The “eternal and necessary bond between Philosophy and Physics”

This article was downloaded by: [University of Saskatchewan Library] On: 25 July 2012, At: 14:45 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20 The “eternal and necessary bond between Philosophy and Physics” Iain Hamilton Grant a a School of Cultural Studies, University of the West of England, Frenchay Campus, Bristol BS16 1QY, UK E-mail: Version of record first published: 31 Aug 2006 To cite this article: Iain Hamilton Grant (2005): The “eternal and necessary bond between Philosophy and Physics” , Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 10:1, 43-59 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09697250500225164 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-andconditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

ANGEL AK I Downloaded by [University of Saskatchewan Library] at 14:45 25 July 2012 journal of the theoretical humanities volume 10 number 1 april 2005 What Schelling calls ‘‘philosophy of nature,’’ does not merely and not primarily mean the treatment of a special area ‘‘nature,’’ but means the understanding of nature in terms of the principle of Idealism, that is, in terms of freedom [. . .]. Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom 94 What ultimately is the essence of his [Fichte’s] entire understanding of nature? [. . .] Actually, nothing but a moralizing of the entire world that undermines life and hollows it out, a true disgust towards all nature and vitality except what there is of this in the subject, the crude extolling of morality and the doctrine of morals as the only reality in life and science. Schelling, SW VII: 18–19 resenting Schelling’s Naturphilosophie in the ethical or practical terms for which Schelling castigated the inadequacies of ‘‘the Fichtean philosophy’s’’ concept of nature, the precepts underlying Heideggerianism are here shown, like those underlying Fichteanism, to be ‘‘the fruit of a culture’’ in which ‘‘unnature now actually serves as nature’’ (SW VII: 80). Schelling in particular, but the Naturphilosophen in general, never stopped railing against ethics as antiphysics; even Oken, for instance, greatly despised 2 as an arch-idealist and an intolerable meddler in ‘‘organic physics,’’ argues that ‘‘an ethics apart from a philosophy of nature is a nonentity, a bare contradiction, just as a flower without a stem is a non-existent thing’’ (1847, 656). Therefore, the extent to which Heideggerianisms remain possible – the extent, that is, to which morality is ‘‘crudely extolled as the only reality’’ – is the extent to which our philosophical culture is the victim of an Idealism it has invented to P iain hamilton grant THE ‘‘ETERNAL AND NECESSARY BOND BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND PHYSICS’’1 a repetition of the difference between the fichtean and schellingian systems of philosophy disguise the physicalism on whose rejection its metaphysics is in fact grounded. When Badiou (2000, 100) therefore sets contemporary philosophy – particularly of the popular (because undemanding) ‘‘post-metaphysical’’ variety3 – not merely the question ‘‘Is metaphysics still possible?,’’ but rather the challenge ‘‘Are we capable of it?,’’ we here explore a prospect Badiou himself deems ‘‘impossible’’; that is, whether the capacity for metaphysics is not dependent on the ‘‘true and necessary juncture of philosophy and physics’’ (SW VII: 101). In what follows, we will attempt to specify the dimensions of the problem and to outline a solution.4 Accordingly, antiphysics has at least a two hundred year history, established so that the ‘‘primacy of pure practical reason’’ counters ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/05/010043^17 ß 2005 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/09697250500225164 43

Downloaded by [University of Saskatchewan Library] at 14:45 25 July 2012 systems of philosophy Kant’s late return to Naturphilosophie in what Schelling knew as Transition between Metaphysics and Physics (SW VI: 8). In other words, the immediately post-Kantian situation remains a contested zone, bifurcating into, on one side, the transition between physics and metaphysics; and, on the other, the Fichtean antiphysics Heidegger betrays in the form of a Schelling for whom nature must be subsumed under freedom, or even become an artefact of it, ‘‘a product of intelligence,’’ as Fichte has it (W XI: 362). The latter solution is not, however, restricted to Heidegger: Jason Wirth’s Conspiracy of Life repeats this interpretation of Naturphilosophie, rendering its practicism a priori by subjecting it to the imperatives of self-evaluative life, which Schelling disparaged as Fichte’s ‘‘economic-teleological’’ anti-ontology (SW VII: 17). Accordingly, Badiou’s characterisation of Deleuze’s metaphysics, which latter draws immensely on Idealist precursors,5 as subjecting the concept to ‘‘the trial of biological evaluation’’ (1994, 63), repeats the ‘‘test of life’’ into which Jaspers (1955, 114) transforms Schelling’s philosophy as a whole (although Schelling mentions it only once, at SW XIII: 177). The evaluative vitalism of Jaspers–Badiou not only echoes Heidegger’s (1941) subsumption of nature by freedom but itself accords with the generally Fichtean tenor of a great deal of philosophical and scientific commentary by Schelling’s contemporaries. In an article published in the philosopher’s New Journal of Speculative Physics (I,3), the physicist Karl Friedrich Windischmann, for instance, declared in 1802 that Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, like all possible philosophical approaches to nature, ‘‘pursues the physical only under the protection and direction of the ethical’’ (Schelling 1969, 91), while in the previous year’s Journal of Speculative Physics (I,2 1801), the physician Karl August Eschenmayer contended that, for Naturphilosophie, ‘‘all laws of nature are simply transposed from our mind, [and] the first impulse of nature dwells in ourselves’’ (Schelling 2001, 267), in the form of the equation ‘‘spontaneity ¼ World Soul,’’ which Eschenmayer interprets as a strict Fichtean.6 In the above sense at least, Heidegger accords with common sense regarding philosophical idealism. This accord is far from accidental, but attests to the essentially Fichtean solution to the metaphysics of nature underwriting the predominant trajectories of contemporary philosophy. It is as a consequence of this that our philosophy idealises Naturphilosophie, rather than, as Schelling maintained, providing the ‘‘physical explanation of idealism’’ (SW IV: 76). Beyond the self-limitations of a philosophy that rejects physis such as Schelling ridiculed in Fichte, the problem not only of a naturalist ontology (physicalist metaphysics) but also of the ontology of nature itself (the metaphysics of physis), has assumed increasing urgency in a variety of fields. For example, while Deleuze asserts that metaphysics must necessarily ‘‘embrace all the concepts of nature and freedom’’ (1994, 19), Badiou declares such a ‘‘philosophy ‘of ’, or rather [. . .] as nature’’ to be ‘‘a contemporary impossibility’’ (1994, 63–64). While Bonsepien opposes a mathematical to a speculative Naturphilosophie,7 numbering Schelling amongst the latter as serving, in proper Fichtean ‘‘economic-teleological’’ manner (SW VII: 17), moral ends, this simple, ‘‘romantic’’ and common equation is rejected both by Walther Zimmerli (in Hasler, 1981), who ironically deploys the arch Fichtean Eschenmayer to demonstrate the mathematical roots of Schelling’s theory of the powers (Potenzlehre), and, more recently, by Châtelet’s recovery of the mathematical dimensions of the naturephilosophical project. The very terms, meanwhile, in which the avatars of practicism in philosophy obtained their ideal and effective-actual primacy, have resurfaced as the poles by which the ontology of nature itself – that is, metaphysics – is contemporarily articulated. For example, the Naturphilosoph C.G. Carus’ Organon of the Cognition of Nature and Mind (1856) argued that ‘‘nature’’ be reconceived as ‘‘Becoming’’ (‘‘das Werdende,’’ in Bernouilli and Kern 1926, 303 n.), echoes in the reconception of nature provoked by the sciences of complexity (Heuser-Kessler 1986).8 Both, however, are opposed by Fichte’s practicist argument that not only is ‘‘all change [. . .] contrary to the concept of nature’’ (W III: 115; 2000, 105) but the resultant ‘‘being’’ is ‘‘secondary to and derived from activity’’ (W I: 499; 1982, 69), the ‘‘inert residuum of an exhausted force’’ (W XI: 364). 44

