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The Universe in the Universe: German Idealism
and the Natural History of Mind
Iain Hamilton Grant
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement / Volume 72 / July 2013, pp 297 - 316
DOI: 10.1017/S1358246113000167, Published online: 03 April 2013
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1358246113000167
How to cite this article:
Iain Hamilton Grant (2013). The Universe in the Universe: German Idealism and
the Natural History of Mind. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 72, pp
297-316 doi:10.1017/S1358246113000167
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Iain Hamilton Grant
whether by contrast it consists in the irreducibility of its objects to the
concepts formed of or from them. Rather, we take it as primary that the
medium in which the question we posed is in fact posed shows an importantly recursive character, making nature into the object and the
concept under investigation. That investigation therefore concerns
the nature of nature, and is the province of the philosophy of nature.
This is the problem forged from the conclusions Kant reached regarding the domains of the concept and of freedom, that is, of nature
and purpose, in the Critique of Judgment. Yet it is a problem recurrent
wherever, as for example in McDowell,2 the transcendental constitution of nature – its irreducibly conceptual nature – is maintained,
in part against those, such as for example Rescher,3 who maintain a
conceptual or explanatory idealism exceeded ontologically by
objects irreducible to such explanations.
To begin to address these problems therefore makes an account of
its first formulations, in the Naturphilosophie of Schelling, into a desideratum. The following paper therefore proposes to investigate the
problems encountered by any transcendental account of nature by
way of a detailed reading of Schelling’s formulations of them in the
Introduction to the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature. While often dismissed as ‘neomedievalising obscurantism’,4 as the revenge of nature
2
See J. McDowell, Mind and World, second edition (Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press, 1996), and ‘Two sorts of naturalism’, in Mind,
Value and Reality (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1996),
167–197. See also McDowell’s ‘Responses’ in J. Lindgaard (ed.), John
McDowell. Experience, Norm and Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008),
200–267 and ‘Responses’ in N.H. Smith (ed.), Reading McDowell on Mind
and World (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 269–305,
esp. 274–5: ‘The transcendental work […] is done here by the idea that conceptual capacities figure not only in free intellectual activity but also in operations of receptivity outside our control. Nature is relevant here only in
connection with a possible threat to that idea.’ Hence, ‘once my reminder
of second nature has done its work, nature can drop out of my picture’.
3
Rescher argues this convincingly in N. Rescher, Nature and
Understanding. The Metaphysics and Method of Science (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000) and Reality and its Appearance (London and
New York: Continuum, 2010).
4
As for example in D.J. Depew and B.H. Weber, Darwinism Evolving.
Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (Cambridge, MA:
MIT, 1997), 55. Somewhat bizarrely, the phrase ‘medieval obscurantism’
was used a century earlier to characterise the opinions held of Schelling by
his contemporaneous objectors in W. Wallace’s Prolegomena to the Study
of Hegel’s Philosophy and Especially of his Logic, second edition (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1894, 107).
298
The Universe in the Universe
mysticism against the successes of the natural sciences, the philosophy of nature in fact asks precisely the question that the natural
sciences cannot, but which they presuppose as their own fundamental
orientation: what is nature? Yet Schelling’s Naturphilosophie begins,
as a critique of its transcendental resolution, from the question of how
a concept of a nature may arise that is separate from the nature within
which it does so and of which it is. In other words, it starts not with
what I have elsewhere called an ‘eliminative idealism’5 such as, for
example, Moore, Burnyeat and Williams have influentially argued
idealism to entail,6 but from the very problem of conceiving
thought as not arising from the nature it is of, both in the sense of
having nature as its object and in that of belonging to or issuing
from nature, in the manner later proposed, for example, by Peirce.7
It is only, Schelling will argue, in separating thought from its initial
conditions – in isolating its termini – that nature becomes a mere
object, a Gegenstand for and against a subject, whether this object
is, for example, conceptual or otherwise actual. Accordingly, the
problem of the emergence of the separation of thought from the
nature it is in and of remains insuperably primary with respect to
either resolution of the nature of nature.
2. Invention and Identity
The problem I wish to address derives from the relative status of
termini in transcendental arguments. A transcendental argument is
a deduction of the conditions of possibility for some X, where X is
5
See my Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London and New York,
NY: Continuum, second edition 2008), 59.
6
For a discussion of these issues, see J. Dunham, I.H. Grant and S.
Watson, Idealism. The History of a Philosophy (Stocksfield: Acumen,
2011), 10–15, 33–7, 205–9.
7
‘It is somehow more than a mere figure of speech to say that nature fecundates the mind of man with ideas which, when those ideas grow up, will
resemble their father, Nature.’ C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers, VII vols.
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–58), V, 591. See
Peirce’s
Schellingian
confession,
especially
regarding
the
Naturphilosophie, in a letter to William James of January 28, 1895, cited
in B. Matthews, Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy (Albany NY:
SUNY, 2011), 225n2, as against his claim, in ‘The law of mind’ (in J.
Buchler (ed.), Philosophical Writings of Peirce (New York: Dover, 1955),
339) never to have contracted the ‘virus’ of ‘Concord transcendentalism’,
however indebted this may have been to Schelling.
