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Naturphilosophie

DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-DC092-1
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DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-DC092-1
Version: v1,  Published online: 1998
Retrieved March 28, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/naturphilosophie/v-1

2. Schelling and the Naturphilosophen

Schelling originally started in complete harmony with Fichte’s viewpoint, but later gradually shifted away from it. Whereas Fichte stressed the certainty of which the I disposes in positing itself, Schelling tried to uncover the origin of the I, the kind of being from which it stems. I am! My I comprises a being which precedes all thinking and conceiving’ (Schelling [1795] 1856–61, vol. 1: 167). This being is now seen as more comprehensive than the ego: namely nature. The I is not its own product, as Fichte would have it, but the I and the material objects are produced by nature as a ground deeper than the I. ‘Nature’s reality stems from herself – she is her own product – a whole which is organized out of itself and organized by itself’ (Schelling [1799] 1856–61, vol. 3: 17). With this move, Schelling could ascribe to nature the structure which Fichte had claimed for the I. Schelling also thought that this would make it possible to overcome the limitations which Kant thought were necessary in our grasp of nature. Nature can now be seen as a reality which is a self-determining system for which purpose is a constitutive idea and not a regulative one as Kant had it.

From 1797 to 1806 Schelling made various attempts to formulate his philosophy of nature. This necessarily brought him into conflict with Fichte’s soulless mechanical conception of nature. For Fichte nature was just the ‘system of necessity’, the inanimate realm of the ‘not-I’ or ‘non-ego’, posited by the I itself. Schelling, however, envisaged nature as a vital process from whose activity the consciousness of the ego and the mind emerges. Whereas Fichte asked how the self gets at nature, Schelling had the problem of how nature finally arrives at the I.

At the beginning of his development away from Fichte, Schelling envisaged Naturphilosophie as being of equal status with transcendental philosophy; from 1801 onwards, however, Naturphilosophie became primary for Schelling and independent from it. He claimed that we cannot grasp nature by merely investigating her products as they present themselves to our experience. This would be to see nature merely as an inanimate object, as natura naturata. Nature as ‘productivity’, or ‘absolute activity’, in its ‘infinite becoming’ requires studying her as natura naturans, as a subject, a productive process which eventually gives rise to mind and crystallizes in its products (Schelling [1799] 1856–61, vol. 3: 284). This view eventually flowed into a critique of Newtonian mechanical physics taken as the paradigm of modern science. Mechanism starts from material bodies which are supposed to have the property of attracting and/or repulsing each other. Yet, in order to conceive nature as an entity that is able to produce the self and the objects in like manner, it is necessary to give attraction and repulsion a more basic status and to take them as defining properties from which material objects and also consciousness are derived. Schelling did not attack the experimental and empirical side of science but its premature objectivism which leaves out the subjective element in nature and its developmental aspect.

In carrying out his programme Schelling was influenced by the experimental physicist and founder of electrochemistry, Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–1810), and influenced him in turn. Ritter pleaded for a strong connection of galvanism and chemistry and saw the living organism as a system of nested galvanic chains. When he found that the galvanic process is not necessarily bound to organic material, he considered galvanic action to be the key to the activity of the whole universe.

Hegel was the other post-Kantian idealist who occupied himself with Naturphilosophie. He was decisively stimulated by Schelling before he came to work out a fundamentally different system. For Hegel, nature as the realm of the idea in its otherness is not to be grasped as an evolutionary process but as a conceptual development of the idea on the way to self-knowledge.

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Citing this article:
Heidelberger, Michael. Schelling and the Naturphilosophen. Naturphilosophie, 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-DC092-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/naturphilosophie/v-1/sections/schelling-and-the-naturphilosophen.
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