Naturphilosophie

3. Major doctrines of Naturphilosophie

Schelling’s Naturphilosophie set the tone for many similar undertakings. Although these attempts sometimes differ very much in detail from each other, we can distinguish several recurrent tenets. First, and foremost, there is the view of the ‘unity of mind and matter’. Schelling and many Naturphilosophen argued that nature is animated, that there is an original unity or ‘identity’ of nature and mind which allows us to infer nature’s laws from the laws of the mind and vice versa: ‘The system of nature is at the same time the system of our mind’ and ‘Nature must be visible spirit, and mind invisible nature’ (Schelling [1797] 1856–61, vol. 2: 39, 56). This view was primarily directed against both Cartesian dualism and eighteenth-century materialism. It had a great impact on the Romantic movement, both in literature and science. Hans Christian Ørsted, for example, who discovered electromagnetism in 1820, claimed that all objects are materialized ideas. And according to the biologist Lorenz Oken, it was the task of Naturphilosophie ‘to show that the laws of the mind are not different from the laws of nature but that both represent each other. Philosophy of nature and philosophy of mind range, therefore, parallel to each other’ (Oken 1843: §13). Later, one of the sharpest critics of Naturphilosophie, Hermann von Helmholtz saw the principal error of this movement precisely in the mingling of the necessary laws of nature with the spontaneous activity of mind. A last remnant of the identity view of nature and mind can be found in the dual aspect view of mind and body as it was embraced by a large number of physiologists, psychologists and many philosophers up to and including Rudolf Carnap’s Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (The Logical Construction of the World) (1928).

A second doctrine is the prevalence of the organism as an explanatory model. For Schelling (as for Kant), mechanical explanations of nature have to be supplemented by organic ones. It is not possible, Schelling claimed, for the universe to be simply a causal mechanism as its organic structure is logically prior to its mechanical one. ‘One and the same principle’ is at work in both organic and inorganic nature which binds all of it ‘into a general organism’ (Schelling [1798] 1856–61, vol. 2: 350). Organisms are causally self-contained, they are their own cause and effect and they are self-movable, whereas causal mechanisms can only be moved from the outside and are therefore essentially passive. Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, who decisively influenced Schelling in his organic thought, explained the organism in terms of three organic forces: irritability, reproduction and sensibility (Kielmeyer 1793). Irritability is organic activity or movement, sensibility is organic receptivity or sensation, and reproduction refers to the metabolism, to growth and procreation.

A third related doctrine of Naturphilosophie is the unity of nature and its forces, and thereby also of science. There was a strong tendency to exhibit nature in all its different aspects as a development from a small number of fundamental forces. Ørsted, whose dissertation had examined Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, had claimed that there is a ‘unity of all the forces’ of heat, chemistry, electricity and magnetism and that ‘the former physical results [Kenntnisse] thus combine into a physics of one piece’ (Ørsted 1803: 209). Similar claims have been made by scientists such as Faraday, Mohr, Grove, J. R. Mayer and others, which eventually led to the establishment of the energy conservation principle. The inorganic as well as the organic realms were seen as directed by the same principles, so that there is no essential difference between them. This does not mean that nature reduces to mechanism, but that the inorganic world has to be conceived as the product of an inherent organic natural process. Naturphilosophie developed the tendency to impose the organic categories found in the study of nature even on culture, society and the state. In this sense, it also helped to prepare the ground both for the later materialist and naturalist movement as well as for organic conceptions of the state and society.

In viewing nature as a unity, the movement of Naturphilosophie was also influenced by Goethe’s search for an underlying idea of the organic and inorganic realms of nature. In morphology, he argued that all plants are modifications of one primordial plant, the Urpflanze, and that all plant organs were variations of a single fundamental organ, the leaf (see Goethe, J.W. von §3).

Another doctrine of Naturphilosophie concerns the developmental aspect of nature. Instead of viewing nature and its parts in static terms, Naturphilosophie tried to conceive of it as the outcome of an evolutionary graduated succession. Very often this process was seen as being initiated and maintained by a polar antagonism of forces. Models for conceiving this process were either taken by way of analogical reasoning from some philosophical source (Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations, Fichte’s idea of the self determining itself by positing the I and the not-I at the same time) or some scientific theory of the time (magnetism, galvanism, electricity, chemistry, physiology). Other sources included Goethe and Herder who also held influential theories of development. In all this, the concept of polarity played a prominent role and was seen as the continuous principle for every development and activity. Oken, for example, viewed living organisms as governed by two opposing processes: an individualizing one which increases the organism’s vitality, and a universalizing one that leads to death and is a drive to the absolute (see Absolute, the).