6
• PHILOS OPHY
GENETI C " :
B E COME
THE PHYS I CS
OF
THE VVORLD S OUL
lain Hamilton Grant
The whole of modern European philosophy since its inception (through
Descartes) has this common deficiency - that nature does not exist
for it.
(Schelling: VII, 3 56; HF, 30)1
The present chapter has two principal purposes. Firstly, to establish some
key components of speculative physics or Naturphilosophie as Schelling con
structed it. Secondly, as physicists too are calling for it,2 to present a
philosophical impetus to pursue speculative physics in che present. The core
of this case is the relation between thought and nature - which, since
Schelling tells us Descartes is responsible for the abolition of nature from
thought, or of phusis from metaphysics, does not reduce to 'mind and body'.
And the means for i ts vehiculation are provided by the physical history of the
concept of the World Soul.
THE
P H Y SIC S
O F
THE W O R L D
I certainly agree there is no World Soul.
S O UL
(Leibniz)3
'Without a doubt there is a world soul', counters Deleuze;4 the question is,
what is its nature? While Gode van Aesch, echoing the traditional accounts of
the world soul in the Timaeus, typically considers i t 'a mythical concept',5
Esposito grants it an ideal essence, making it an early sketch of Schelling's
'ahistorical, eternal and essentially changeless' Absolute.6 Thereby, however,
he not only deprives the World Soul, but also the Absolute, of a nature,
entirely eliminating the express physicalism of Schelling's World Soul, 'the
two struggling forces condensed and recapitulated . . . Perhaps this is what
the Ancients wished co indicate by the world soul' (III, 382). 7
Plato develops a complex theory of the World Soul, as 'the original
principle of movement, movement itself [arche kineseos, autokinesis]' without
• P H I LO S O P HY
B E C O IVI E
O•NBTIC•
1 29
which 'the universe would collapse' (Phaedrus 245e and Laws 896a: 'self
generating motion'); as 'pilot [kybernetes]' (Statesman 27 3d-e), after the model
of a thermodynamic governor.8 Aside from Plato's 'phoronomy' of the World
Soul he also discusses its matter, generation, and organization, considering it
as living metal9 ('are metals the bones of an ancient world - or the preface to
the new?' wonders Ritter), 10 and as cosmic animal (Timaeus 36b-c), whose
organism metabolizes the substantial mathematics of the Same and the
Different that generate the world-body (Plotinus, Oken).1 1 The 'universal
animal' appears in Schelling's Bruno (IV, 278; Bruno, 1 76).12 Bruno himself
described the World Soul as the internal artificer of matter that animates
everything, an animator that Ritter identifies with galvanism, the 'pulse of
the cosmic animal'. 1 3
The cosmic animal o r 'great animal totality' has recently resurfaced in
Alain Badiou's account of Deleuze's 'philosophy "of " or . . . as nature'. 14
'There have never been,' Badiou notes, 'but two schemes, or paradigms, of
the Multiple: the mathematic and the organicist, Plato or Aristotle . . . The
animal or the number? This is the cross of metaphysics . ' 1 5 B ut it is not the
Multiple that concerns us here; rather the antithesis of animal and number,
and the disj unction of the two as a deliberate scission of Plato's Timaeus, the
source text for the World Soul and the repeated beginning of Schelling's
researches in the philosophy of nature.16 The Timaeus starts with number 'One, two, three, but where is the fourth . . . ?' ( 1 7a) - and ends with the
'cosmos . . . being itself a visible Living Creature embracing all the visible
creatures' (92c). In presenting himself as a Platonist, Badiou extracts number
from the 'physics of the all' (Timaeus 27a, 47a) and argues instead for the
received Platonism of the sort known in mathematics, so that, in presenting
Deleuze and the animal as Aristotelian, he excises the animal from Platon
ism. But, crucially, Badiou also Aristotelianizes Platonic physics, insofar as,
along with the excision of the animal from the cosmos, number too ceases to
be part of phusis, and becomes instead something approached by intellect
alone. In other words, there is a distribution of bodies (animal) and events
(number) i n relation to 'sense' ('worldly multiplicities')17 and ' intellect' (the
'perforation' of being by the event of truth), which reverses Aristotle's
determination of i ntellect by sense (Physics 1 84a), such that a discontinuous
'generaticity of truth' takes a stand against the philosophers and mathema
ticians of the organo-mathematical continuum.18
The introduction of the antithesis presents the 'cross of metaphysics' as the
intersection of two barriers: between number and animal, but also between
thought and nature. For Badiou, a 'physics of the all' is impossible ('give up
the all', he argues, 'and generate discontinuities'), which impossibility he
contrasts with Deleuze's project of 'a philosophy "of " . . . or as nature'.19 At
stake, then, in this angular redistribution of the World Soul is the nature of
this physics, that is, the physics of this metaphysics of 'the cross', that is, the
chiasmus, 'of metaphysics'. But this has a tradition: the Kantian transcen
dental confronts an insuperable gulf between nature and freedom, which is
t 30
TH•
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& C H ll! L L I N O
precisely a means to allow the causality of freedom to perforate inanimate
nature and animal inertia. When, in the Transition project,20 the interaction
of subjective-bodily and ethereal forces provides a physical-transcendental
means to overcome this gulf, Kant almost ceases to be Kantian and, in a
certain manner, reverts to Leibniz, whose own 'transition between meta
physics and physics' was similarly accomplished by way of the actions of a
potentia agendi, an active force within the monads.21
Another problem is the related one of the solutions of continuity by which
physics and mathematics sought to ground the matter and nature of the
continuum: the hypokeimenon, substrate, ousia or protes hules. In physics,
matter cannot be susceptible of infinite division, for otherwise there would
be no simples, matter would not be composed of anything, and research
could no longer pursue the infinite divisibility of matter and the expo
nentiality of abstraction, both of which find place in speculative physics. In
mathematics, meanwhile, the differential relation of infinitely small dis
tances takes the place of the positive construction of the continuum, just as
Leibniz says, there is no World Soul, but every natural machine contains
within itself an 'infinite number of organisms' 22 Continuity is assembled
from innumerable number-animals, like links in an extended metabolism, or
cells in an infinite galvanic chain. As we shall see, Schelling's solution to this
problem consists of three elements: material i ndividuation, or the identity of
matter and the absolute (II, 60; Ideas, 47), Kielmeyer's transphyletic
extension of the theory of recapitulation, and the 'dynamic process' .
Continuum o r discontinuity? The introduction, in Badiou's critical
Auseinandersetzung with Deleuze, of the discontinuity into Platonic physics
makes Badiou's text a phylogenetic recapitulation of the ontogenesis of its
set-theoretic base. Here too, Badiou belongs to a tradition most clearly
encapsulated in Lorenz Oken's Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie. That work
presents Naturphilosophie as 'mathematics endowed with substance' (Lehrbuch,
§ 26), and nature itself as the resultant 'mathematical multiplicity' which
'must have proceeded . . . out of zero' (Lehrbuch, § 3 5). But Oken is also the
most fervent of organicists, so that the substantialization of the matheme
becomes the algorithm of an absolute organicism, yielding a (highly linear)
account of the recapi tulation thesis where the terminii ad quo and ad quem are
fixed: 'Animals are only the persistent foetal stages or conditions of man'
(Lehrbuch, § 3048), so that all of organic nature becomes a single mega
organism with a human head.