299
Iain Hamilton Grant
anything actual.8 Two stipulations should be made. First, the
grounds for the satisfaction of a transcendental argument must
include the complete discovery of the possibilisers9 for any
actuality = X, or their transcendental deduction will have no end.
Second, if X means ‘anything actual’, then all objects, insofar as
they are actual, can in principle be demonstrated to derive from the
conclusions reached in a grounded, that is, an exhaustive, transcendental deduction. What cannot be achieved is a transcendental deduction of the transcendental deduction itself, or the stipulation of the
conditions of possibility for the transcendental deduction of the
source and origin of actual phenomena. The reflexive asymmetry of
the transcendental deduction has the important consequence that
the deduction itself is non-deducible, or only deducible once the
totality of its conditions are exhausted, since it is only by ‘carrying
the empirical synthesis [of conditions] as far as the unconditioned’
that reason ‘is enabled to render it absolutely complete; and the unconditioned is never to be met with in experience, but only in the
idea’.10 This means that there are no stipulated conditions of possibility for the emergence or conduct of a transcendental deduction.
These considerations are important because it is by way of such arguments that it is demonstrated that no nature in itself need exist in
order that I experience. Hence the late Husserl’s attempts to ‘rePtolemize’ the Copernican turn in accordance with experience.11
‘Actual’, that is, in the broad sense, indicating some state minimally
susceptible of predication rather than, for instance, the modal contrary of
‘potential’.
9
A condition of possibility is a ‘possibiliser’ just when it is necessary
and sufficient for the possibility, i.e. just when it creates a possibility.
10
See, KRV A409/B436; Kant writes: ‘reason demands the unconditioned’ (KRVA564/B593); ‘Reason is a power of principles, and its ultimate
demand aims at the unconditioned’ (KUK Ak.V, 401). References to Kant’s
works are to Kants gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich Preußischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften (AK), XXIX vols. Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 1902-, which pagination is retained in all referenceable translations. Of these, I refer as KRV to Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N.K.
Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929); KUK to Critique of Judgment, trans.
W.S. Pluhar, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987); Op.p = Opus postumum, trans.
E. Förster and M. Rosen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
11
Edmund Husserl, ‘Foundational investigations of the phenomenological origin of the spatiality of nature: the originary ark, the earth, does not
move’, in M. Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, trans.
L. Lawlor and B. Bergo (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
2002), 117–131.
8
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The Universe in the Universe
Hence also the arguments belonging to Fichte’s Science of Knowledge,
that ‘nature’ is only possible as a determination of the nicht-Ich by the
Ich that so determines it.12 Hence also McDowell’s argument that any
‘nature’ that can be conceived as being is a nature that only can be conceived to be, and as such, plays neither a fundamental nor even a
necessary role in the explanation of the mindedness of the ‘world’
minds mentate about.13 Yet since the extensions of transcendental arguments are ultimately conditioned by their termini, such that their
conclusions cannot legitimately be extended beyond the immediate
sphere within which they arose,14 they limit only possible objects of
judgments rather than stipulating what is not.
That is, transcendental arguments begin and end by reducing
nature to experience; or, the alpha and omega of experience coincide
in the elimination from mind of mind-independent nature. From this,
two prospects open: the first is to accept the elimination which, since it
would have the consequence that nothing that cannot be thought can
exist, would result in what Kant would have called a dogmatic
monism. In such a case, Schelling’s judgment that ‘criticism is
bound for self-annihilation just as much as dogmatism is’15 would
be correct, since there would no longer remain a thinkable that was
non-intuitable, and therefore no discrimination, of the kind on
which a critical philosophy relies, between legitimate and illegitimate
judgments in accordance with their objects. Arguably, indeed,
objects vanish altogether from such a perspective. The second prospect is to accept the identity of mind and nature. Since I agree
with the relatively neglected German Idealist philosopher Schelling
that ‘it is not because there is thinking that there is being but rather
12
J.G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, trans. P. Heath and J. Lachs
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
13
See especially McDowell’s ‘Responses’ to Pippin’s ‘Two cheers for
the abandonment of nature’, in Smith, Reading McDowell on Mind and
World, 273–5.
14
As David Bell writes in ‘Transcendental Arguments and NonNaturalistic Anti-Realism’, in R. Stern (ed.) Transcendental Arguments.
Problems and Prospects. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
189–210, here 192, ‘The transcendental argument must not invalidly infer
objective and or unrestricted conclusions from purely subjective and/or
merely parochial premises’.
15
SW I, 327. F.W.J. Schelling Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and
Criticism, trans. Fritz Marti, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge. Four
Early Essays (1794–1796) (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1980),
186.
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Iain Hamilton Grant
because there is being that there is thinking’,16 I cannot agree with the
first conclusion, so will argue for a species of the latter. Yet this much
must be noted at the outset: though an Idealist, Schelling insists that
being is the reason for thinking, not thinking for being. This means
that any blanket dismissal of Idealism as the naïve sub-Berkeleyan
caricature with which, for example, Moore and Burnyeat work their
various refutations, misses its target, at least in this case. Contrary
especially to Moore’s account, Schelling’s assertion shows that
Idealism does not by definition propose the elimination of a mind-independent reality. The onus is on the anti-idealist to show that the
idealist is committed to this elimination.