Downloaded by [University of Saskatchewan Library] at 14:45 25 July 2012 grant Heidegger’s claim that ‘‘freedom’’ is the ‘‘principle of Idealism’’ remains, then, true only of our false idealism. Accordingly it blazes the trail that practically all post-Heideggerian Schellingian interpretations will follow, from Jaspers to Habermas to, most recently, Wirth. What makes Heidegger’s accomplishment all the more perverse is that it achieves this primatisation of the practical as the only ‘‘possible’’ philosophical approach to nature. A naturalistic Naturphilosophie, speculative physics as such – the mere mention of such obviously metaphorical conceits brings peristaltically immediate reactions: ‘‘it’s impossible’’ (1994: 64), cries Badiou, ‘‘except as narrative, description, or a novel’’; a ‘‘continental science fiction’’ narrative, adds Bowie (2005, 46), only to erupt, ‘‘[don’t they] realize that hardly anybody is listening anymore?’’ Likewise, when contemporary philosophers turn – uncharacteristically – to the subject of nature, and of Naturphilosophie’s naturalism, they repeat Heidegger’s transmutation of physis into freedom, as in the following, excerpted from the Introduction to the recent translation of Schelling’s First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature: It is often overlooked that the method of construction [which Schelling deploys in his naturephilosophy] [. . .] also involves, in the act of postulating, the engagement of human freedom in transcending mechanism from the start. Not only epistemological and ontological, the philosophy of nature is an expressly ethical project. (Peterson 2003, xxxiii) What could better illustrate the primacy of the practical over the theoretical, the triumph of a merely ‘‘praxical philosophy,’’ or the postulation of a ‘‘good beyond being’’? The Heideggerian understanding of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is thus established beyond question. Krell is therefore right when, proposing to investigate the forces of ‘‘birthing and dying’’ in the naturephilosophies of Novalis, Hegel and Schelling, he condemns contemporary philosophy for being ‘‘so busy making speeches about ethics and politics,’’ and for its failure to philosophise on the sheer scale of so-called Idealism, precisely because of our ignorance of physics (in the extended sense of the term). That said, it is an alarming indication 45 of a philosophy not merely antipathetic towards but actually incapable of metaphysics that, rather than attempting to correct these flaws, Krell mobilises merely textual or philological apparatii to engage a merely ‘‘logical’’9 nature, and focuses even this limited rubric on those natural phenomena that affect life and death alone (disease, sexuality). Leaving aside the question of a ‘‘philology of nature’’ for the moment, Krell is not alone in treating animality or life as marking the limits of thinkable or free nature; we can see, for instance, no other reason for Badiou’s invocations of ‘‘organicity’’ and the ‘‘great animal totality’’ in his (1994) assessments of Deleuze’s philosophy of nature. For present purposes, the most recent iteration of this paradigm, which might for the present be called the ‘‘organo-ethical,’’ can be found in Jason Wirth’s (2003) ‘‘meditations on Schelling,’’ entitled The Conspiracy of Life, where everything is brought together: Levinas’s ‘‘good beyond being’’ is invoked from the outset (2003, 6ff.), and the meditations themselves begin with living and with dead dogs, painted, poetic and rhetorical, all collated under the rubric of an exploration of ‘‘F.W.J. Schelling, a great – and greatly neglected – philosopher of life’’ (2003, 1). It may seem simply ironic that a Lebensphilosophie should end with the requirement that nature be ‘‘murdered’’ (2003, 94f.), but there is more than irony at stake, as Wirth equally contends. We will argue that ‘‘nature-cide’’ is the Fichtean answer Schelling rejects as ontologically inconsistent to the transcendental question posed in the Oldest System-Program of German Idealism: ‘‘how must a world be constituted for a moral being?’’ (in Frank and Kurz 1975, 110); and the solution that Wirth’s ‘‘meditations’’ yields does not follow merely ironically or contingently, but, we shall argue, necessarily from the practicist, ethico-political philosophy that not only determines the address to relatively underexplored corners of German Idealist philosophy but also constitutes the default of contemporary philosophy in general. Yet the practicist ‘‘deduction’’ of ‘‘nature for a moral being’’ ignores that the subject (both grammatically and metaphysically) of the question is ‘‘the world,’’ or at very least, its being qua constituted; the problem, in other words, is not

Downloaded by [University of Saskatchewan Library] at 14:45 25 July 2012 systems of philosophy how freedom can give rise to nature but how nature can give rise to freedom. As we shall see, this is precisely the reverse of the position that Fichte’s most naturephilosophical of texts – ‘‘Propositions for the Elucidation of the Essence of Animals’’ (henceforth Propositions) – adopts. Even Schelling’s Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom is overt regarding the one-sidedness of Fichteanism’s ‘‘free world,’’ as we shall see. Not only the nature of the problem but also the nature of the transcendental, is thus altered. The transcendental dimension of the problem of nature, which is automatically assumed to be resolved by the ‘‘primacy of practical reason’’ inherited from Fichteanised Kantianism, is therefore crucial to a post-Kantian naturalism: in what regard is physis itself transcendental, that is, the unconditioned-conditioning? Just as, therefore, Badiou’s dismissal of Kant (2000, 46) follows too swiftly from his anxiety regarding the reinstitution of a ‘‘classicism’’ twisted by the modernist addition of ‘‘freedom,’’ making it impossible for him to investigate the problem of the transcendental (a crucial element of Deleuze’s metaphysics); so too his rejection of naturephilosophy as ‘‘an impossibility’’ deprives philosophy of the means to meet the challenge he sets it regarding not merely ‘‘Is metaphysics still possible?,’’ but more ‘‘poetico-existentially’’ (a crucial element both of Guattari’s and Badiou’s practicism), ‘‘Are we capable of it?’’ (2000, 100). Such practicisms leave a nature that is the residuum of freedom; a ‘‘philosophy of nature’’ reducible to a logos of physis; or a ‘‘nature’’ extending no further than the phenomena of life: these restricted concepts mark the incapacity of contemporary philosophy not only for metaphysics but also, as Krell acknowledges (1997, 2) only then to demonstrate, for physics. The dimensions of the problem of a philosophy of nature to be introduced here are: 1. The nature, limitations, and philosophical ubiquity of Fichtean nature. 2. The differentiation of Schellingian from Fichtean Naturphilosophie. 3. How is a Transcendental Naturephilosophy possible, and why is it necessary? I fichteanism and animality: naturephilosophy as two-worlds antiphysics THEORY OF FORMING NATURE. Nature should become moral. We are its educator – its moral tangent – its moral attractor [Reize]. Novalis, Wercke 450 Intellect and thing inhabit two worlds, between which there is no bridge. Fichte W I: 436; 1982, 17 Life – infinite metabolic reciprocity in oneself, but outwardly directed [. . .] Fichte W XI: 365 The ubiquity of Fichteanism in contemporary philosophy may be assessed not only by the number of works bearing his name (Martin 1997; Zöller 1998; Breazeale and Rockmore 2002), although even this seems to crop up where we least expect it (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 207; Alliez 2004, 30).10 Rather, a covert species of Fichteanism continues to inflect the majority of philosophical encounters with Schelling,11 and thereby the nature of the philosophy of nature. Recent studies of Schelling by Wolfgang Bonsepien (1997, 165), Camilla Warnke (1998, 195), and Thomas Bach (2001) echo Dietrich von Engelhardt and Nelly Tsouyopoulos (in Hasler 1981) in demonstrating the same incapacity to distinguish the Schellingian from the Fichtean philosophies as Hegel (1977a, 79ff.) found in Reinhold. Again, it is not in their overt mentions of Fichte alone that their Fichteanism consists, but rather in their attempt to redefine Schelling’s philosophy of nature as restricted to animal particularity. Again, this is less Schelling than Fichte, whose Propositions (1800) constitutes the latter’s attempt to demonstrate, against Schelling’s accusations to the contrary,12 that the ‘‘science of knowledge’’ can indeed address nature, which ‘‘is not so alien to practical philosophy as it may seem on first glance’’ (GA II,3: 243–44). Investigating what kind of nature this might be, in order to differentiate Naturphilosophie from the ‘‘science of knowledge,’’ Schelling is forced to note against Fichteanism that ‘‘nature is also partly non-living’’ (SW VII: 10), precisely because Fichte explicitly denies this, arguing instead that life exhausts 46