Naturphilosophie is infamous for its organicism; it is found throughout
Ritter's works, from the Proof of a Continual Galvanism: 'Nature is . . . the
All-Animal';23 to the Fragments of 1 8 1 0: 'The Earth is there for the sake of
Man. It is only his organ.'24 As for Oken, nature mathematizes: 'Vegetation
is natural algebra'. More contemporarily too, philosophers of nature reca
pitulate these recapitulations. Rene Thom, for example, following D'Arcy
Wentworth Thomson in pursuing a mathematicization of organic morpho
genesis, articulates the 'hope that scientists . . . take up the torch of the quest
.
• p H I L C> B C> P H V
B IE C C> NI &
CJI E N B T I C "
Ull
for a synthetic knowledge in the manner of the eighteenth century Natur
philosophen';25 Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate a residual organicism even
while insisting that their 'material vitalism' is 'nonorganic . . . a vital state of
matter as such' , when they stipulate that life is not possible with silicon,
albeit for a posteriori, or 'machinic' reasons26 - which is at least odd, since
many argue that life is not only possible, but actual, precisely due to silicon
machines. 27
Wherever we look, the vital is opposed to the inorganic. It is as though
Kant's barrier between reflective and constitutive judgment has been
maintained at the level of the thinkable: thought can become organic, but
not inorganic. Fichte, for example, is similar to Badiou in his rejection of
'worldly multiplicities', even nature itself, according to Schelling. It is well
known that Fichte reduces Kantianism to the 'pure act'. Accordingly,
organism was as far down the evolutive ladder as he could go, before activity
dissolved into the inorganic, the non-metabolic and the inert, far enough
into nature only to act as a counterposition against the inevitable con
sequence of the absolutizing of the lch that 'nature did not exist' for it.
Nature exists therefore, only insofar as it remains Ich-able, that is, only
insofar as the Ich can metabolize its thinkability into potential action,
Leibniz's potentia agendi in things, 'a force or power of action by which the
transition is made between metaphysics and physics'.28 Yet, to take the
Science of Knowledge at its word, what sort of philosophy of the infinite acts of
an unconditioned subject needs to bother with physiological particulars at
all? Doesn't the Fichtean philosophy of the animal entail the admission into
the unconditioned of the conditions of organic life? And these must surely
themselves arise i n the inorganic.
As a result of claims such as: 'Things are therefore not principles of the
organism, but rather conversely, the organism is the principle of things' (II, 5 00),
Schelling's On the World Soul is often held to be precisely such an organicist
philos ophy, an impression strengthened by the presence of the 'cosmic
animal' thesis in the Bruno (IV, 2 7 8 ; Bruno, 1 76). Already in the World Soul,
Schelling, following Kielmeyer's 'Ich, DIE NATUR',29 concedes the con
sequence of confronting deep time with 'natural kinds' lenses borrowed only
from the present. Just as Kielmeyer's Rede - from which 'coming ages will no
doubt date the advent of a new era in natural history' (II, 5 65) - brought
deep time into service as a critique of uniformitarianism in natural history,
on the one hand, and against the entire framework of the transcendental a priori
forms of intuition based on physiologically contingent particulars on the other,30 so
Schelling realized the implications for the philosophy of nature:
That our experience has known no reorganization [Umgestaltung] of
nature, no transition of one form or type into the other . . . is no proof
against this possibility; for, if an advocate of this could answer, t�e
changes to which organic as much as anorgic [anorgische] nature is
subjected, could (until a universal standstill of the organic world comes
1 32
THB
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SCHELLING
to pass), have happened over ever longer periods, fo r which our small
periods (which are determined by the cycles of the earth round the sun)
provides no measure, and that are so large that until now yet no
experience of the course [Ablauj} of one of them has been undergone.
(II, 348-9)
Schelling's philosophy is not like Kant's: he does not see in an organism
the occasion for a lawful projection of subjective purposes into nature for
reflection, since the organic kinds for which reflection is as i t is at the moment
of the transcendental deduction of the a priori forms of intuition, is itself
manifestly contingent according to natural history. Accordingly, the uni
versality of the a prioris is undermined, as well as the sequence of carefully
crafted conditions, culminating in the unconditioned. Therefore, as the First
Outline puts it, 'empiricism extended to the unconditioned is indeed nature
philosophy' (III, 24):
In every organization individuality (of the parts) goes on to infinity;
(this proposition, even if it cannot also be shown to be a constitutive
principle from experience, must at least be established as a regulative
principle of every investigation . . . ). The essence of the process of
organization must therefore consist in the individuation of matter to
infinity. (II, 5 20)
This is not only to extend the concept of organization, it also, literally, un
conditions the subject of the organization. In other words, infinitely individuated
parts never turn back on themselves to be sealed up into an organization, but
proliferate unrestrictedly, as the 'positive force' of nature: 'All individual
things have the positive in common; the multiplicity of different things only
develops from the determinations and restrictions of the positive' (II, 408).
These determinations are the effect of the 'negative force'. There is no basis
for analogy, since connectivity fills all available conceptual space, leaving no
'gulfs'. This is why both !ch 'has no predicates and is no thing' (III, 3 7 2 ; STI,
29),31 and why 'matter has no inwardness' (III, 368; STI, 26); in the 'self
construction of matter' (IV, 4), there is no self, no 'subject' or 'auto', but only
the infinite externality of matter. In Schelling, there never was a 'struggle
against subjectivism' (Beiser, German Idealism), but only 'an excess of
objectivity'.32 In fact, there is no struggle at all, only a tension in the
'common principle . . . fluctuating between inorganic and organic nature' (II,
347), between, that is, force and organization. Thus, in the First Outline of a
System of Naturephilosophy and the Introduction to the Outline, Schelling resolves
this tension by opting for a Boscovite-Priestleyan 'dynamic atomism' (III,
23n.). While these here remain 'ideal explanatory grounds', the Universal
Deduction of the Dynamic Process ( 1 800) opens decisively with the 'self
construction of matter' (IV, 4), by which time, to equip the World Soul with
a later vocabulary, animal is insufficiently evolved to serve as the basis of
• P H I L C> B D P H V
B•COM•
O • N E T I C "'
1 33
speculative physics, having not yet involved the infinite individuality of its
parts as matter.
That the World Soul is a conflict of forces, that deep time is phenom
enologically inscrutable, means that there can be no a priori finality in nature.