Before continuing, a caveat: the suggestion of an identity between
mind and nature seems – but only seems – to entail a reciprocity
between them, such as that, for instance, frequently ascribed to
Schelling’s desideratum that ‘Nature should be [soll] Mind made
visible, Mind invisible nature’.17 Yet the ‘should be’ entails – a
point Hegel would make repeatedly against Fichte18 – that it is not.
Reciprocity – Wechselwirkung or ‘operating by mutuality’ –
amounts to a trap for identitarians regarding mind and nature,
since it proposes that the two are reciprocally limiting and exhaustive
of the whole. Reciprocity therefore maintains both (a) that everything
in mind is in nature and (b) that everything in nature is in mind.
Rejecting reciprocity without falling into dogmatic monism therefore
means accepting (a) and rejecting (b), thus retaining as irreducible the
asymmetry between being and thinking. Yet the onus falls upon such
an account to formulate in what such an identity consists if its factors
betray a priori differences. Lest the point be lost in jargon: if mind
were not nature, what would it be?
There are two ways in which Kant accounts for transcendental arguments, two termini he provides for the satisfaction of their deductions. The first concerns the function of apperception, the source to
which transcendental deduction leads and from which its legitimacy
ultimately derives. The second, simpler in appearance, concerns the
‘manner in which concepts can relate a priori to objects’.19 I will
briefly address each in turn.
16
SW XIII, 161n; F.W.J. Schelling, The Grounding of Positive
Philosophy trans. Bruce Matthews (Albany NY: SUNY, 2008), 203n.
17
SW II, 56; Ideas 42.
18
In The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of
Philosophy, trans. H.S. Harris and W. Cerf (Albany NY: SUNY, 1977),
117, 133–5.
19
KRV A85/B117.
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The Universe in the Universe
For Kant, a transcendental deduction is concluded just when a
concept may be traced back to its originating faculties and the question
of its legitimate usage thereby settled. Since, Kant claims, we enjoy – as
a matter to be demonstrated as fact – possession of concepts that do not
derive from experience, the terminus of the transcendental deduction
necessary to demonstrating their source cannot terminate in the
world as the object nor as the totality of objects of experience, but
only in a transcendental function that unites concepts deriving from
Sensibility (Sinnlichkeit) with those deriving from the Understanding
(Verstand). It is the function of this function to forge experience.
That is, we may say with Lyotard, that such a function is ‘subjective’
precisely and only in the sense that ‘the faculty that exercises it is the
same one as invents it’.20 On this understanding, the subjectivity vital
to transcendental philosophy is as much autonomic as autonomous.
The generation of experience is what concepts do, even unto dreams;
yet they must be apperceived, that is, grasped by a subject whose experience is thereby generated as that subject’s experience.
As Kant notes, the imagination does indeed become ‘very mighty
when it creates a second nature’; but it can only do so ‘from the
materials that first nature provides’.21 Experience is therefore
forged by transcendental means only given the participation of the
paradoxical non-faculty of receptivity (Rezeptivität). Receptivity is
not, strictly speaking, a faculty or Vermögen, but rather a capacity
‘to be affected by objects [Gegenstände]’ and that ‘necessarily precedes
all intuition of these objects’.22 Whence the ‘necessity’ with which
this capacity ‘precedes all intuition’? The suggestion is that in order
that conceiving experience not become a ‘frictionless spinning in
the void’, it must be grounded in an antecedent to which the function
of forging experience, remains open. So because receptivity, as the
one remaining non-spontaneous power amidst the economy of the
faculties – but not, for all that, transparent to nature23 – is necessary
in order to generate experience, it follows that the transcendental deduction of experience yet requires a basis or ground lying outside
20
J.F. Lyotard, Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime (Paris: Galilée, 1990),
15.
21
KUK, AK V, 314.
KRV A26/B44.
23
McDowell has emphasised this point in responding to Robert Pippin
on ‘leaving nature behind’, insisting that ‘our conceptual capacities’ are not
limited to overt conceptual activity, but figure equally in ‘operations of receptivity outside our control’ (Smith, Reading McDowell on Mind and
World, 274).
22
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Iain Hamilton Grant
itself and that this ground be set prior to experience. Nevertheless,
Kant insists that an argument seeking its terminus in such a nature
remains transcendental: ‘I entitle’, says Kant, ‘[t]he explanation of
the manner in which concepts can relate a priori to objects, transcendental’.24 I thus turn to this second element of Kant’s approach to
transcendental termini.
Consider the statement Kant has just made: it involves a relation
anterior to the relata, as the ‘manner in which concepts can relate a
priori to objects’. It is this relatedness, then, rather than the nature
and mind so related, that provides the ultimate ground of the subjective function of creating experience – a function, to remind ourselves,
that transcendental philosophy paradigmatically fulfils by reciprocally isolating nature from abstraction. Nevertheless, the suggestion
that there is an a priori relation between concept and object is a
radical one, insofar as it proposes an oblique transection of transcendental autochthony, of the subjectivity attaching to the function by
which experience is generated, a fundamental irreducibility of the
object to the autonomy of the function.