Downloaded by [University of Saskatchewan Library] at 14:45 25 July 2012 grant nature, so that non-living nature is only the ‘‘inert residuum of exhausted force’’ (W XI: 364). This examination of Fichteanism is undertaken for two reasons, therefore: firstly, because its ubiquity will demonstrate its philosophical actuality; secondly, because besides offering an effective metaphysics of the practical, and experimenting in the field of the transcendental, Fichte’s ontology is tortured by a nature it disavows: ‘‘It pressures him, hits him, gnaws at him from all directions, forever threatening and restricting’’ (SW VII: 17). Although an ‘‘immense gulf that Nature has appointed between animate and inanimate Creation’’ might be mistaken for a metaphysicians’ idea, it derives in fact from Blumenbach (über den Bildungstrieb, Göttingen, 2nd ed., 1789, 71), and thus from the natural sciences.13 It is, however, Kant’s Critique of Judgement that is to be credited with transforming this from a physically into a transcendentally divided nature, now comprising, as Schelling critically remarked (SW VI: 8), an ‘‘organic nature entirely separate from nature in general.’’ For Kant, a ‘‘Newton of the blade of grass’’ (Ak.V: 400; 1987, 282), i.e., a physics of organisation, is not merely contingently, as a matter of historical fact, but necessarily unavailable, due to transcendental conditions, since organisation cannot be judged a constituent of nature itself. The ‘‘gulf ’’ the third Critique seeks famously to bridge (Ak.V: 175; 1987, 14)14 is no longer a product of nature in nature, as Blumenbach conceived it; rather, nature becomes the divided product of a transcendental differentiator. Nor is Kant alone: philosophers show a disturbing propensity to adopt theses stemming from the natural sciences as axioms for addressing nature, while historians of ideas look to such sources as grounds for authority. Thus Blumenbach’s distinction survives in Bernouilli and Kern’s (1926, viii) identification of opposing biocentric and logocentric, vitalist or formalist, tendencies within Naturphilosophie. It has recently been repeated in Badiou’s stark separation of ‘‘animal from number’’ (1994, 63) and, consequently, of naturephilosophy from ontology. In both these latter instances, while Kant’s transcendental subtlety has been supplanted by critical15 stringency, a further dimension of the 47 problem is invented. This new dimension consists in the increasing tendency to define the whole of nature as animality, not to acknowledge that ‘‘nature is also partly non-living’’ (SW VII: 10). From this perspective, it is surprising that Fichteanism is usually considered only as the practical completion of the Kantian critical system, as the subjugation of knowledge to the idea, as making knowledge the artefact of an activity that renders the latter primary with respect to the former.16 Although, as we have suggested, this simplistic view accords with the various forms that contemporary philosophy has sculpted for the primacy of the practical over metaphysics, Fichte does not straightforwardly assert this without transforming the constitution of ontology in turn. Indeed, one of the resources on which this new Fichtean ontology will draw is the introduction of the concept of force in transcendental philosophy, by which Kant was seeking contemporaneously to make the Transition from Metaphysics to Physics.17 Rather than drawing this concept from dynamics in the natural sciences, however, Fichte maintained its strictly transcendental application, so that the theory of scientific knowledge must demonstrate that ‘‘all of those specific actions which the human mind is necessarily forced to perform’’ (W I: 63; 1988, 120; emphasis added), at the same time constrain it to the production of actuality. Somehow, however, the exercise of these transcendental forces in the form of ‘‘acts of mind’’ or of an I, must impact upon nature, on the ‘‘Not-I.’’ The problem the Wissenschaftslehre must therefore resolve is the nature of this Not-I, or as the second edition Concerning the Concept of Wissenschaftslehre (1798) has it, ‘‘nature’’: The Wissenschaftslehre furnishes us with nature as something necessary – with nature as something which, both in its being and its specific determinations, has to be viewed as independent of us. (W I: 64; 1988, 121) The Not-I is everything that does not act, everything that is determined or that is always what it is, everything that is being rather than force. As Hegel’s Difference essay will realise and exploit even while seeming to disparage it beyond serious philosophical attention, Fichte’s revolutionary

Downloaded by [University of Saskatchewan Library] at 14:45 25 July 2012 systems of philosophy gesture is to have made being and matter equivalent, as opposed to the ancient concept of matter as ‘‘not-being,’’ me on or non-ens. In so far as this is the case, the role of the Not-I becomes simply to limit the I, while the I has as its goal the maximal reduction of the Not-I; at stake between the two is transposing the free determination of being by activity from the sphere of the I to that of the Not-I, thus determining not only how mind ought to act but also how ‘‘the whole universe ought to be’’ (GA II,3: 247). But how is what acts but has no being to limit what is but does not act; and how is what does not act but simply is, to limit what acts but is not? This is the root of what Schelling presents as ‘‘Fichte’s contradictory concept of nature’’ (SW VII: 9), which, transcendentally presented – that is, in terms of forces – under the rubric of the Not-I from Fichte’s first sketches of the Wissenschaftslehre, is necessarily held to spill beyond force and into being, beyond the act into being. Just as in Kant, the transcendental differentiates in nature, so Fichte’s limit must be a transcendental actor locatable in nature. Fichte pursues forces to the point of their exhaustion in Propositions, and locates this point in nature. That is to say, animate-organic nature – at its lowest threshold of consistency, Fichte’s transcendental animal is composed of a ‘‘system of plant-souls’’ (W XI: 366); at its highest, it comprises the ‘‘entire universe’’ (GA II,3: 247) – articulates the juncture where exhausted force issues in being as its ‘‘residuum.’’ The Propositions calls this process of residual production ‘‘crystallization’’ which, although for Kant it betrayed visible evidence of intelligible structure, for Fichte signifies the end of the road for force: ‘‘there is only result here, no organisation’’ (W XI: 364). In what Fichte himself calls his Naturphilosophie (W XI: 363), ‘‘being’’ has thus become phylum-specific, attaching only to the mineral realm, so that nature itself is now ontologically divided. Accordingly, if the Wissenschaftslehre is to demonstrate the ‘‘absolute totality’’ by which it is differentiated from other sciences (W I: 59 n.; 1982, 117 n.), then the transcendental philosophy derived from its ‘‘three a prioris’’ or absolutes (I, Not-I, Limit; cf. GA I,1: 151 n.; 1988, 134 n.) must now comprise nature, ‘‘as something necessary and independent of us’’ (W I: 64; 1988, 121) and yet as something deducible in terms of the ‘‘acts of mind’’ the Wissenschaftslehre demonstrates to be ‘‘necessary.’’ It follows from this that Fichte is constrained to argue that (a) ‘‘nature is the product of intelligence’’ (W XI: 362) and that (b) it remains nevertheless ‘‘necessary and independent of us’’ (W I: 64; 1988, 121). What Schelling calls Fichte’s ‘‘contradictory’’ solution is cited therefore at the outset of the Propositions: I transfer, runs the Wissenschaftslehre, the concept of my self onto nature as far as I can without eliminating from it its characteristics as nature itself, i.e., without making it into an intelligence (into a self-positing I). (W XI, 362) Accordingly, the Propositions begins with a refutation of the argument that ‘‘Intelligence is a higher power [Potenz] of nature’’ (W XI: 362); or, in terms of the Schellingian Naturphilosophie the Propositions is designed to counter,18 ‘‘Intelligence [. . .] is a simple consequence of nature’s incessant potentiation’’ for which it ‘‘has made long preparations’’ (SW IV: 76). Schelling concluded thus on the grounds that a transcendental philosophy could account only for the products, but not, however, for the production, of intelligence itself, for which purpose a Naturphilosophie is therefore required. Now since Fichte presents the Wissenschaftslehre as the one complete science, it is imperative that, rather than adopting a Naturphilosophie along the lines that Schelling stipulates, the latter can be constructed under the rubric of transcendental philosophy. In order to achieve this, Fichte must show the derivation of material being from activity. In the Wissenschaftslehre, therefore, the concept of being is by no means considered primordial, but rather derivative, a concept derived [. . .] from contradiction with activity, and so a merely negative concept. (W I: 499; 1982, 69) How, then, does material nature arise? Fichte gives two solutions to the problem of the generation of material nature. The first, in the Crystal Clear Report, merely states that ‘‘our existing world is complete,’’ but goes on to add ‘‘Life is not 48