All that is certain is the conflict - although , again following Kielmeyer, not
the proportions - of these forces .33 This is why a Schellingian philosophy of
nature works not with the continuity or discontinuity of organization and
matheme, but with the tension of the infinite individuation of matter and
the un-conditioning of experience as i t moves from recording to producing
further individuation. Finally, therefore, since 'organization is the principle
of things', and since individuation is infinite, the World Soul cannot be
approached as though it were a body. Rather, the investigation of the World
Soul feeds back on i tself (eventually giving rise to the theory of the invo
lution and evolution of the powers, or Potenzen), since it is the axis of the
composition of natural things, or rather, as Kielmeyer put it 'all variations in
dead, material nature . . . derive . . . from a striving in the soul of nature . . .
for heterogenesis . ' Kielmeyer's account, of course, has a naturalistic basis: his
'physics of the animal kingdom'34 developed the theory of recapitulation3�
from one relating solely to the organic world, as Oken understood it, for
example, to a 'developmental history' that included inorganic elements, and
that gave these latter elements a causal role in the 'changes that the animal
kingdom and its groups have suffered on the earth . . . and those probable in
the solar system. '36 Thus, due to the identity of the forces involved, all
matter was subject to recapitulation, that is, to parallel development,
regardless of the resulting product. From this aspect of Kielmeyer's Rede,
Schelling derived the hypothesis of a higher physics - one of the dynamic core
of nature. However, Kielmeyer went further. At the end of the Rede, he
suggests that 'the human mind also manifests the proportion of forces that
are combined i n it' ,37 and again, Schelling will follow suit, confirming in
1 797 that 'philosophy is the natural history of mind', in pursuit of which
'phi losophy becomes genetic' (II, 39; Ideas, 30), and postulating in 1 800 'the
identity of dynamics and the transcendental' (III, 452; STI, 9 1 ). While
Deleuze has remarked on the 'autopositing' of the concept 'as a philosophical
reality' in the post-Kantians, 'particularly Schelling and Hegel',38 Schelling
goes further: since 'Naturphilosophie gives a material explication of idealism'
as the latter 'erupts at the threshold of nature' (IV, 7 6), it necessarily entails a
physics of the idea, or 'physical concept formation' (the Stoic and Neopla
tonist phusike ennoia),39 no different than the actions of gravitation in the
formation of 'stones and rubble' (VI, 2 79). Thus, there are two aspects to
Sche lling's Naturphilosophie: the dynamics of nature, and of the idea. To
explore this further, following Kielmeyer's extension of the concept of
recapi tulation to cover everything from rocks to ideation, we now move from
the World Soul to the world body.
TH•
THE
N BW & C H B L L I N O
A B Y SS
OF
F O R CE S
The abyss [Abgrund} of forces into whose depths we peer, already
introduces this question: what ground or reason might there be in the
first construction of our Earth, that no generation of new i ndividuals
is possible on it otherwise than under the condition of opposing
powers ?
(Schelling: III, 324n. )
Thus naturephilosophy must follow the ' infinite i nd ividuation' of matter
into the inorganic rather than remaining with the animal or plant. 'In the
first construction of our Earth' : Schelling's response to the hyper-tellurianism
of second natures and analogical gulfs - and, implicitly, to the 'transcen
dental or volcanic spatium'40 - is to physical ize the analogy and make matter
active. In identifying the dynamic core of natural production, however,
Schelling asks after the contingency of individuals currently available to
scrutiny, and the determinacy of their ground in the forces. Thus, chemically
speaking, he writes: ' the earth-principle, i.e., only the symbol [Sinnbild] of
things irreducible, or rather the irreducible itself ' (III, 2 4 5 ). Is the chemical
earth then an unconditioned body, or merely the 'sensible image' of it? Are
chemical bodies the phenomenal output of unstable forces, or are they per
manent material artifacts? Peering into the abyss of forces means: retro
specting the natural history of the earth, much as Steffens did in his
'physiology of the universe' .41 Where Schelling saw an abyss, Steffens saw
The Inner Natural History of the Earth ( 1 80 1 ) as demanding an equivalence of
human and natural history:
It became steadily clearer to me that just as the natural sciences
themselves had ushered in an absolutely new historical element,
through which our own time was cut off entirely from the past, so
the most important of the sciences [i.e. , geology, the natural history
of the earth] must become the basis of the entire i ntellectual future
of the species. History must itself become nature through and through,
if it wants to assert itself as nature; that is, in every aspect of i ts being.42
Ritter says this too: 'Not history of physics; rather: history
physics
history. '43 If history is not natural history, it is not history at all: the only
possible means to preserve the 'entire intellectual future of the species' is that
it be accounted for as natural history. Why, however, would a natural history
guarantee the future of any species, or its exclusive maintenance of i ntellect?
Who can tell that no generation of species is possible except under currently
observable conditions (uniformitarianism )? As a buttress against natural
historical contingency, Steffens' geology places man at the summit of the
earth's creations. But the fact that a natural history will thus guarantee the
species' future at all rests, for Schelling, on certain key assumptions.
According to ' natural history in the strict sense of the term' . . .
=
• P H I L C> B C> P H V
B B. C C> IVI E
O • N •T I C "
1 311
. . . w e would think nature i n its freedom as i t develops along all
possible trajectories in accordance with an original organization (which
for that very reason cannot now exist anywhere), as now one force, at
the cost of suppressing the others, has here a lower and there a higher
intensity, and thus an equilibrium is attained amongst these same
organic forces; this would even have the advantage . . . of being able to
reduce the external variations amongst the Earth's creatures as regards
the number, magnitude, structure and function of the organs to an
original, i nner variation in the proportions of organic forces44 (of which
these were only the outward phenomenon). (I, 469)
Natural history and the history of freedom can only coincide if nature rests
on an 'original organization': a little determinacy of the ground alone can
guarantee freedom. If, on the other hand, this organization no longer exists,
then existing organizations, differing from the original, cannot be it - and
this only by assuming that it did once exist. Otherwise, the ground of the
determinacy is to be sought i n the proportions of the forces; if these change,
then so too do the resultant organizations, thus accounting for the successive
eradications of species throughout natural history. Steffens has followed
Kielmeyer's injunction to carry recapitulation beyond the animal and
vegetable, and into the geological realm, but at the cost of constituting Earth
and Man as permanent, unchanging bodies, against all the evidence of
natural history itself. The question Schelling poses to this is remarkably
transcendental : the fact that the Earth's creatures are merely the 'outward
phenomenon' of the proportions of the forces, poses the challenge: if the
ground cannot be sought in bodies, and if all bodies are accessible to sense, then
the forces themselves are unintuitable; 'matter is the darkest of all things' (II,
3 5 9) says Schelling, repeatedly echoing Plato. Ground, Earth and Body
therefore establish a polarity between the planomenon and the phenomenon.
The abyss of forces is therefore an abyss for our 'peering' (sensuous intuition),
but also a physical abyss, insofar as premising our guarantees against
extinction events on observable bodies has no ground other than these
bodies. Since, according to the evidence of natural history, these are neces
sarily contingent, the abyss of forces is the chaos logically and materially
prior to 'the first construction of our earth'.
When, therefore, Schelling provides a 'geology of morals' i n the Philo
sophical Inquiries, it begins with 'the self-operation of the ground' and ends
with 'the crisis of the turba gentium' (VII, 379-80; HF, 5 6-8), global tur
bulence and storms of species. Within this naturalistic 'ages of the world',
the 'will of the deep ' realizes particularization in organic bodies,45 estab
lishing a series of bodies repeatedly swept away by this periodic recapitu
lation of primal forces. Just as
we record the eruptions of volcanic mountains; if we could only
glimpse the rule of their recurrence and finally establish it, we could
1 39
TH •
N B W S C H l!. L L I N O
dispense with recording them. Therefore: what must be judged a priori
and happens according to necessary laws, is not an object of history; and
conversely, what is an object of history cannot be assessed a priori . . . (I, 467)
So the periodic recapitulation of the self-operation of the ground i n cre
ated nature sweeps its forms aside. Thus, not only is the circuit of creation
and destruction not history because it is periodic, but also because it cannot
be said to follow any chronological sequence; this is because the conditions
for accounting a phenomenon recurrent depend crucially on non-recurrent
elements: but the only non-recurrent elements are the bodies established and
eliminated periodically, so chat, 'our small time-frame provides no measure'
of the recurrence. Once again, the antithesis of the geo-planomenal and the
phenomenal establishes the abyss as i naccessible co sense (Kant's das Uber
sinnliche), since it exceeds the physiologically contingent forms of i ntuition
available to specific organizations that would enable the specification of
difference between the recapitulated and the recapitulating. Thus the ground
is ungrounding: 'in the unground {Ungrund] or indifference there is
admittedly no personality [no individuality]; but is the point of origin the
whole? ' (VII, 42 3 ; HF, 93). In other words , given the 'will of the depths'
that 'excites the self-will of the creature' - that produces individuality,46
there are two foci for naturphilosophische inquiries: the whole (Absolute,
Unconditioned) and the individual .