By this account, transcendental philosophy may sustain the relation
between mind and nature without stipulating their identity. Yet
because the termini of transcendental deduction remain apperception
in the first case and relation in the second, the prospect of a necessary
antecedent to the autochthonous generation of experience begs the
question as to the termination of arguments resulting in either. In
the case of generation, regardless of the actual or experienced antecedence of that generation with respect to the subject’s apperception of
it, a ‘first nature’ remains necessary. In the second case, that of the a
priori relation of concept and object, if they are so related, this relation
is primary either with respect to their separation, or with respect to
both subject and object. Neither first nature nor the a priority of
relation have been deduced, which, as the Preface to the Critique of
Judgment would make clear, required Kant to revisit the foundations
of transcendental philosophy25 and, ultimately, to abandon the nonconceptual element in the interests of a wholly relative creation, abandoning epistemic support from anything extra-subjective.26
24
KRV A85/B117.
‘A critique of pure reason […] would be incomplete if it [had not]
already explored the terrain supporting this edifice [of a system of metaphysics] to the depth at which lies the first foundation of our power of principles
independent of experience […]’ (KUK AK V, 168).
26
‘He who would know the world must first manufacture it – in his own
self, indeed’ (AK XXI, 41; Op.p., 240).
25
304
The Universe in the Universe
It is at this point that Schelling’s investigations in the Introduction
to the first, 1797 edition of the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature enter
the picture. That text contains a prolonged critical analysis of the
claims of transcendental philosophy with respect to the self-sufficiency or self-grounding Schelling denies it.27 Both there and in subsequent editions of this and other of his naturphilosophischen works,
Schelling attempts to understand how it is possible that mind comes
to be conceived as separate from nature. At this stage, then, we note
that the form ‘how is X possible?’ is of course transcendental. Yet
Schelling’s investigation of this transcendentally formed problem is
designed critically and precisely to demonstrate that the ground of
transcendental inquiry cannot be closed against its ungrounding,
and to supply the reasons for this. What follows will consider only
one extended passage, to which I will return throughout.
[F]or we require to know, not how such a Nature arose outside us,
but how even the very idea [Idee]28 of such a Nature has got into
us [1]; not merely how we have, say, arbitrarily generated it, but
how and why it originally and necessarily underlies everything
that our species [Geschlecht] has ever thought about Nature. [2]
[… W]hat we want is not that Nature should coincide with the
laws of our mind by chance [Zufällig] (as if through some third intermediary) [3], but that she herself, necessarily and originally,
should [/] not only express, but even realize, the laws of our
mind, and that she is, and is called, Nature only insofar as she
does so. [4] Nature should be Mind made visible, Mind the invisible Nature. Here, then, in the absolute identity of Mind in us and
Nature outside us, the problem of the possibility of a Nature external to us must be resolved. [5]29
Schelling’s questions are then:
How do ideas arise [entstand] and ‘get into us’, rather than how
we invent or project representations
1.
27
The Introduction is a sustained four-way (unhelpfully, Schelling
does not structure it accordingly) analysis of transcendental philosophy, empiricism, rationalism (especially Leibniz’s) and Naturphilosophie with
respect to their emergence. The critique of transcendental philosophy
runs from SW II, 12–34; Ideas 10–26.
28
For reasons the translators do not explain, Harris and Heath render
both Idee and Vorstellung (Kant’s ‘representation’) as ‘idea’, rendering it
unclear, bluntly, where in the Introduction Schelling criticizes transcendentalism and where he praises Platonism.
29
SW II, 55–6, Ideas 41–2.
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Iain Hamilton Grant
2.
Granting a capacity for arbitrary generation or relative creation,
what necessarily underlies this capacity such as is shared by the
entire species, transhistorically?
Under what conditions would a merely contingent [zufällig]
coincidence of mind and nature be conceivable?
What follows if the identity of mind and nature is given?
Why identity does not entail the elimination of concept or
nature, nor their reciprocal or mutual maintenance. How
does nature come to be conceived as external to us?
3.
4.
5.
All of these problems culminate in the single question, requiring that
the first five be developed before we address it. The culminating
question is:
3. What is Nature?
Let us start with the first of these Schellingian problems, which pits
emergence against projection, or creation against its relativized form.
Schelling writes, ‘for we require to know, not how such a Nature arose
outside us, but how even the very idea [Idee] of such a Nature has got
into us’. At this point Schelling is not asking ‘how does Nature as such
arise?’, since we do not, he says, ‘require’ to know this in order to solve
the initial problem, namely how the idea of a Nature arises if it ‘gets
into us [in uns gekommen sei]’30 from elsewhere. Two things are
immediately apparent. Firstly, it is not the existence of nature that
is at issue, nor whether it becomes or simply is, nor whether the
laws of nature are fully formed and unchanging; nor whether the
world is eternal; nor whether they arise and develop. This is,
however, the subject of extended passages from the Introduction to
the Ideas which we shall come to below.