Downloaded by [University of Saskatchewan Library] at 14:45 25 July 2012 grant a producing, but a finding’’ (GA I,7: 249; Behler 1987, 98). Fichte’s second, and more complex, solution stipulates that despite opposing the I’s activity, being is only within the I: ‘‘nothing is outside of the I’’ (W I: 335–36; 1988, 248). The division here seems to fall between the transcendental ‘‘foundation of all matter, as will become clearer and clearer,’’ enthuses Fichte, on the one hand, and the practical business of life engaging with a world that is already complete and does not, pace Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, require to be generated. In other words, the entire Wissenschaftslehre would reduce to a choice between a practical engagement with the world as it is, and a theoretical engagement in forming all the concepts to generate a transcendental world, a world as it might be. But the being of the world as we find it could not be the material being founded by the production of ‘‘passive or static material,’’ since the world as we find it is found precisely in so far as it is not produced, whereas the ‘‘foundation of all material and all enduring substrata’’ is precisely ‘‘the mere product which results from the unification of opposed activities,’’ of the I and the Not-I (W I: 336; 1988, 248). While contradictory, it would be difficult to say that this contradiction lay within the Fichtean concept of nature, as Schelling argues. If, however, the problem of the generation of material nature is posed within the framework that Fichte supplies in the Propositions, a different solution emerges that places the contradiction at the core of natural production. We noted above that the lowest threshold of consistency that the Propositions gives for the ‘‘transcendental animal’’ consists in ‘‘the system of plant-souls.’’ This is because, Fichte argues, there is reciprocity between plant and environment, rather than an ‘‘artificial’’ or, rather, artefactual causality that generates abstractions: Either one-sidedly, mere causality, that gives rise to a product, so that that on which it acts is not determined by itself to retroact, thus remains just an inert residuum of the exhausted force. The mineral [. . .] [:] There is only result here, no organisation; hence no developing, self-renewing reciprocity with the world, because the chemical force is bound by the non-penetrated equivalent masses. (Again, an abstraction). Or reciprocally, 49 that both or all penetrate each other internally, forming a reciprocal solution, and flow together into a new whole. (Organisation, presented in the simplest abstraction in plants.) (W XI: 364) Fichte’s distinction works by opposing the immanent causal determination of the fixed particular (this mineral, that crystal, etc.) to transcendental, i.e., non-phenomenal, organisation comprising many systems (plant-souls). The entire orientation of Propositions is to build the transcendental animal not from this or that causal property, nor into a particular form,19 but from the convergence of all reciprocity ‘‘into a new whole [. . .], the most intimate union in the All.’’ In the end, therefore, there will be only ‘‘one force, one soul, one mind’’ (W XI: 364), and it is in this sense that the animal becomes transcendental – organic activity transcends the particularity by which it falsely signals phenomenal completeness. Meanwhile, it follows from the first of the Propositions – that ‘‘nature is the product of intelligence’’ (W XI: 362) – that such activity is doubly transcendental, both in the sense that this is not simple activity such as is found in ‘‘complete [ fertig]’’ nature, but also activity in so far as its generation is intelligible. Accordingly, ‘‘nature and intelligence terminate in each other without hiatus’’ (ibid.), i.e., without interrupting transcendental reciprocity. The ‘‘foundation of all matter’’ thus generated produces not simply a particular product with this or that set of properties or attributes that may then be enumerated and its ‘‘being’’ determined, but rather a transcendental substrate of activity in general. The production of the transcendental substrate thus coincides with, but is not, the point at which the activity of the I meets resistance, in so far as it, necessarily alive, encounters ‘‘the ready-made world’’ (the transcendental animal stumbles on a crystal). The complete world is not a whole, but a finite particular precisely in so far as it is complete, whereas life is ‘‘infinite reciprocity, outward directed and in itself’’ (W XI: 365). It is a consequence, then, of Fichte’s transcendentalism that life becomes the reciprocal condition of the continuous flow of intelligence into nature, and plant-souls into the All, while minerality becomes artificial, an unflowing, fixed particulate being incapable of activity,

systems of philosophy Downloaded by [University of Saskatchewan Library] at 14:45 25 July 2012 illustrating what Hegel (1970, 23) calls the ‘‘impotence of nature.’’ Indeed, this is exactly what Hegel’s Naturphilosophie draws from Fichte. Expressing the point as though Hegel were commenting on the metaphysics derived from the Propositions, Hegel writes: Naturephilosophy takes up the material which physics has prepared for it empirically, at the point to which physics has brought it, and reconstitutes it, so that experience is not its final warrant and base. Physics must therefore work into the hands of philosophy, in order that the latter may translate into the Concept [Begriff ] the abstract universal transmitted to it [. . .] It is because the method of physics does not satisfy the Concept that we have to go further. (Hegel 1970, 10) The world as it is is simply the world as ‘‘empirically prepared by physics’’; since physics does not satisfy transcendental philosophy, its material must be reconstituted, with experience providing neither evidence of, nor ‘‘foundation’’ or ‘‘basis’’ for, the nature of material nature. The jettisoning of all corporeal particularity – that is, not just the peculiarities of this body (the ‘‘sthenic’’ philosopher, the impotent mineral), but also the particularity attaching to body as such, its immanent detachment – is a prerequisite, Hegel argues (1977a, 88), for philosophy to undertake the reconstitution of matter. Yet Fichte is far from recommending the abandonment of the particularity of the world ‘‘as it is,’’ making the ‘‘modification of matter’’ (W I: 307; 1982, 269) into the metric of philosophy’s practical actuality; at its highest threshold of consistency, then, life – ‘‘infinite metabolic reciprocity, outwardly directed and in itself ’’ – is expressed as the ontological imperative, ‘‘the whole universe ought to be an organised whole’’ (GA II,3: 247). While Fichte withdraws all capacity to act from physical nature, Hegel grants Nature this capacity even beyond bodily particularity, so that matter becomes ‘‘a pure abstraction’’ (1977b, 351), only in order that it demonstrate ‘‘its impotence [. . .] to adhere strictly to the Concept’’ (1970, 23–24). If for Hegel ‘‘natural objects do not think’’ (1970, 7) because they are irremediably particular, Fichtean nature cannot think because it cannot act. Thus Fichte’s only error, and one Hegel commits in turn when he supports Mosaic history against evolution on the grounds that the former guarantees that each thing was always what it now is (i.e., nothing emerged from something other; Hegel 1970, 284), is to deny activity to nature on transcendental grounds while rejecting the central precept of dynamic physics as emerging under Boscovich–Priestley, and later Oersted and Faraday,20 i.e., that there is no substance behind the powers. In other words, by maintaining a distinction between force and substance, activity and being, animal and artifice, Fichte ensures that between ‘‘intellect and thing [. . .] there is no bridge’’ (W I: 436; 1982, 17). Accordingly, while sharing a vocabulary with a physics to which his philosophy is entirely blind, Fichte’s dynamics transforms his attempts at a naturephilosophy into an antiphysics that prepares the ground for Hegel, although the latter does not acknowledge Fichte’s preparatory labour. Against this, Schellingianism’s physicalism is entirely clear: ‘‘nature has made long preparations for the heights she reaches through reason’’ (SW IV: 76). Having, as Schelling advises, ‘‘set aside all practical admixture’’ (SW IV: 86) in order to properly diagram Fichte’s transcendental animality, or biocentric naturephilosophy, as a two-worlds antiphysics, and before proceeding to differentiate the Schellingian from the Fichtean naturephilosophy, we will turn to one amongst many instances of neo-Fichteanism. II neo-fichteanism: the vital instance as the incapacity for physics One does not think without becoming something else, something that does not think – an animal, a molecule, a particle – and that comes back to thought and revives it. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 42 By grounding naturephilosophy on animal being, Fichte gives credence to the dichotomy that Bernouilli and Kern establish between 50