The upshot is that the forces are unavailable both for intuition and for
reflection. Schelling maps two escape routes from the dilemma of the
inscrutability of the self-construction of the earth. The first is to seek an
articulation of those forces that is the archetype of nature's activity without
being subject to the terminal contingency of organic forms (the 'universal
categories of physics' (IV, 1-78); while the second is that the 'Naturphilosoph
puts himself in the place of nature' .47 The first is the route opened by
intellect becoming productive, the second by 'empiricism extended to the
unconditioned' (III, 24).
Given, however, the ungrounding of the ground, the errancy of the pla
nomenon, the merely symbolic i rreducibility of the Earths or Elements, and
the contingency of organization, how is an articulation of the forces to be
found in nature? How, in other words, is the 'deduction of the dynamic
process' possible? While the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature are busy physi
calizing the transcendental apparatus ('chemistry is nothing other than
sensory dynamics': II, 343; Ideas, 2 5 7), the World Soul says that the duality or
conflict of positive and negative force is basic; the First Outline and the
Introduction posit a 'dynamic atomism', embedding a potentia agendi into
atoms, although mediated by the idea, as we have seen. In the Universal
Deduction of the Dynamic Process, however, there is no hesitation concerning
the transcendental or ideal status of the 'primitives of nature':
• P H I L C> & C> P H V
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1 37
the same phenomena that we conceive under the term 'dynamic pro
cess ,' and which are the only primitives of nature, are nothing other
than a consistent self-construction of matter, simply recapitulated at
different stages. A deduction of the dynamic process also therefore
counts as a complete construction of matter itself, and therefore one
and the same with the highest task of natural science as a whole. (IV, 4)
Here Schelling gives his solution to the continuity problem: forces before
bodies. At one level, this is already well known from innumerable narratives
of the demise of mechanism and the rise of organicism. But the dimensions
of the problem extend beyond the cliche of its accepted solution. In
particular, we have already elucidated the problem of the identity of the
primitive forces, since they are i naccessible to sense or reflection. Facing this
same problem in his 'inner natural history of the earth', Steffens announces
he will 'establish magnetism as the first step in the evolution of all the
developments on our earth and even thereby elevate the theory of evolution
to a principle' 48 Thus, the magnet would embody the polarity of whole and
individual, insofar as, being a body, and thus individual, it is also one of the
'universal categories of physics' Schelling 'deduces' along with electricity and
the chemical process (IV, 4). While i n terms of physics, this is either a
successful explanation or not (the earth's magnetic field and its causes in the
iron core at the planet's centre; the consequent retention of atmosphere and
shielding from cosmic radiation, and so forth - but in what sense 'con
sequent'?), the process by which such primitives are to be 'deduced' is far
from clear.
Negotiating precisely this task, Schelling opens his Universal Deduction
thus: 'The sole problem of natural science is: to construct matter. This problem
can be resolved , although the applications to be made of this general solution
will never be complete' (IV, 3). The categories of physics thus to be deduced
are equally the categories of the 'self-construction of matter', that is, they are
to be unconditioned with respect both to the ideal and the physical. Since 'it
is the nature of philosophy to consider things as they are in themselves' (IV,
1 20), while Naturphilosophie 'knows only the purely productive in nature' (Ill,
1 0 1 ), nature and philosophy move in contrary directions; naturephilosophy,
however, moves in both trajectories at once: 'to philosophize about nature is
to produce it' (III, 1 3). This is one (formal) reason why the Universal
Deduction can affirm that 'the deduction of the dynamic process is at the same
time the complete construction of matter' (IV, 4). In the later Schellingian
lexis of the powers (Potenzen), these trajectories will be known as the evolutive
and the involutive, respectively. This is why the 'Introduction' to the Ideas for
a Philosophy of Nature ( 1 797) affirms of that work that it 'does not begin /ram
above . . . but from below . . . ' (II, 5 6; Ideas, 42), not with hypotheses, but with
bodies. This is not simply to comply with empiricism in the norms of the
'experimental arts,' but rather for fully philosophical reasons, namely, as the
ground of an 'unconditioned empiricism' (IV, 82; III, 24) which, in turn, is the
.
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N B W S C H ll!: L L I N O
only method by which to involve the 'unthinged' (dem Unbedingten), 'the
absolute in the natural sciences' (III, 283).
Of course, anything unconditioned must be identical; there could not be
two unconditioned things, since 'things' are, by definition, conditioned
particulars. It is in this evolutionary49 sense that the absolute is to be
understood: for Naturphilosophie, the unconditioned is not arrived at by
simply positing it (as does Fichte), but rather by successive 'un-conditionings'
of particulars. The so-called 'identity philosophy' - really a continuation of
Naturphilosophie
will articulate this in terms of the Potenzen, which are
maximally potentiated when involved into the particular, and maximally
depotentiated when evolved into the unconditioned. Simply put , involution is
like cubing a number (VII, 449) and cubing its product again (no product is
without Potenzen); evolution is like cube-rooting it. The absolute, or identity,
is therefore 'devoid of all powers' (VI, 2 1 2), while differentiation is 'an
intensification of the unity' or a 'doubling of the essence' (VII, 424-5 ).
While Schelling's powers function mathematically, their basis lies in the
structure of polarity. Hence the 'magnetic' diagrams (VII, 4 1 6) that li tter
the identity philosophy:
-
+
+
A=B
A=B
A =A
(IV, 1 37 )
Or, as the raw schema of magnetic polarity:50
f-
--
1 + ..
/3
/2
1+
/1
1- �
-1 I -2 I
-31 i- 00
Chatelet writes, 'We know that the patient exposition of the absolute was
one of the major ambitions of the philosophy of nature,'51 an 'exposition' that
had to progress, phenomenon by phenomenon, through the infinitely reca
pitulating categories of physics. While in Eschenmayer's diagram, the
potentiation of the unity becomes visible as differentiation, as does the
depotentiation of the differentia into unity, what Schelling's own magnetic
diagram additionally shows is the polar reciprocity that exponentiates the
involution of differentia. The second remains susceptible of linear inter
pretation, while the first is itself dynamic, exchanging poles not on the basis
of particular identities, attributes or species, but by virtue of the identity
into which they are depotentiated . Polarity is both a schematizing and a
physical apparatus: it is like Buffon's 'primitive general outline'52 of nature,
naturalized, 'the basal form [for the construction} of our entire system' (IV,
1 38 [Schelling's addition}). 'Philosophy becomes genetic' (II, 39; Ideas, 30)
because i t is articulated by the same polarities that articulate nature. This is,
Schelling remarks, 'the very ancient doctrine . . . that "like is known
[erkannt} by like" ' (VII, 3 37; Ideas, 8), and i ts starting point is physics.