Secondly, that the access problem that bedevils transcendental
philosophy and epistemology is inverted. The access problem is
this: to what have we access if the form under which all representation
is for us is insuperable? If, that is, no access-instance, since it would
be our access-instance, can be independent of our makings, doings or
expressings, then this must also apply to the objects we access – that
we represent – since if it did not, this would disqualify the instance as
one of access. While such a problem may be resolved by retreating
ever further (or ever higher) into the orders of reference within a
domain constituted as without an outside, this postpones, rather
than resolves, the issue. For this reason, the access problem is
30
306
SW II, 55–6, Ideas 41–2.
The Universe in the Universe
ultimately a problem of how an ontology may be derived from an
order of reference that is not ultimate but infinitely nested.31 The
Schellingian inversion takes place on a twofold basis: firstly, on that
of an idea that does not arise from us but rather accesses ‘us’; whatever
the idea might be it does not, that is, originate in us – mind, therefore,
is only part of the idea’s trajectory. Nor do we yet know what this ‘us’
might be. What we do know is that it is an ‘us’ rather than an ‘I’. We
learn only later in our passage that the basis of the ‘us’ is Geschlecht –
species, kind or ‘race’ in the sense of ‘human race’ and which delivers
the ideation problem to the domain of nature, rather than delivering
the domain of nature from the problem of ideation, which is the standard transcendental route.
The inversion of the access problem from ‘how can I know nature’
to ‘how does the idea of nature enter our species’ is therefore naturalistic in that it does not presuppose conceptual mastery of what precedes it. Schelling notes that nature grips or even ‘conceives’
(begriffen) those who investigate it.32 The question therefore of the
concept or Begriff by which nature in turn is grasped or conceived
turns on the capacity of a part to conceive the whole – that is, to
achieve for the concept an extension greater than that whole. The
two routes by which this is possible are (1) reduction of the conceived
to the content of the concept, and (2) maintaining the asymmetry
between nature and its concept without the assumption of the limitation of the latter thereby.
A nature that produced a thought incapable of exceeding its point
of emergence, a dead end, would not be a nature capable of the
concept of nature, of the ‘universe in the universe’ as Schelling says
elsewhere.33 Accordingly, the concept is not doomed by nature to
reduction to the neuroanatomical event from which it emerges, or
to limitation by just one side of the separations that produce it –
object from intuition, cause from effect, the philosopher from
herself.34 The concept must therefore conceive, grasp or contain
the separations that inform it, including, ultimately, the difference
separating the concept from nature.
The inversion of the access problem has the following ultimate
consequence: it pits a naturalistic creation against the Kantian
31
A thorough working out of these problems is dexterously performed
by Gunnar Hindrichs in Das Absolute und das Subjekt (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 2009).
32
SW II, 12; Ideas 9.
33
SW VI, 207; cf. VI, 185.
34
SW II, 13; Ideas 10.
307
Iain Hamilton Grant
representation or Vorstellung. The action, that is, of ‘arbitrarily generating’ a representation disconnected not only from a nature outside
me but also arising only within me, may have as its positive element
the confident outlook of a nature to be produced in the bitter triumph
of merely relative creation. But it is a production that can neither be
accounted for from reality nor in terms of a reality finally made. The
latter remains a desideratum and as such, acknowledges from the
outset that it neither is nor can be an actuality issuing from the transcendental except as such a desideratum. This is why Fichte is correct
to argue that all transcendental arguments issue ultimately in practical problems.
With this, we move to the second of Schelling’s questions. The
question does not concern a representation of nature such as we
have arbitrarily generated, ‘but how and why it originally and necessarily underlies everything that our species [Geschlecht] has ever
thought about Nature’.35 Granting that the capacity for ‘arbitrary’,
i.e. non-necessary, generation exists, transcendental philosophy
itself demands that we ask what necessarily underlies this capacity for
invention. Insofar as anything necessary does underlie it, the arbitrary
is its product; insofar as it does not, then whatever underlies representation has no relation whatever to representations, which therefore
become arbitrary in the strong sense, i.e. that there is no reason for
the arbitrary production of representations. Since this is precisely,
as we have seen, what transcendental arguments set out to disprove,
by arguing that there is an a priori relation between concept and
object, some necessary basis, of whatever nature, is in fact assumed.
This being the case, the question ‘what is its nature?’ leads to the following problem: either the necessity is a necessity that attaches
simply to the function of forging experience, which does not prove
but reiterates the claim that there are unmotivated productions of representations. Or the necessity is such as to withdraw the authority for
their production from spontaneity – the function of forging experience – and to place it, as Schelling recommends, in the species.
Accordingly, the thesis here is that it is in the nature of the species
to generate representations, via the introduction of ideas of the
same nature as those species into their members qua members of a
species.
Summing up so far, ideas access species susceptible to them, and
that species is one: nature. It is within this one species that the question underlying the difference between arbitrary and necessary generation arises, namely, the question of generation itself. Amongst
35
308
SW II, 55–6; Ideas 41–2.
The Universe in the Universe
the aims of the ‘Introduction’ to the Ideas is that ‘philosophy become
genetic’.36 Accordingly, a philosophy must demonstrate itself in
‘arising before our eyes’ and be tested according to its capacity for ‘development’.37 The question Schelling poses to the transcendental
concept of nature is twofold: firstly, what ‘reality’ belongs to its
‘concept of nature’38 and secondly, from what does it derive, on
which the answer to the former depends.
