Naturphilosophie

1. Kant and Fichte

The leading role among the various trends in Naturphilosophie was played by Schelling’s philosophy of nature. To understand it, it is necessary to examine also the philosophy of Kant and subsequently that of Fichte.

Kant had a threefold influence on the movement of Naturphilosophie: through his Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science) (1786) where he took forces as the defining properties of matter; through his third critique, the Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment) (1790), where he treated the concept of purpose in nature, and finally in providing a frame for these ideas through the transcendental idealism of his first critique, the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) (1781/87).

In his Metaphysical Foundations Kant tried to clarify the concept of matter as it has to be presupposed by all possible scientific investigation. In contesting Newton’s views, he saw matter as constituted by the opposing forces of attraction and repulsion. Matter fills space by its repulsive force. The resulting dispersion is counteracted and limited by an attractive force. Thus Kant arrives at a dynamic view of matter which takes active opposing forces as fundamental and which avoids the conception of the atom and of empty space. His theory advanced a dynamic view of nature (‘dynamism’) as a research programme in physics, and made similar conceptions of the sciences appear in a new light (for example, positive and negative forces in magnetism and electricity).

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant tried to come to terms with the teleological structure of nature. Organisms as products of nature cannot be completely explained in the causal way in which one would explain a mechanical system. For in organisms not only do the parts determine the whole, but the purpose guiding the organism as a whole also determines its parts. In understanding organism and nature as a whole we have thus to grasp it as fulfilling a purpose, to see it as a self-organizing system which has the cause and effect of its action in itself (Kant 1790: §64). However, since we can talk of purposes only in relation to free action and since nature is not an intelligent being we can ascribe purposes to nature only in a metaphorical, regulative sense, as if it were a free acting creature with its own purposes. Our grasp of organic nature is therefore inherently subjective and can never reach the objective validity of explanations by mechanical causality. Later Naturphilosophen attempted to overcome this Kantian limitation and to furnish nature with an objective, purposive structure which is constitutive of it, and thus to see nature as an autonomous and even indeterministic system.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had claimed that experience is not passively received by our mind but is determined and even produced by categories intrinsic to our own understanding. The unity of our self-consciousness, the synthetic apperception, as the ‘highest point’ of philosophy is responsible for our sense impressions being synthesized into genuine knowledge. Thus every philosophy has to start with an inquiry into the transcendental conditions of the mind itself which make knowledge possible.

Before he became acquainted with Kant’s writings, Johann Gottlieb Fichte believed determinism to be unavoidable. His view changed dramatically, however, when he realized that Kant’s transcendental idealism can be radicalized so as to make room for absolute human freedom. Nature is a system of necessity only because it is conceived by us that way. In Kant, the unity of self-consciousness was only the formal condition of our knowledge; some material must be given to our senses which ultimately stems from the thing-in-itself. For Kant, the process of being affected by objects does not depend on the self. Fichte, however, came to reject the idea of the thing-in-itself and claimed that the unity of self-consciousness is also the material condition of our knowledge. The self with its capacity for synthesizing knowledge is not reacting to something given, it is autonomously producing its reality, including itself. Knowledge of objects is derived from an initial act of self-positing; objects are the result of a law-governed production of the ego. The ‘I’, the self, is in this case not to be thought of as the consciousness of an individual person, but as a general structure independent of individual realization.