• P H I L C> & C> P H V
THE
' P H Y SI C S
O F
THE
BECOME
A L L '
O B N BTIC•
A N D ' THE
PHY S I C S
1 39
O F
A L L
T H I NG S '
Merely reflective humanity has no idea of an objective reason, of an Idea
that as such i s utterly real and objective; all reason is something
subjective to them, as equally is everything ideal, and the idea itself has
for them only the meaning of a subjectivity, so that they therefore
know only two worlds, the one consisting of stone and rubble, the
other of intuitions and the thinking thereupon.
(Schelling: VI, 279)
At the core of Platonic physics lies the theory of matter. Matter is a 'difficult
and dark idea' (49a) since it cannot be sensibly intuited but can be thought;
unlike the other ideas, however, matter cannot be thought clearly, but only
with difficulty. Or, matter is not a clear thought. It is as if, when Parmenides
asks Socrates: 'is there a form of hair, or mud, or dirt or any of these things'
(Parmenides 1 30c-d), he is asking is the form of dirt itself dirty (and if not, in
what way is it the form of dirt)? No one takes this thought of matter further
than Plotinus: 'We utterly eliminate every kind of form; and the object in
which there is none whatever we call Matter: if we are to see Matter we must
so completely abolish Form that we take shapelessness into our very selves'
(Enniads 1.8.ix).
Plotinus gives a material theory of the idea of matter on the grounds that a
non-material theory of matter would not be a theory of matter. This does not
depend on capturing its attributes or making an inventory of our knowledge
of it; rather, physics is immediate and chancy, especially as regards matter,
because its difficulty and darkness must necessarily be part of its idea.
Moreover, this idea must, like Parmenides' hypothetical question, be itself
material. What would later be seen (and particularly for Schelling: 'What
after all can work upon the mind other than itself, or that which is akin to its
nature?' II, 2 2 2 ; Ideas, 1 5 7) as a principle of identity that must itself be
identity, becomes casually glossed, in Plato's Timaeus, as 'eikota muthon, likely
story' (29d2). In this casual sideline, Platonic physics replicates the principle
'like is known by like' in the Timaeus' 'eikota muthon'. This provides com
mentators with all they need to package this work - which 'embraces the
whole of physiology and . . . pertains to the theory of the universe', as Proclus
began his Commentaries on the Timaeus of Plato53 - as a 'myth' or a 'discourse
on discourse',54 or indeed as a lesson in the epistemic status of generated
things. ss The eikota muthon, however, is closer to Parmenides than to the
myth of Er. That is, j ust as Parmenides' One makes mere semblance out of
the many, so Plato, conjoining the two, gets the cycles of the Same and
the Diffe rent from which the World Soul is fabricated. Against this,
Cornford particularly reinforces why the very idea of a Platonic physics seems
self-defeat ing: a world of becoming, and one of being; what becomes is not,
and what is does not become. Divest it of its physics, therefore, and its
1 40
THB
N l!! W S C H E L L I N G
metaphysics assumes the same old laughable two-worlds variety; i t is not
Plato however, but Kant and particularly Fichte who say, 'intellect and thing
inhabit two worlds, between which there is no bridge. '56 Thus, when Krings
writes that Schelling 'Platonizes Kant' and ' Kantianizes Plato' ,57 this is true
only insofar as the 'productive nature' (Philebus 26a6) of Plato is pitted against
the purely practical 'second nature' of Kant,58 which becomes so extreme a
gulf as to form precisely a two-worlds antiphysics in Fichte, the target of
Schelling's invective.
The Timaeus is not a two-worlds metaphysics, however, because it has a
one-world physics, embracing, if not the ideai themselves, then certainly
genesis eis ousian, 'the becoming of being' (Philebus 2 6d9). When this com
ponent is overlooked, because the story is a myth, or because i ts little
positive theoretical content is outmoded - who today would say matter was
'difficult and dark' ? - little is lost for physics, but everything is lost as
regards the nature of metaphysics . As Kant uncharacteristically put it,
leaving aside his doctrinal somatism, 'meta-physics is physics beyond the
empirical cognition of nature' .59 Schelling's own writing on the Timaeus of
1 794 therefore develops what the Philebus (26d8) calls 'the becoming of
being [genesis eis ousian]' alongside 'productive nature [e tou poiountas phusis}'
(26e6), as the basic principle of Plato's 'physics of the all [tou pantos phuseos}'
(47a9 and 2 7a5). Moreover, the 'difficult and dark' (Timaeus 49a5) idea of
matter is discussed, as well as the matter of the ideas, the 'substance of the
Forms in general' (Plotinus Enniads VI.6.vi). This last stems from Aristotle's
account, in the Physics (209bl 5), of the connections between the Timaeus and
Plato's 'unwritten teachings' , and it becomes a steady theme i n Plotinus not
only to i nvestigate whether the ideas are material, but whether there is
'matter in the intelligible universe [kosmos noetos].' 60
The physics of becoming and of productive nature, alongside the theory of
Platonic matter - the fact that this is not a physics for those of us who come
later means that we are, as Proclus61 says of those who do not see the stated
topics treated seriously therein, 'illiterate'.62 To put it briefly: for Schelling,
Plato's physics is an early synthetic account of matter as developing from the
unlimited (productive nature), the limit (idea), their conjunction (to koinon)
and causation (aitiai);63 in a phrase - ideating productive nature causes their
own conjunction in creating material things, with no need of a substrate.
This theory satisfies two of Schelling's later demands:
1.
2.
Whoever cannot philosophize without a substrate, cannot philosophize
at all (III, 308n.);
The concept of matter is itself, by origin, synthetic; a purely logical
concept of matter is meaningless (II, 23 5; Ideas, 1 88).
Matter is not a substrate but a product. This means that nature's dynamics
(its synthetic productivity) encompass the construction of matter (which
Schelling calls 'infinite individuation'). Since, moreover, matter is a 'difficult
· P H I L C> S C> P H V
B K C C> NI •
a • N •T • c ·
t4t
and dark idea' (Timaeus 49a), it is, as i n Schelling's use of the Platonic term,64
non-intuitable; that is, the origin of matter is not empirically accessible,
although, crucially, it is thinkable. This is due to the principle that like
knows like, insofar as the mixture of matter and idea is common to all phusis.
This alters the post-Nietzschean acceptance of Platonism considerably.
Despite his weariness at contemporary philosophy's 'not having done with
overturning Platonism', and in spite of his disparagement of the 'anti
Platonism' of the modernists and postmodernists, Badiou excises the
dimension of physics from metaphysics somewhat prematurely.65 That
matter is non-i ntuitable but thinkable, that it is synthetic substance, that it
is generated, alters all the relations of Platonism as received: there is thought,
and there are changeable bodies, but their conjunction, as the becoming of
being, yields productive nature. This allows the becoming that besets the
world of appearances as phenomena to result from the interplay of the
syntheses in nature's productivity through which the idea moves, as through the
'sea of unlikeness' Plotinus mentions (Enniads 1.8 .xiii). Thus Plato too has his
floods and earthquakes, as nature's productivity enters a phase of metabe
coming, undoing its own works through its excess of dynamics in a 'uni
versal ruin' (Statesman 27 3-4), until the kybernetes regains control. The
identity of the World Soul is therefore thought, in Plato, not as a particular
material body (Cornford's copper), but as precisely a polarity of the Same and
the Different. When the World Soul is functioning optimally, there is a
dynamic identity between the Parmenidean One (thought-being) and Many
(nature); when erratically, either 'too much' or 'too little' - to use the
'indefinite dyad' that is said to define Platonic matter (Aristotle, Metaphysics
987b-988a, 1 090, Physics 1 87a)66 - then turba gentium ensues, 'the world
turns with a sudden shock' (Statesman 2 73a).