Since Schelling cannot eliminate reality from the transcendental
concept of nature without undermining his argument, some reality
must attach to it. It is the reality of reflection, which rests in turn
on the ‘activity of separation [zertrennendes Geschäft]’ proper to it.39
Such separation arises from the doubt that the nature I grasp and
that grasps me is nature in itself or merely for me; but this doubt is
in turn parasitic upon the activity of reflection from which it issues.
While what reflection separates is conceptual content – concept
from thing, or intuition from object – separation is an activity disturbing an ‘equilibrium of forces’ original only with respect to the reflection that disturbs it. The theory of action underwriting the
withdrawal of force from acting in a world whose forces in turn we
feel40 rests in turn upon dynamics as the ‘grounding science’ of
Naturphilosophie.41 At its root, therefore, is the community of
forces necessary in order that there be separation at all and, since
no force is possible that is not limited by another,42 such separation
can only be for reflection. The reflective separation of mind from
nature is therefore actual precisely insofar as it effects a redistribution
of forces affected by dynamic activity in a common nature.
36
SW II, 39; Ideas 30.
SW II, 11; Ideas 9.
38
SW II, 6; Ideas 5.
39
SW II, 14; Ideas 11; t.m.
40
‘The essence of man is action. But the less he reflects upon himself,
the more active he is […]. As soon as he makes himself object, the whole
man no longer acts; he has suspended one part of his activity so as to be
able to reflect upon the other. Man is not born to waste his mental power
in conflict against the fantasy of an imaginary world, but to exert all his
powers upon a world which has influence upon him, which lets him feel
its forces.’ (SW II, 13; Ideas 10).
41
SW II, 6; Ideas 5.
42
‘[W]e may think of force only as something finite. But no force is
finite by nature unless it is limited by one opposing it. Where we think of
force therefore we must always presume a force opposed to it.’ (SW II,
49–50; Ideas 37).
37
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Iain Hamilton Grant
These considerations give rise to the third of Schelling’s problems,
namely, how are arbitrary or ‘chance coincidences’ conceivable?
Since, as we have seen, these conditions belong not to spontaneity
in isolation from nature, but to a production Schelling must claim
to be natural, this question concerns how nature is capable of arbitrary production. Even if reflective production is ‘arbitrary generation’ only for itself, that is, to the extent that it acknowledges no
means to ‘borrow its own reality from actuality’,43 surely this only
defers resolving the problem of natural arbitrariness on the basis of
epistemic limitation? It should be noted that at no point does
Schelling dismiss the reality of reflective separation or its products.
He only notes the energetic cost of its production. We may say therefore that production is demonstrably arbitrary to the extent that it
becomes incapable of development, stalling upon its encounter
with the separation at its root. The test of arbitrariness therefore is
the reality attaching to its consequences.
It should be noted, however, that Schelling is not attempting to demonstrate natural arbitrariness but rather to reject the assumption
that rests on it, namely, that coincidence is conceivable. The specific
‘coincidence’ Schelling problematizes is that of nature and mind. To
what extent is such a coincidence conceivable as arbitrary? Firstly, we
must note that the passage does not demonstrate that the coincidence
occurs, nor even stipulate how it might occur. It aims rather to demonstrate that such a coincidence remains inconceivable if it is
brought about by some ‘third intermediary’. Kant gives us an
example of such a third in the concept of relation that underlies the
coincidence of nature and mind without causing it. Coincidence,
on this view, remains coincidence solely and exclusively if the coincident elements remain (a) capable of non-coincidence such that the
bond between them is not one that necessitates; and (b) separable
therefore from the bond that unites them.
In his excellent book All or Nothing,44 Paul W. Franks argues that
German Idealism was motivated to respond to the sceptical challenges it encountered from neo-Humean and other sources. Franks
describes the form these challenges take as the Agrippan
Trilemma45: to the question ‘Why X?’ all answers will either (a)
lack justification; (b) supply a justification that retriggers the Why43
SW II, 44; Ideas 33.
Paul W. Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental
Arguments and Skepticism in German Idealism (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2005).
45
Ibid., 18.
44
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question rather than resolving it, creating a regress, or (c) presuppose
what they seek to establish. Thus, when Hume seeks to demonstrate
the inconclusiveness of relying on reason to explain nature, he has
Philo ask ‘What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the
brain which we call thought that we must make it the model of the
whole universe?’46 Philo’s question seeks to demonstrate, contrary
to Schelling’s account, that there is no reason to assume what is
true of the part to be true of the whole. The coincidence, in other
words, between thought and the universe, is absolute in the sense
of pure mere coincidence. It renders any attempt to argue a necessity,
for instance, between the causal patterns involved in the production
of thought and those involved in the production of other events or
entities, (a) unjustified; (b) retriggers the why question (a); and (c)
is regressive. On this basis, no demonstration of coincidence as
other than absolute could succeed. The only positive conclusion,
therefore, is the impotence of reason on the cosmic scale.