grant a ‘‘biocentric’’ and a ‘‘logocentric’’ Naturphilosophie, although they falsely locate this dichotomy in Schelling. They write: Downloaded by [University of Saskatchewan Library] at 14:45 25 July 2012 The later mutilations of the Schellingian Naturphilosophie by its own creator prove that Schelling was logocentrically rather than biocentrically oriented. (1926, viii) That this is a false dichotomy is evident in many ways. Firstly, while it is manifestly false that Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, late or early, was ever ‘‘logocentrically’’ (as opposed, say, to ‘‘transcendentally’’)21 oriented, such a combination would arguably cease to be a philosophy of nature in any sense at all.22 Secondly, the appearance of dichotomy is undermined even if we assume that the only way, therefore, to pursue a philosophy of nature is to select for life rather than language, to go ‘‘biocentric.’’ This is indeed the path adopted by many contemporary philosophers of a naturalistic bent, so that biology marks the limits if not of nature itself, then of plausible philosophical attention. Biocentrism does not, however, define nature- against languagephilosophy, as we might think, but rather defines the moment beyond which the phenomenological envelope will not extend, precisely because life is thought not in itself, but for consciousness. ‘‘Biocentrism’’ marks the point, that is, where a phenomenology of nature23 turns back from nature itself, through ‘‘life,’’ and towards the consciousness that life vehiculates. Finally, the dichotomy collapses because logos and bios are the elements of species man; both poles, therefore, of the distinction, remain reducible humanisms, and differentiate only along the lines of arid philosophies of language versus lush philosophies of life. Philosophers, then, repeatedly use animality as the threshold beyond which the fabric binding consciousness to the practical shreds irreversibly, and action ceases to be possible. Accordingly, we might propose that from the organo-ethical perspective, to venture beyond animality (‘‘one does not think without becoming something else, something that does not think,’’ write Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 42), giving ‘‘animal’’ as a first example before following through, ‘‘[. . .] a molecule, a particle [. . .]’’) is a regrettable passion that acts on me, something suffered or undergone; to 51 descend from cognition to animality marks out the territories of agency in the contours of the act, now traced in political and existential histories rather than mammalian odo-geographies. It is precisely in its attachment to the vital instance that attempts at a naturephilosophy are caught within the infinitely reciprocating circuit of Fichtean life, ‘‘wavering’’ on the thresholds of physis and ethos. Thus we may already observe Fichteanism in the biologism of Warnke and Bach, and in the medicalism of von Engelhardt and Tsouyopoulos, just as surely as we can identify the Fichteanism of contemporary philosophy in its assumption that prioritised practicism is grounded in the somatic intimacy of life. ‘‘Nature’’ in Fichteanism serves as the ground, therefore, from which to begin the ascent to its determination by consciousness, rather than the unground or abyss into which the naturephilosopher descends: ‘‘the naturephilosopher puts himself in the place of nature’’ (Schelling 2001, 192), every particularity ‘‘dissolved in the All’’ (SW VI: 183–84). Wirth’s recent study of Schelling thus begins (2003, 6ff.) by updating Fichteanism, applying Levinas’s (1974, 95) prioritisation of the ‘‘Good over the True’’ to the foundations of post-Kantian philosophy, in order to present Schellingianism in general, and Naturphilosophie in particular, as an ethics. While ultimately this is a false, Fichteanised Schelling, Wirth’s arguments are for that very reason revealing both as regards the Fichtean grasp of contemporary philosophy, and as regards the resultant problems being played out in the naturephilosophical context.24 Wirth’s argument is that the nature ‘‘spiritualised’’ in Schelling’s Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom, ‘‘render[s] [. . .] its foundation as ideal’’ (2003, 68), so that this becomes a nature ‘‘wherein freedom rules’’ (SW VII: 350; 1986, 24). The question is whether this ‘‘rendering of the foundation as ideal’’ is sufficient to achieve the prioritisation of the practical over the physical, as Wirth’s contends. Schelling, following the passage just cited, explicitly denies that the primatisation of the practical demand is ontologically sufficient: ‘‘it would by no means suffice to declare that ‘Activity, life and freedom are alone true actuality [das wahrhaft Wirkliche],’ ’’ since even a ‘‘subjective idealism