Following all this reciprocity between the like and the unlike, the
becoming like and the becoming different that we find in the Platonic
physicists, the Aristotelian reduces the 'physics of the all' to that of 'all the
things of nature', and ties likeness inflexibly to a relation between classes of
objects and faculties. This effects two great changes i n physics: 'the general is
approached by the i ntelligence and the particular by the senses ' (Physics
l 89a). Firstly therefore body and intellect are segregated, and likeness,
instead of forming the identity of thought and nature, becomes attached to
faculties: the general (the concept) to the intellect and the particular (the
body) to the senses. There ensues therefore the domination of concepts and
the conceivable by bodies and, at the same time, a segregation of thought
and nature, taking the physics out of metaphysics. From now on, meta
physics is transformed into meta ta phusika, which is the play of intellect
released from determination by sensibilia, so that it becomes possible to
disparage metaphysics as an i rresponsible distraction unnecessary to physics.
'It is whole entities that are more intelligible [gnorimoteron] to the senses'
(Physics 1 84a). Of course, this does not go unchallenged; Plotinus will
maintain a theory of incorporeal matter (Enniads III.6.viii-xix),67 which
1 42
T H E.
N E: W S C H E L L I N G
follows from the problems Aristotle began to have with the substrate, 'the
ultimate underlying subject common to all the things of nature' (Physics
192a). And the Stoics, trying to reassemble likeness, will develop a natural
concept formation.68 But the ground is laid for all the scientific revolutions,
with their elements, earths, bodies, and 'first things': 'We may say that the
science of nature is for the most part concerned with bodies and magnitudes
and with their changing properties and motions' (On the Heavens 268a). Thus
Denis Des Chenes, commenting on the continuity binding modern Cartesian
physics to medieval , Scholastic physics, argues that 'Aristotelian philosophy
of nature . . . contains the principles common to all natural philosophy, and
not just to the part that became our physics.'69 All revolutions in physics
have been governed by this single metaphysics, which we find in Kant:
'natural science . . . in the strict sense belongs to the doctrine of body alone;'70
and amongst particle physicists: 'science is the study of limited objects . . .
[the} investigat[ion of] an isolated part of the world by itself.'71 Thus, as long
as bodies dominate and thought is immaterial, there has never been a
revolution in the natural sciences.
S P ECUL A T I V E
TR A N SCE N D E N T AL
P H Y S IC S :
AND
THE
THE
M A GNET I C
D YN A M IC S
O F
THE I D E A
A dynamical explanation i n physics means exactly what a transcen
dental explanation means in philosophy. To explain a phenomenon
dynamically means that it has been explained from the original con
ditions of the construction of matter in general . . . All dynamic
movements have their final ground in the subject of nature itself,
namely in the forces of which the visible world is only the framework.
(Schelling: IV, 7 6)
What after all can work upon the mind other than itself, or that which
is akin to its nature? It is therefore necessary to conceive of matter as a
product of forces for force alone is the non-sensory in objects.
(Schelling: II, 2 2 2 ; Ideas, 1 7 5 )
'The identity o f the dynamic and the transcendental ' (III, 4 5 2 ; STI, 9 1 ) is
little developed i n Schelling, but follows of necessity from the philosophy of
forces we have been pursuing. If 'an original antithesis of forces in the ideal
subject of nature appears necessary to every construction' (IV, 5 ) , then
anything constructed must evince that original antithesis, including
thought. Before moving to naturephilosophy's conceptual core, therefore, the
developments that Schelling drew from Plato (agai nst Kant) need to be
established.
One such development is the principle of likeness. To turn this principle
or hypothesis into a component of speculative physics, Schelling will
establish that it has its physical expression in the form of Identity. Identity is
• P H I L C> B O P H V
B E C C> NI B
0 1!. N l!E T I C •
1 43
given physically i n every organization o n the Earth, and paradigmatically in
the magnet's indifference point ( 1° or A
A). Identity can therefore be
dynamically explained as the involute of a dynamic process (the production
of individuality); it can also be explained transcendentally, from the concept
itself, insofar as identity can never not be itself (IV, 1 20). But it is not a
conjunctive predicate between two entities, nor will Schelling have anything
to do with identity inhering in anything since neither matter nor Ich have
any interiority (III, 368; Ideas, 2 6). Schelling goes on: 'everything that is, is
(considered in itself) not the appearance of absolute identity, but rather
identity itself' (IV, 1 20). Two questions arise: ( 1 ) what of infinite indivi
duation; and (2), where does this leave the thesis of the identity of the
transcendental and the dynamic? To answer them, we must ask: why is a
theory of identity necessary at all - especially since the so-called Identity
philosophy is held to supersede the Naturphilosophie, despite its major works
devoti ng at least half their content to the topic. Moreover, we can see the
germ of identity in Schelling's recapitulation of the neo-Platonic theory of
reciprocal likeness in the passage from the Ideas, above. To follow this
passage entails that mind knows mind only, or that what mind is, is in fact
reciprocati ng forces or forces with which it is in affinity, such that 'knowing'
arises from this reciprocity or affinity. Yet we have seen the trouble to which
the abyss of forces leads, beginning with the First Outline (III, 23 n.): the
conflict of the forces cannot be assumed to be such as to maintain indefinitely
the current relations amongst the series of organizations on the earth, and
will give rise, come the Philosophical Inquiries, to world-disorder, such as
occurs when the World Soul loses control in the Statesman. Moreover,
Schelling requires this ungrounding of the ground in order to demonstrate
nature's capacity for individuation through the 'will of the depths' (not so
much a geology of morals as a geological ethology).
On the one hand, then, identity is necessary as a means to grasp indivi
duation in natural production; on the other, it seems completely to under
mine it, because if there is an identity of natural production, all natural
prod uction must be identical, and there is no question therefore but that the
current series of organizations will continue to populate the Earth. But this
is only so if the phenomena are mistaken for the forces. As Schelling notes,
'an original antithesis of forces in the ideal subject of nature appears
necessary to every construction'.72 Identity is therefore dynamic - polar,
magnetic: at one pole, the infinite i ndividuation from the World Soul; at the
other, the absolute identity of the Presentation of My System; between the two,
magnetic relation, but no absorption, duplication, or third-stage partheno
genesis, such as would give 'life' to the concept. This means that infinite
individuation and absolute identity are not contraries, but antitheses, such as
only arise from an i ndifference point that, as the Inquiries put it, 'precede all
=
antithesis' (VII, 406; HF, 87).