Schelling’s strategy, however, is to argue not from coincidence,
since, as we have seen, coincidence presupposes a separation the
concept is not required to remain on one side of. Rather, he argues
from the necessity attaching to the production of thought that
Philo’s opening gambit itself acknowledges: given that such a coincidence occurs – that thought and nature coadvene, so to speak – then
no explanation can satisfy the phenomenon unless it is necessitated
not at the level of content, but rather of event, by the nature that
underlies its possibility. To this extent, Schelling argues in strict
transcendental mode, asking after the conditions of possibility attaching to the coincidence of thought and nature.
However, the passage goes on to stipulate the requirements for
satisfying the question: nature is nature when and only when ‘she
herself, necessarily and originally […] not only express[es], but even
realize[s], the laws of our mind’.47 Nature is nature only if it is
capable of realizing and expressing the laws of mind. The passage
does not state the conditions under which this might occur, since it
articulates as fundamental a condition that is not a terminus to a deduction, but rather opens the conditions attaching to the laws of mind
to a naturalism whose basis is given neither in experience nor in ‘pure
thought’. The cost, in other words, of the absolutisation of coincidence is the abolition of absolute termini, and therefore of a
46
David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Part II, in
Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993), 50.
47
SW II, 55–6; Ideas 41–2.
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Iain Hamilton Grant
spontaneity that can be restricted to a single domain of being: if there
is spontaneity at all, it belongs to all nature.
What we do learn, however, is that a nature for which mind is not
possible is not a nature at all. It does not follow from this that there
could be no nature that did not produce mind, but only that, if
mind exists, the nature it considers could not be nature if it were considered incapable of mindedness. As he writes in the System of
Transcendental Idealism, ‘the concept of nature does not entail that
there must also be an intelligence that is aware of it. Nature, it
seems, would exist, even if there were nothing that was aware of it’. 48
In consequence, the nature of the problem changes from ‘what is the
nature of mind’ to ‘how does intelligence come to be added to nature,
or how does nature come to be presented?’ (SW III, 345; System 5).
The nature that produces mind belongs at once to the nature of
species and to that of ideas that access species. Accordingly, if the
identity is given – question four – what follows? Firstly, that nature
philosophizes, so to the extent that idea and nature are separated,
this must be a derivative rather than an original condition. If minds
conceive themselves to be other than nature, this too must be a
product of natural history, philosophy as ‘a discipline of errant
reason’.49 Secondly, insofar as nature is capable of the idea, no
thought is not a natural occurrence. Thirdly, insofar as there is
thought of whatever kind, because it obtains in one domain of
being, it cannot be impossible that it obtains also in others.
Fourthly, just as we cannot lay claim to the thesis that anything
capable of arbitrariness is therefore universally arbitrary, nor can
we claim that the identity of thought and nature is incapable of
their dichotomy: nature must be equally capable both of their identity and their dichotomy.
Our penultimate Schellingian problem therefore concerns the
nature of identity, and its consequences as regards the apparent
equivalence or non-decidability of unity over dichotomy, or necessity
over arbitrariness. When we consider thought and nature as coincident, and seek reasons for their identity as advening consequently
upon their separate natures, such reasons remain arbitrary additions
that demand explanation rather than offering any, since such a conception of identity presupposes what it seeks to explain. Moreover,
48
SW III, 340; F.W.J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism
(hereafter System), trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville, VA: University
Press of Virginia, 1978), 5.
49
SW II, 14; Ideas 11.
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there is something of a paradox in the claim that X and Y are identical,
since if they were, then either X is not X but Y, or Y is not Y but X.
On the contrary view, that identity is antecedent to particulars, it
can never be the case that particulars are identical one to another.
In fact, as Schelling writes in Presentation of my System of
Philosophy (1801), ‘Everything that is, is absolute identity itself’.50
On the one hand this affirms a univocal account of identity, that is,
to the extent that everything is, it is identity; on the other, it is in
that everything is that it is, i.e. cannot not be, identity itself. We
may say that for Schelling therefore identity attaches to being
rather than to beings or that unity is antecedent to duplicity. In
other words, identity differentiates rather than integrates.51
As a provisional answer, therefore, to the question posed at the
head of this section we may say that nature is precisely the identity
that dichotomizes, or that self-differentiates into the totality of entities, the universe.
We have seen that opening transcendental inquiries to termini sequestered in particular domains of being remains inconsistent
unless it is absolutised, so that such a transcendental philosopher
could claim that ‘there is being because there is thinking’ or ‘what
being there is is thought-being’. We have not yet seen that nature
supplies other termini, but that it replaces one set of terms with a
ground that recedes from epistemic or transcendental access precisely
where thought and nature separate. What this means is that whatever
grounds is not merely logically nor chronologically prior to what is
grounded, but rather that there is always an ontogenetic antecedent
for any product or event that accesses us, despite our inability to
recover it. This is what nature is for German Idealism: at once unlimited production and its ruins, the World-Phoenix, as Kant and
Carlyle have it,52 antecedent to the production of thought it necessitates and accordingly unlimitable save through all its possible
50
SW IV, 119; trans. Michael G. Vater, Philosophical Forum 32 (2001),
343–371, here 352.