Downloaded by [University of Saskatchewan Library] at 14:45 25 July 2012 systems of philosophy (which does not understand itself)’’ such as Fichteanism ‘‘can go that far’’ (SW VII: 351; 1986, 24; translation modified.). The insufficiency of such actuality derives from its restriction of all actuality, ‘‘nature, the world of things’’ (SW VII: 351; 1986, 24; translation modified) to particulars, especially ‘‘activity, life, freedom.’’ ‘‘Rather it is required,’’ corrects Schelling, ‘‘that all actuality (nature, the world of things) be grounded in activity’’ (ibid.). It is, in other words, insufficient to show, with Fichte, that freedom consists in the ‘‘modification of matter’’ (W I: 307; 1982, 269); rather, if freedom is actual, there must be not merely an ethical usage (which Schelling calls Fichte’s ‘‘economic-teleological’’ ontology, SW VII: 17) of nature, since actual freedom necessitates an ethology of matter, without consciousness, even without life. Clearly, when Wirth attempts to ground this practical demand, and free action is made dependent on consciousness, that is, on the human ‘‘co-science (Mitwissenschaft)’’ with nature, whereby ‘‘nature comes to affirm its own prodigal animality’’ (2003, 25), his is a Fichteanism masquerading as Schellingianism. ‘‘Activity, life, freedom’’ are not found in nature, but only in conscious ‘‘human animality.’’ The ontological demand for a philosophy of nature is not satisfied by the restrictedness of ‘‘animality,’’ no matter how ‘‘prodigal,’’ but rather confronts it directly: what is not free cannot be determined as free, but, if freedom is to dominate, must rather be used and then eliminated in the ‘‘nature-cide’’ towards which Wirth’s titular ‘‘life conspires’’ (2003, 94f.). Fichte defines ‘‘life,’’ as the second of the two epigraphs above has it, as ‘‘infinite metabolic reciprocity in oneself, but outwardly directed’’ (W XI: 365); that ‘‘Fichte’s concept of nature is contradictory’’ did not escape Schelling (SW VII: 9). Wirth is only following Fichte in reaching for animal being in order to ground the practicism of his critico-transcendental ontology; but life, the animal, apparent paradigms of nature, do not conjoin consciousness to nature, but rather segregate the one from the other. Wirth’s Fichteanism gets it wrong on two counts, regarding the assertion of an unequivocal practicism driving Schellingian naturephilosophy: firstly, since this presents only a one-sided, therefore only a partially true, and being only partially true, wholly false, account of the Philosophical Inquiries; and secondly, the assertoric mode of Wirth’s account misrepresents transcendental arguments from the Oldest System-Program as what, from that philosophical perspective, would be anarcho-dogmatic ones. This requires that all the dimensions of the problem be properly laid out, and the problem of the relation of transcendental to naturephilosophy examined. For one reason, the Philosophical Inquiries does attest to a spiritualisation or ‘‘potentiating [potenzierende]’’ of nature, but one that is a power of nature rather than an act that passive nature suffers at divine or otherwise non-natural yet spontaneous causality, making transcendental conditions coincident with physical ones. For another, the transcendentalism of the Oldest System-Program’s account of how a world, how nature, ‘‘must be constructed for a moral being’’ (Frank and Kurz 1975, 110) does not entail the automatic assumption of the primacy of the practical, nor does it ground this primacy as ‘‘nature for a moral being’’; rather, transcendental sufficiency, as in the passage from the Philosophical Inquiries (SW VII: 351; 1986, 24) examined above, is given only when the conditions become themselves unconditioned, ‘‘unthinged [unbedingt]’’ or absolute, i.e., when they lose all particularity. In terms of the overt relation of philosophies of life to Fichtean rather than to Schellingian philosophy,25 therefore, Wirth’s account is exemplary, not only revealing the ethical-epistemological axis of the problem (the good vs. the true), but also the formal ontological dimension of Fichtean naturephilosophy, to which we now turn before considering the transcendentalism of Naturphilosophie, as disputed between Schelling and Eschenmayer. III the disputed transcendentalism of naturephilosophy I absolutely do not acknowledge two different worlds, but rather insist on only one and the same, in which everything, even what common consciousness opposes as nature and mind, is comprehended. Schelling, SW IV: 101–02 52

Downloaded by [University of Saskatchewan Library] at 14:45 25 July 2012 grant We cannot agree with Hegel’s judgement that ‘‘Schelling’s answer to Eschenmayer’s idealistic objections against the Naturphilosophie’’ (1977a, 79) fails to bring into sharp relief the difference between the Schellingianising and Fichteanising tendencies in the philosophy of nature (not least in Hegel’s own). Indeed, the arguments around which this exchange of two articles – Eschenmayer’s ‘‘Spontaneity ¼ Worldsoul’’ and Schelling’s ‘‘On the true concept of naturephilosophy’’ – is constructed continue to divide these tendencies, as we have seen, into the contemporary. Here, in list form, is the core of Eschenmayer’s argument (Schelling 2001, 233–34): 1. Naturephilosophy problematises, but cannot resolve, the nature of the ‘‘connection between nature and concept, law and freedom, dead mechanism and vital dynamics.’’ 2. Eschenmayer cites Schelling’s formulation of the second problem: ‘‘what is the universal source of activity in nature?’’ (SW III: 20; 2004, 19) – nature itself (Schelling’s ‘‘unconditioned or unthinged empiricism’’) or the I (Fichte, Eschenmayer)? 3. If Schelling is correct, then there can be no principle of becoming, but only actual becomings, none of which could furnish a principle for any other. Therefore, a transcendental philosophy is necessary in order to produce the free concept. 4. This free concept must be free according to principles that are themselves spontaneous and undetermined by nature. Therefore, a transcendental investigation of the concept of becoming in nature leads not to material nature as its source and principle but rather to ‘‘vital consciousness,’’ i.e., to spontaneity, the ‘‘soul of the world.’’ In other words, the argument hinges around whether nature itself is active, and whether a transcendental philosophy or a philosophy of nature, which Eschenmayer calls an ‘‘unconditioned empiricism’’ (unbedingten Empirismus; Schelling 2001, 234), is capable of resolving this problem. Against the Fichtean transcendentalism Eschenmayer offers, Schelling writes: ‘‘some, misled by the term ‘naturephilosophy’, will think they should expect a transcendental deduction of natural phenomena’’ (SW IV: 81). On the 53 contrary, the reason, writes Schelling, for the opposition of naturephilosophy and transcendental philosophy, and why these two sciences proceed along ‘‘entirely different lines [. . .], lies in things’’ (SW IV: 83). Schelling is always clear that, while connected, the transcendental and naturephilosophy operate along contrary axes. The mistake is often made, following Hegel’s characterisation of Schelling’s philosophy in On the Difference between the Fichtean and the Schellingian Systems of Philosophy, of merely viewing the two as the symmetrical constituents of a philosophical science as such, reducible to neither. Yet Schelling consistently insists that the relation is asymmetrical: transcendental philosophy is identical to dynamics (SW III: 452; 1978, 91), but dynamics restricted to a single region of nature, namely the ‘‘natural history of mind’’ (SW II: 39; 1988, 30), whereas naturephilosophy is concerned with what is not recoverable in mind, that is, the natural productivity that is as active in geology as in ideation. Caught, then, between a false equilibrium of the two sciences in philosophical science per se, and a naturalistically false prioritisation of mentation over physis, Schelling opts to reject any transcendentalism in naturephilosophy whatsoever. In doing so, however, Schellingian naturephilosophy is indeed open to the ‘‘charge’’ (if charge it is) of ‘‘unconditioned empiricism’’ levelled at it by Eschenmayer. The question is, granted that Kant and Fichte are transcendental philosophers, and granted that Schelling does not wish to repeat their errors, is there another means of pursuing a transcendental naturephilosophy that does not entail these errors? For instance, does Wirth’s error regarding the transcendental background to the problem of world-constitution for a moral being provide an alternative means to construct a transcendental naturalism? Before addressing this directly, what solutions does Schelling offer to Eschenmayer’s criticisms? Key to this is Schelling’s solution to Eschenmayer’s second point, concerning the source of activity in nature: this solution proposes activity to be ‘‘the unconditioned or unthinged [das Unbedingte] in nature’’ (SW III: 11; 2004, 13). Thus, overtly contra Fichte and Hegel, Schelling posits activity in nature that is not only