What, then, can be said of the identity of dynamics and the transc�n
dental? Retaining the principle of the reciprocity of likeness, Schelling
1 44
THB
N EW
& C H BL L I N G
writes: 'In transcendental philosophy . . . we rely solely on th is, that intui
tion, like everything else, can only become objective to the Jch through outer
objects, which objects, now, can be nothing else but intelligences outside us
. . . • (III, 5 5 6 ; STI, 174). Several things follow from this; firstly, intelligence
is a phenomenon of force, just as quality is the object of sensation, 'but all
quality is simply electricity' (III, 4 5 2 ; STI, 9 1 ), and since nothing guarantees
the maintenance of these forces, nothing guarantees the recognition of any
object whatever, as Ritter found in his self-experimentation programme:
'First case: Zinc in the eye. Chai n closed . . . dim inution of external objects;
blue color . . . Second case: Silver in the eye. Chain closed . . . red color,
enlargement of external objects . . . [and so on] . '73
Sensation is altered by electrophysiological changes, like closing one's
body into a galvanic chain. Although these are relatively minor changes,
Ritter is beginning a programme of un-conditioning with regard to the
conditions of his capacity for sensation. Similarly, Schelling's balance
between intelligences is subject to disruption from, for example, electrical
storms. This parallel seems suspiciously linear, like Oken's recapitulation.
But there is a second consequence: having generalized the forces responsible
for the production of quality in sensation beyond the particular organic
platform in which they are contingently instantiated, Schelling, too, is
beginning a process of un-conditioning. Just as, because 'all chemistry is
sensory dynamics' (II, 224; Ideas, 2 5 7), then where there is chemistry, there
is sense in potentia, so too for electricity and sensation. The uni t of likeness is
unpredictable in advance, so that all that is predictable is that every physical
instantiation of a function of intelligence makes actual rather than analogical
claim to 'intelligent objects' and the like. What recapitulates, the unit of
selection for genetic philosophy, is always and only forces; forces react with
forces, producing phenomena. Thus the phenomena are j ust as actual and
physical as the forces that produce them, so that Schelling can conclude, with
Kant, that 'matter is a species of representation',74 but only insofar as
representations are thereby treated as material things, on an ontological
monofilament of a planomenon. It is between the physics of the planomena
(geology) and the dynamics of the concept (noo-phoronomy), on the one
hand, and the recapitulating, auto-potentiating forces that produce both,
that speculative physics attains a physics capable of geology and noology,
without sacrificing the physicality of either, or questioning their physical
reducibiliry to the permanently raging yet identical 'abyss of forces'. This is
how a physics of the World Soul is possible.
N o tes
1
Schellings Siimmtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling (Stuttgart and Augsburg:
J.G. Cotta, 1856-61). References to Schelling will be to this edition, using
�oman numerals for volume and arabic for page numbers. Philosophical lnquirieJ
tnto the Nature of Human Freedom, trans. James Gutmann (La Salle IL: Open
• P H I LOSOPHY
B • C O IVI B
G • N KT I C •
' ....
Court, 1 986). The English translation of this text will be marked as 'HF'
followed by the page number from this edition.
2 Omnes, R., Quantum Philosophy, trans. Arturo Sangalli (Princeton NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1 999).
3 Leibniz, G. W. Philosophical Texts, trans. and ed. R. S. Woolhouse and Richard
Francks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 2 1 0.
4 Foreword to Eric Alliez, Capital Times, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele
(Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1 99 1), xii.
5 A. Gode von Aesch, Natural Science in German Romanticism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1 94 1 , reprinted 1 966), 255.
6 Joseph L. Esposito, Schelling's Idealism and Philosophy of Nature (Lewisburg:
Bucknell University Press, 1977), 1 00-1 .
7 Of the nature of the Absolute, Schelling writes in 1 803: 'the absolute must be
thought of purely as matter, as pure identity' (II, 60; Ideas for a Philosophy of
Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni
versity Press, 1 988), 47; henceforth Ideas). Likewise, according to Moiso,
Schelling's Weltseele 'cleared the way for a physics of realities, that is, the living
totality of material events' (Francesco Moiso, 'The Hegelian theory of physics
and chemistry in relation to Schelling's Naturphilosophie', in R. Horstmann
and M. Petry (eds), Hegels Philosophie der Natur (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1 986),
5 5).
8 'I suggest that the World-Soul operates in Platonic cosmology rather like the
governor on a steam-engine' Richard D. Mohr, The Platonic Cosmology (Leiden:
Brill, 1 985), 1 7 1-9. The cybernetic account is interesting, both insofar as,
unlike many contemporary commentators, it grounds itself in the physicalist
account of the Wodd Soul Plato offers, and as a physicalist counterpoint to the
exclusively conceptual disjunction of regulative/determinant for understanding
organism in Kant. And Mohr adds, crucially for what concerns us here, that
'like a machine governor, the World-Soul is capable of maintaining order only
within a certain range of natural disruptions' (Mohr, The Platonic Cosmology,
1 72).
9 Proclus infers that the 'whole fabric' that Plato's demiurge divides into two in
order to construct the cycles of the Same and the Different is metallic. He
writes: 'Plato all but speaks of the divine Craftsman as using the tools of
Hephaestus, forging the whole heaven, giving it a pattern of figures, turning
the bodies on a lathe, and shaping each into its proper form', The Commentaries of
Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato, trans. Thomas Taylor (New York: Kessinger,
1 997), 2 8 1 . Francis M. Cornford, Plato's Cosmology (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1 937), citing this passage on p. 74, adds to it the specific
hypothesis that the 'whole fabric' is 'copper'.
1 0 Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines Jungen Physikers, ed.
Steffen and Birgit Dietzsch (Leipzig and Weimar: Millier & Kiepenheuer,
1 984), 8 5 .
1 1 Plotinus writes of the 'generative soul in matter' (Enniads 11.iii . 1 7 and V.i.5) of
the soul as 'number . . . but number as substance'. While the number Plotinus
considers is the One, Lorenz Oken, in his 1 802-10 Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie,
3 vols (Jena: F. Frommann, 1 809-1 1 ) makes the same case for the number zero,
which generates entities in a material-formal set-theoretic manner. Oken
defines Naturphilosophie as 'mathematics endowed with substance' (Elements of
Physiophilosophy, trans. Alfred Tulk (London: Ray Society, 1 847), 4), from
which it follows that 'the universe or world is the reality of mathematical ideas'
(p. 1 ). See pp. 1-10.
. .
1 2 Translation taken from: Schelling, F., Bruno or On the Natural and the Dzvme
Principle of Things, trans. and ed. with an introduction by Michael G. Vater
t 4•
THB
N EW
SCHELLI N G
(Albany: SUNY Press 1 984), 176. The English tr�nslat.ion of. this text will be
marked by 'Bruno' followed by the page number m this edmon.
1 3 Ritter, J. W., Beytriige zur nlihern Kentniss der Galvanism11s und die Resultate seiner
Untersuchungen, 2 vols (Jena: F. Frommann: 1 800-5), 1 48. Ritter also writes
(Beytra'ge, 25 2): 'All the inner, dynamic senses are constituted by one and the same
natural force, electricity.' In the same year, Ritter published Das elektrische System
der Koerper (Jena: F. Frommann), in which he argued that not only was elec
tricity the principle of organic life, but also constituted an 'electrical system of
the earth itself' (p. 148). Finally, in the 1 81 0 Fragmente, the full extent of the
electrical World Soul is realized: 'The universe is a voltaic body' (p. 245 ),
crediting Schelling as the 'philosophical electrician and electrical philosopher'
(p. 247). Novalis, in Die Christenheit oder Europa und andere philosophische
Schriften, ed. Rolf Thomas (Koln: Konemann, 1 996), confirms that 'Ritter is
searching everywhere for the real World Soul' (p. 472).
14 Badiou, A. and Deleuze, G., 'The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque', trans. Thelma
Sowley in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1 997),
63.