51
See Grant, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling, 174. Jason Wirth
discusses this point in his paper ‘The solitude of God: Schelling, Deleuze
and Nature as the Image of Thought’, presented at the Schelling Tagung,
Universität Bonn, July 10 2011 and forthcoming in Schelling-Studien 1
(2013).
52
Kant, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, tr.
Stanley L. Jaki (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981), 160, AK I,
321. The ‘World-Phoenix’ is recurrent throughout Carlyle. See, e.g.,
Sartor Resartus Part 3 ch.7, and French Revolution Book VI, ch.1: ‘Behold
the World-Phoenix enveloping all things: it is the Death-Birth of a
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Iain Hamilton Grant
productions and their source. As to these termini ad quo or ad quem,
these limits or sources can never be recovered by a thought that
remains, after all, an additional product of these same sources.
Therefore the terminus of transcendental philosophy is the philosophy of nature precisely because the latter alone can demonstrate
there is no terminus that is not conditioned by a separation antecedent
to it.
4. The Universe in the Universe
What strives against the intellectual or thinking – the real, being
as such – of which we may indeed become conscious, and the
concept of which consists, however, in not being taken up into
the concept.53
Having examined the five questions Schelling poses regarding the
relation between nature and the concept, we turn finally to the character and function of the concept of nature Schelling recommends. If
conception is consequent upon division, how is nature capable of a
concept of the divisions antecedent to its emergence – that is, of a
‘natural history of mind’?54
It is difficult to conceive how a local product, actual as such, may
enjoy an extension greater than its initial locus if the locus – the
point of ‘coincidence’ or of separation between mind and nature –
is explanatorily sufficient. A naturalism pursuant of neurophysiological reduction therefore could have no account of the concept as such
but only its cause, leaving the concept beyond nature’s capacities
altogether if it consists in anything other than an echo of its cause.
Or, if consistent, a naturalism of the concept would seem to
condemn it to an extensionlessness in a manner not even Descartes
envisaged for thought, making the concept a point insuperably less
than its productive context, the creation within which it figures.
While the image of the point-concept retains the asymmetry
necessary to overturning eliminative idealism, it simultaneously
functions as the limit of nature, its nec plus ultra, in that nature
does not continue after, but only up to, this point. Yet it is precisely
what a concept is that it conceives something. The problematics of
World!’ See, finally, Martin Schönfeld’s fine essay ‘The phoenix of nature:
Kant and the big bounce’, Collapse 5 (2009), 361–376.
53
SW VIII, 164.
54
SW II, 39; Ideas 30.
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The Universe in the Universe
nature and history – which together exhaust ‘applied philosophy’55,
Schelling tells us – alter the conception of nature, and the concept
of the concept, in accordance with dynamics, the ‘basic science
[Grundwissenschaft]’ of the philosophy of nature.56 While the asymmetry of nature and the concept remains, or while the separation at
the latter’s root remains actual, the history of a concept is always
catching up with the concept from which natural-historical inquiry
began and which issues from that inquiry. It is precisely in that conceiving has its history in the separation from the nature that conceived
it to begin with that the concept acquires an extension that, while
necessarily insufficient to recover its antecedents, is also additional
to them, that is genuinely consequent upon them. Since, moreover,
the concept begins its career neither arbitrarily in mind alone nor coincidentally between mind and nature, but asymmetrically in the
nature from which it issues, the concept’s history already conceives
the separations that form it. The concept’s extension, therefore, is
always greater than consciousness of it, and what it conceives is its
own nature, that is, the nature from which it issues. Accordingly,
Schelling will later consider the concept’s extension to be subject to
‘powers’ as instancing its basic recursive function.
It is for this reason that Schelling gives, as the test of a concept, not
adequacy to a thing, but operative range, that is, whether it ‘admits of
development’.57 Only insofar as it does so does it exceed antecedence
just as the idea – the concept of the concept – enjoys only part of its
career in mind.58 Indeed, Schelling is at pains to stipulate that concepts do not have prior limits, and defines the idea therefore as the
‘infinite’ or ‘unlimited concept’ which is itself ‘the concept of the
universe’.59
The philosophy of nature does not propose to eliminate nature or
concept but, in seeking a concept of nature capable of the concept,
changes the form in which nature’s antecedence is thought into the
movements proper to the conceiving operative in nature. A concept
is not a thing, an object, nor an abstract container, but a form of movement overcoming its beginning in pursuit of the history of which it is
consequent.
German Idealism therefore confronts philosophy both with the insuperability of the philosophy of nature, and with the necessity of its
55
56
57
58
59
SW II, 4; Ideas 3.
SW II, 6; Ideas, 5.
SW II, 11; Ideas, 9.
SW III, 553; System 172.
SW VI, 185.
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Iain Hamilton Grant
application to mind. A consequent outcome of such a programme
would consist therefore in the demonstration of the forms in which
nature casts the thinking it produces, a demonstration that cannot
acquire the terminus Kant demanded transcendental philosophy
satisfy precisely because for it, what precedes mind is the nature
that is its own, nonrecoverable history. If the philosophy of nature
were inapplicable to ideation of all sorts, it would not be a philosophy
of nature, but rather of something incapable of mindedness. I take it
no naturalist would wish to be in such a position.
University of the West of England
iain.grant@uwe.ac.uk
316