Downloaded by [University of Saskatchewan Library] at 14:45 25 July 2012 systems of philosophy autochthonous but law-governed: ‘‘In naturephilosophy, I say that nature is its own lawgiver’’ (SW IV: 96). In so far as this is the case, the sphere covered by transcendental philosophy is not so much separable from that covered by the philosophy of nature as it is generated by it. It does not do so, however, in accordance with the simplistic alternative of causality vs. reciprocity with which Fichte works in the Propositions; rather, ‘‘the acts which are derived in the theoretical part of idealism are acts the simple powers of which exist in nature and are set out in naturephilosophy’’ (SW IV: 92); or, as Schelling puts it earlier in the same work, ‘‘electricity in nature [is] intelligence [. . .] [as] a simple consequence of nature’s constant potentiation’’ (SW IV: 76). In other words, the final phenomenal link between the act of thinking and the experience of the content of thought has been broken; to reinstate it is thereafter the function of transcendental philosophy, the only science with such a ‘‘double series’’ according to Schelling: ‘‘Transcendental philosophy, since its object is the original genesis of consciousness, is the sole science in which this twofold series occurs’’ (SW III: 398; 1978, 49). Rather than pursuing this here, which would take us into the arena of formalism in naturephilosophy, I wish to conclude with an idea of transcendental naturalism left open by the problem posed in the Oldest System-Program; that is ‘‘how must a world be constituted for a moral being?’’ (in Frank and Kurz 1975, 110). If we add to this Schelling’s solution to the second of Eschenmayer’s criticisms, i.e., that ‘‘nature is its own lawgiver,’’ then the problem can be recast in terms of a naturalism structured around the world as the constituting agent. This inverts the transcendental order understood in KantoFichtean terms, and thus as understood by Eschenmayer, but it opens up two potential solutions for a transcendental naturalism not subject to this ‘‘transfer of intelligence from the I onto nature’’ (W XI: 362) account. The first of these solutions operates the conceptualisation of constructions on the basis of Leibnizian sufficient reason, rather than on the completeness of a transcendental deduction. Since Schelling has already noted that we are misled if we expect to discover such deductions in his Naturphilosophie, sufficiency provides a guarantor for the transcendental construction that is the same as the guarantor for the physical, but that does without the finally conditioning instance that settles the constructed into exclusively transcendental territory. The second solution concerns Schelling’s constant search for the ‘‘unconditioned in nature’’: to the extent that this is a possible programme, there can be no guarantee that the unconditioned has been reached. Accordingly, the transcendental would again lack conditions of closure, and would instead open onto sequences of unconditioning that carry the entire process back beyond the envelope of the second of the twofold series in which transcendental philosophy consists, and into naturephilosophy itself. As Schelling put it in the Journal, ‘‘the naturephilosopher puts himself in the place of nature’’ (Schelling 2001, 192): this is not to be understood as the transfer of intelligence, but as the motions of its physical precursors. notes 1 In the Exposition of the True Relation of Naturephilosophy to the Improved Fichtean Theory (1806), Schelling writes: ‘‘Above all, the true significance of the eternal and necessary bond between philosophy and physics remains a mystery even in our time’’ (SW VII: 101). References are to Friedrich Willhelm Joseph von Schellings sa«mmtlicheWerke, XIV vols., ed. K.F.A. Schelling (Stuttgart and Augsburg: J.G. Cotta’scher, 1856 ^ 61). Where available, translated sources follow these citations; otherwise, all translations are my own. 2 That Oken remains despised is clear from the most recent treatment of his work by the historian and philosopher of science Nicholas Jardine (Scenes of Inquiry (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) 1), who delights in the ‘‘grotesque’’ nature of his system. The biologist and theoretician Gould (Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,1977)), meanwhile, does not bellow his disdain with the same excess of sobriety. Pursuing the contrasting degrees of abstraction tolerable by the natural as opposed to the human sciences would be instructive. 54

Downloaded by [University of Saskatchewan Library] at 14:45 25 July 2012 grant 3 I use Habermas’s (1992) formulation not only because it can stand tolerably well for all those who assert the end or death of metaphysics to have occurred as either an historical or as a metaphysical fact; but specifically because Habermas delights, like Cromwell in a cathedral, in liberating moral-practical problems from conceptual stringency of any sort, and in reducing metaphysical to discoursive-historical objects. In place, then, of standing like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, at the gateway Moment, at the juncture of eternity and recurrence, post-metaphysics confronts philosophy with a decision: ‘‘Left and Right Hegelianism?’’ And in place of the manifest impracticality of metaphysics as textual scholarship, the equally transparent practicality of post-metaphysics as ^ speech. 4 In part this paper has been provoked by having spent a year in the company of several colleagues, especially Peter Jowers and Sean Watson, wondering repeatedly how exactly it might be possible to develop a metaphysics that ‘‘embraces all the concepts of nature and freedom’’ (Deleuze 1994, 19). The paper’s title is an expression of my thanks to them, and its use of the collective ‘‘we,’’ therefore, not even empirically inaccurate. 5 To say nothing of the more overt statements to this effect in What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994,11^12,102, 208), amongst the developments in Difference and Repetition indebted to Idealism we might number the discussion of the relation between good sense, science and philosophy in terms drawn from Hegel’s Differenzschrift (1994, 224f.); while the geo-logical articulation of depth, ground, ungrounding, the profound, and ‘‘transcendental volcanism’’ (1994, 228 ^32, 241) draws on Schelling’s citations and development of Steffens’ geological researches (SW IV: 504 ^ 05, citing Steffens’ essay, ‘‘On the Oxydation and Deoxydation Processes of the Earth,’’ published in Schelling’s Journal of Speculative Physics I.1 (1800), in Schelling 2001,100 ^ 01).Catherine Malabou (in Paul Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) 114 ^38) has prompted a reconsideration of Hegel’s role in Deleuze’s metaphysics, an unpopular view seconded by James Williams’s argument, in his Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2003) 26, that ‘‘generalized anti-Hegelianism’’ is a trap laid by the book. As noted elsewhere, Eric Alliez recommends the philosophical value of a ‘‘confrontation with 55 the Fichtean standpoint’’ in his The Signature of the World (London: Continuum) 30. 6 Fichte agreed with this verdict of Eschenmayer, whose anonymous review of Schelling’s First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature and Introduction to the Outline (both 1799) had appeared in the Erlanger Literatur-Zeitung for April 1801, and which Fichte expressly praised in his letter to Schelling of 31 May 1801. It is Eschenmayer’s (‘‘increasing,’’ according to Durner, in Schelling 2001, 2: xix) Fichteanism that makes his ‘‘Spontaneity ¼ World Soul,’’ which appeared in volume II.1 (1801) of Schelling’s Zeitschrift fu«r spekulative Physik, along with Schelling’s simultaneously published response,‘‘TheTrue Concept of Naturphilosophie and the Proper Technique for Resolving its Problems’’ (SW IV: 79^104), into a theatre in which the divergence of Fichteanism from physics is played out. In the Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (published September 1801), Hegel claims that ‘‘Schelling’s answer to Eschenmayer’s idealistic objections against the Naturphilosophie’’ (Hegel 1977a, 79) precisely fails to bring the distinctness of the two systems out into public discussion, and notes the ‘‘distortion’’ of the Schellingian by the Fichtean system this occasions. Hegel’s derogatory use of ‘‘idealistischen’’ here is to be noted. 7 Reinhard Lo«w’s critique of ‘‘the modern, mathematico-physical philosophy of nature,’’ against which he positions what he styles as Schelling’s advancement of ‘‘the interests of reason: how must nature be thought so as to conceptualize actuality on the one hand and on the other, so that man can understand himself as an intellectual and moral being?’’(in Hasler 1981, 103), perfectly and falsely exemplifies the tendency that Bonsepien follows and that Zimmerli and Cha“telet reject. 8 Heuser-Kessler’s study concentrates on establishing conceptual likenesses between the precepts of specifically Schellingian Naturphilosophie and the contemporary natural-scientific paradigm to which the study’s title adverts. The current context, however, is oriented towards the problem of an ontology of nature rather than theoretical homologies. 9 Noting that Aristotle’s name for his forebears is physiologoi, Heidegger asks what this means: ‘‘the physiologoi are neither ‘physiologists’ in the

