico-practical ends" (16). He continues telling us that this "principle, inherited from the ontological quietism attendant upon the Kant-Blumenbach restriction of organic causation to subjective judgement alone, informs the vast majority of postkantian developments in the philosophy of nature..."(16).
Grant reiterates that with this post-Kantian philosophy of organism, and Hegel's "suppression of inorganic externality established in his Philosophy of Nature, the ancient division of physics and ethics could be maintained (17). This would provide post-Kantian philosophy the "antinomy of teleological judgement, i.e., the mutual exteriority of nature and freedom, remains the axis around which philosophy is organized" (17). Most post-Kantian misreadings of Schelling see a discontinuity between certain phases in his development as a philosopher. Grant takes his Freedom essay as an example that demonstrates that rather "...than a substantive turn from naturephilosophy, the Freedom essay again demonstrates the persistence of naturephilosophy throughout his work, linking the emergence of the later philosophies of time, mythology and revelation, with naturephilosophy as the ‘substrate’ of philosophy in general" (17).
Grant affirms that "Naturephilosophy rejects the vitalist alibi that maintains the isolation of organic from inorganic matter. To the extent that any naturephilosophy retains a particular kind of physical organization - any body whatever - as its ‘primal type’, it remains necessarily Kant-Fichtean" (18). Grant maintains that all subsequent naturephilosophies have "invariably given the vital instance as the particular physical organization, or contingent physical product, from which philosophy may ascend to action and consciousness independent of the motions of matter in general" (18). He goes on telling us that in argument of his present work "that this has been the prevailing case wherever the philosophy of nature has suffered even the slightest return to philosophical prominence, so that the situation of contemporary philosophy, from this perspective, remains that of the immediately postkantian period. By way of the naturephilosophy, Schelling provides a rare instance of the as yet mostly untried consequences of exiting the Kantian framework which has held nature in its analogical grasp for the two hundred years since its inception" (18-19).
He concludes in this section by saying that Schelling's naturephilosophy is an unfinished project that "disputes the logico-linguistic or phenomenal determination of nature; rejects the primacy of the practical; reworks the theory of the subject as a theory not of ‘self’, but of the itself, the subject ‘kath’ auto’, and a corresponding theory, therefore, of ‘nature as subject’. It thus unconditions the construction of concepts with regard to the ‘self-construction of matter’ (IV, 4); conceptual genesis and natural genesis become one and the same; or, in other words, nature autoproduces its self" (19).
1.3
"...true philosophical science is cognition of the universe."
- Schelling
Grant's reconstruction brings to light the philosophical test that Schelling uses against all philosophical systems in which they either affirm ‘the infinite science’ of the ‘unconditioned [das Unbedingte]’, a philosophy of the absolute and thereby a naturephilosophy or they fall by the wayside as philosophies that have eliminated nature altogether. Schelling on the unconditioned in his naturephilosophy says ‘let the absolute be thought of, to start with, purely as matter, as pure identity, as sheer absoluteness’ (II, 62; 1988: 47), "writes Schelling, indicating that the primary condition vitiating the unconditioned science, ‘common to all modern philosophy’, is that ‘nature does not exist for it’" (20). Grant shows how Schelling tests his theory against Plato's physics as well as the naturalists: discovering in Plato "a one-world physicist, proposing, as natural science, the science of becoming, or dynamics" (19), and in the naturalists Schelling sets them "against Kielmeyer’s dynamic natural history, which the naturephilosophy will seek to extend, in pursuit of ‘the unconditioned in nature’ (III, 11; 2004: 13) to the Idea" (21).
In summation to this chapter Grant says,
"When, therefore, Schellingian naturephilosophy is raised, it does not merely sit episodically amongst other systems and artifacts of the antiquarian intellect, but challenges systems to reveal what they eliminate. Insofar as philosophy still leaves nature to the sciences, it continues to fail Schelling’s test, and becomes a conditioned, that is, a compromised antiphysics, an Idealism so ‘powerful’, in Jacobi’s lexis, as to eliminate nature" (21).
So the great divide in philosophy from Kant's time to our own in Grant's reading is between a speculative realism that brings nature and science(i.e., metaphysics and physics) into Schelling's 'infinite science' of the unconditioned; and a correlationist philosophy that eliminates nature altogether becoming antirealist and a compromised antiphysics of the Ideal, affirming the Kantian two-worlds theory of a correlation between mind and nature that isolates "physics from metaphysics" (5).
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII
I shall take up each chapter in a separate notebook entry.... enough for now.
1. Philosophies of Nature After Schelling Iain Hamilton Grant 2006