systems of philosophy Downloaded by [University of Saskatchewan Library] at 14:45 25 July 2012 contemporary sense [. . .] nor are they philosophers of nature. The physiologoi is rather a genuine primordial title for a questioning about beings as a whole, the title for those who speak out about physis, about the prevailing of beings as a whole [. . .]’’ (1995, 28). Thus arises a merely logico-discursive nature. 10 As philosophers of the concept, Deleuze prefers Hegel, Schelling and even Maimon (cf. Deleuze 1993, 89) to Fichte, while the latent existentialism of Alexis Philonenko’s Fichte (La Liberte¤ humaine dans la philosophie de Fichte, 2nd ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1980)) appeals to Guattari. To advance the cause of philosophy as onto-ethology, which is how he reads Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?, Alliez notes the timeliness of a ‘‘confrontation with the Fichtean standpoint’’ (2005, 30). 11 Jaspers (1955,178) inaugurates this Fichteanised Schelling with his mid-century Schellingian revival: ‘‘For Schelling, Kant is the turning-point, Fichte’s idealism the foundation, and he himself the completion of the philosophy of freedom that can recreate metaphysics quite otherwise than all prior metaphysics.’’ Similarly, despite citing Schelling’s condemnation of Fichte from the Stuttgart Seminars (SW VII: 445; 1994, 215; Heidegger 1985, 93) to the effect that the ‘‘Science of Knowledge’’ delivers ‘‘a complete deathblow to nature,’’ Heidegger’s Schelling wavers between Fichteanism and Schellingianism precisely as regards the problem of nature. 12 See Walter Schulz (ed.), Briefwechsel Fichte-Schelling (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), and the ‘‘Selections from Fichte ^Schelling Correspondence,’’ translated in Jochen Schulte-Sasse et al. (eds.), Theory as Practise (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,1997) 73^90. 13 Blumenbach does not so much create a wholly new method in the natural sciences as translate outmoded Stahlian debates surrounding vitalism into a positivistic-naturalist context. Similarly, it is not so much in its great utility to natural history, whatever Kantians such as Girtanner had to say, as it is in the transformation of this from a straightforwardly naturalistic into a transcendental problematic that the Kantian principle acquires its philosophical significance. 14 For Kant’s brief acknowledgement of Blumenbach in the third Critique, see Ak.V: 424; 1987, 311. For a naturalistic solution of this transcendental gulf, see my ‘‘Physics of Analogy’’ in Rachel Jones and Andrea Rehberg (eds.), The Matter of Critique. Readings in Kant’s Philosophy (Manchester: Clinamen, 2000) 37^ 60. 15 Although Badiou (2000, 45) likes to think that his classicism surpasses its criticist precursors,‘‘criticality’’ is more properly the dimension he retains, mistakenly jettisoning the transcendental in its stead. Further, the sense Fichte gave to ‘‘philosophical critique’’ in Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre accords with the usage Badiou intends of precisely such distinctions between classicism and criticism: ‘‘One can philosophise about metaphysics itself [. . .] One can embark on investigations into the possibility, the real meaning, and the rules governing such a science. And this is very advantageous for the cultivation of the science of metaphysics itself. The philosophical name for a system of this sort of inquiry is ‘critique’’’ (W I: 32; 1988, 97). However, the dimension of criticality to which we wish to draw attention at the present moment consists in its eliminative one: ‘‘a pure critique,’’ stipulates Fichte, ‘‘is intermixed with no metaphysical investigations’’ (ibid.), i.e., expels all metaphysical elements from its field. 16 It is equally important to note that the ‘‘standard story’’ regarding Fichte ^ the one that is standardly derived from Hegel ^ is not the only one told. See Pippin in Sedgwick (2000, 147^70). Regarding Fichte’s Naturphilosophie, see the revealing and heavily guarded acknowledgement by Breazeale (in Sedgwick 2000, 179) that Fichte’s philosophy of nature, while barely developed, is concerned with the nature of experience, or in Breazeale’s own terms, with ‘‘what experience, and hence ‘nature’, necessarily is and must be’’ (emphasis in original). 17 The important Fichtean texts in the present context ^ Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre, Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with Respect to the Theoretical Faculty, Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre, Foundations of Natural Right and the ‘‘Propositions for the Elucidation of the Essence of Animals’’ ^ were all published between 1794 and 1800, while the relevant texts of Kant’s Opus postumum (1993, known by Schelling (SW VI: 8) as u«bergang von der Metaphysik zur Physik, as noted above) were written between 1798 and 1801 (see Kant 1993, xxvi ^xxix for the chronology). 56

Downloaded by [University of Saskatchewan Library] at 14:45 25 July 2012 grant 18 This is Fichte’s first recorded use of the term Potenz, which, having been one of the conceptual mainstays of Schelling’s philosophy since the latter’s Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (SW II: 314 n.; 1988, 249 n.) took it from Eschenmayer’s Principles from the Metaphysics of Nature (1796), demonstrates that the Propositions is a response to Schelling (cf. GA II,5: 419). Further demonstrations of this can be found by comparing the substance of the Propositions with the exchange of letters between Fichte and Schelling, specifically those Fichte drafted or sent to Schelling on 27 December 1800. 19 Fichte’s animal is thus exceptional in the Goethean age, where morphogenesis and comparative anatomy were determined almost exclusively to search for the Urtyp.For more exceptions to this supposed rule of natural science during the Romantic era, and in Naturphilosophie in particular, see my Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (Continuum, forthcoming 2006). 20 R.J. Boscovich’s theory of ‘‘point-atoms’’ (in Crosland1971, 210 ^14), and J.B. Priestley’s definition of matter by ‘‘powers’’ rather than substances (ibid. 115^19) were amongst the eighteenthcentury sources for the ‘‘dynamic atomism’’ in Schelling’s First Outline of a System of Naturephilosophy (SW III: 22^24; 2004, 20 ^22); Hans-Christian Oersted discovered electromagnetism in 1820 (although this is usually credited to Faraday in1831), and thus prepared the way for the field theories of force promulgated by Michael Faraday, for example, for whom ‘‘the substance is composed of its powers’’ (Experimental Researches in Electricity, 3 vols. (London: Taylor 1839^55) 1: 362. 21 In the 1844 Presentation of the Process of Nature, for instance, Schelling demonstrates a marked shift from the position he adopted forty years earlier as regards Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. In the earlier text, Kant’s work divides organic being from nature in general (SW VI: 8), contrasting with the more positive use of that Critique in the later work (SW X: 366 ^75). 22 The prime example of this tendency remains Heidegger (cf. n. 9, above), whose etymology of physiologia demonstrates him incapable of a philosophy of nature precisely because his is a philosophy of logos. Amongst other philosophers promoting an essentially logocentric naturephilosophy, Krings (in Hasler 1981, 73^76; 1982, 57 350) and Peterson (2003, xxvff.) propose a ‘‘logogenetic’’ approach even to Schellingian Naturphilosophie, which Lo«w (in Hasler 1981, 103) summarises thus: If modern, mathematico-physical philosophy of nature shows us a real-genetic image of actuality, which men are neither familiar with nor can form concepts of, then Schelling’s transcendental construction characterized the countervailing interests of reason: how must nature be thought so as to conceptualize actuality on the one hand and on the other, so that man can understand himself as an intellectual and moral being? Hermann Krings has introduced the concept of logogenesis for such a construction. Meanwhile, Roland Omne's, rather than giving a logocentric naturephilosophy, undertakes a naturephilosophical examination of Logos in Quantum Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999) 275: ‘‘Unlike reality, Logos never offers itself in a concrete form, even if it is present everywhere [. . .] We may not know much about Logos, but we possess a sort of living mirror of it: the brain, which [. . .] carries a trace of its matrix as a meteor carries that of an inaccessible planet.’’ Thus biocentrism and logocentrism share the same formal insufficiency, and both hinge around an essentially phenomenological approach to nature. 23 See, for example, Gernot Bo«hme’s ‘‘Introduction’’ to Pha«nomenologie der Natur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), esp. 41f.: ‘‘The phenomenology of nature is nature-knowing as self-knowing.’’ 24 The project retreats at moments of great tension to the French-Heideggerian rubric of philosophical ‘‘discourses’’ (2003, 2), thus supplying a general validation of the empirical accuracy of Bernouilli and Kern’s (1926, viii) division of Naturphilosophie into the biocentric and the logocentric. 25 Such relations might be further explored in the context of the renewed interest in Bergson and Nietzsche from the point of view of the life sciences. In both instances, Keith Ansell Pearson has blazed trails that may bear fruitful comparison with a properly understood Schellingian naturalism.

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