15 Ibid., p. 5 5 .
16 Schelling Timaeus, ed. Hartmut Buchner (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann
Holzboog, 1794). Schelling continues to reference the Timaeus throughout and
beyond what are usually entitled his Naturphilosophische works (II, 1 8 1 ; Ideas,
1 44. See also II, 370; VII, 360, 374; Human Freedom 3 5 , 50- 1 ; X, 374). Given
this recurrence, it is worth noting another: even i n this latter work, the Dar
ste!lung des Naturprozesses (1844), Schelling remarks, 'what has occupied us until
now is Naturphilosophie' and that even 'man [who} stands at the limits of narure',
and with whom Schelling is going to occupy himself, is still cast as 'the ideal
aspect of the universe' (X, 390, emphasis added). In other words, nature and idea
form a continuity that extends throughout Schelling's work. There is an echo in
this passage of a similar one in HF, where Schelling writes: 'The author has
limited himself entirely to investigations in the Philosophy of Nature . . . The
present treatise is the first wherein the author offers . . . his conception of
philosophy which treats of the Ideal' (VII, 333-4; HF, 3-4, emphasis added).
The echo makes it clear that in 1844 Schelling regarded the 'Freedom' essay as
continuing Naturphilosophie.
17 Badiou, Deleuze: The Fold, 67 .
18 While denying the existence of a World Soul, Leibniz maintains the existence
of an 'active created force in things', which things are themselves 'made up of an
infinite number of other organisms' (Philosophical Texts, 2 1 0-1 1 ). He thus
refuses to have a continuum as something from which particular 'substanti al
forms' arise, and constructs it instead from the infinite number of little
organisms that populate each natural machine. If the number is infinite, a
continuum can be established mathematically by considering the distances
between the infinite organisms in the multiplicity of natural machines to be
infinitely small, as in the infinitesimal calculus. Badiou, by contrast, affirms the
'singularity', which 'demands that the separating distance be absolute and thus
that the vacuum be a point of Being' (Deleuze: The Fold, 66)
1 9 Badiou, Deleuze: The Fold, 63.
20 Schell! �g knew of what is now known as the Opus postumum under the title
Trans_itton from Metaphysics to Physics (VI, 8). Badiou is also Kantian insofar as he
remains attached to the ethos of critical philosophy, presenting 'truth' as 'a
process of i:nak! ng holes i ? what constitutes knowledge' (Deleuze: The Fold, 67);
the subordination ofphusts to ethos is in itself a Kantian event, becoming all the
m�re �pparent in Fichte, for whom nature is merely a 'not-I'.
21 Leibniz, G. W., 'Critical Thoughts on the General Part of the Principles of
• P H I L O S C> P H V
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
B B C C> M •
G E N ET I C •
1 47
Descartes' , trans. Leroy A. Loemker, in Loemker, ed. , Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz:
Philosophical Papers and Letters (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1 969), 409.
Leibniz, Philosophical Texts, 2 1 0. Woolhouse and Francks translate organis as
'organisms', unlike 'the other translations', which give 'organs'.
Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Beweis, dass ein bestiindiger Galvanismus den Lebensprocess
in dem Thierreich begleite (Wiemar, 1798), 1 7 1 . The quotation is cited by Walter
D. Wetzels, 'Aspects of Natural Science in German Romanticism', Studies in
Romanticism I O ( 1 97 1 ), 44-59.
Ritter, Fragmente, 1 84.
Thom, R . , Morphogenese et imaginaire (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1 978), 52ff.
Deleuze G. and Guattari , F., A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi
(London: Athlone, 1 988), 41 1 , 286.
Langton C., 'Artificial life', in Margaret Boden, ed. , The Philosophy of A rtificial
Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1 996), 39-94.
Leibniz, Principles of Descartes, 409.
Kielmeyer's Rede (Discourse on the Proportions o f Organic Forces i n the Dif
ferent Series of Oganizations, 1 793), echoing Plotinus (Enniads III.8 . iv), begins
with NATURE's discourse: 'If I could only lead you out of space and time and
follow the path with you where it departs from your system . . . I have already on
occasion extinguished stars from above, and you only experience this after one
or two hundred years; I have wiped animal species from the earth - but what
happened: another species arose, and soon, I again led this great machine of the
organic kingdom along a path of development, which you may present to
yourselves as the developmental path of the universe, as perhaps that of the
i ndividual, in the image of a parabola that never closes on itself, since I never
once clearly show you an element of this path', Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, Natur
und Kraft. Carl Friedrich Kielmeyers gesammelte Schriften, F. H. Holler, ed. ,
(Berli n: Kieper, 1 938), 63-5 ; anti-Kantian emphasis added.
Kielmeyer is often singled out as a Kantian natural scientist, rejecting the
excesses of the Naturphilosophen with appropriate scorn, although here he
manifestly rejects Kantianism, and the implications of his theory such as
Schelling exploits to form the theoretical architecture of the World Soul, and to
account for the 'fluctuating between i norganic and organic nature', are com
pletely j ustified. Timothy Lenoir ('The Gottingen School and the development
of transcendental Naturphilosophie in the Romantic era', Studies in the History of
Biology 5 (198 1 ), 1 1 1-205), for example, transforms Dietrich von Engelhardt's
(Hegel und die Chemie (Wiessbaden: Guido Pressler, 1976), 5) 'tripartite schema'
of Naturphilosophie into the 'transcendental, metaphysical and scientific', to
present Kielmeyer as a transcendental natural scientist against Schelling,
Steffens et al. , as representing 'speculative' Naturphilosophie. Lenoir writes:
On closer inspection the view that German biology in the early C 1 9th was shaped by
Naturphilosophie turned out to be illusory . . . One would expect that the works of
Kielmeyer and Treviranus, e.g. , would be a good place to begin to trace the role of
Naturphilosophie in shaping biological thought in Germany . . . Treviranus is cau
tiously critical [of it} while Kielmeyer is violently opposed to romantische Natttr
.
phi!osophie . . I have discovered . . . that a common core of natural philosophy does run
throughout the works of these individuals; i t is a philosophy of biology proposed by
Immanuel Kant. The Strategy of Life. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1 982), 5-6
Frederick Beiser (German Idealism: the Struggle against Subjectivity 1 781-1801
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 508) forcefully rejects this
view:
TH•
N mW
S C H l!!. L L I N O
Cnhis distinction [between the natural scientists who observed Kant's regulative
principles and the Naturphilosophen who ignored them} is more a positivistic con
struction than an historical reality . . . First, Kant's regulative doctrine was not the
foundation of empirical science in the late eighteenth century; rather it was com
pletely at odds with it . . . Second, the fundamental program of Naturphilosophie to
explain life and the mind on a natu ralistic yet non-mechanistic foundation - was
shared by all the physiologists and biologists . . . The history of science needs to cast
off the legacy of positivism - especially that lurking under Kantian guise - and to
realize that Naturphilosophie was nothing less than the normal science of its day, not
some freakish philosophical or metaphysical alternative to it.
-
The desire on the pare of historians of science to 'save' the experimental sci
entists from the speculators is manifest in practically all works on the Natur
philosophie. The reason for chis is partly methodological, as Beiser suggests, but
also confirms Carus' assertion of the 'metaphysical aphasia' (Carus, C. G.,
Organon der Erkenntniss der Natur und des Geistes (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Hartel,
1 856), 1 27) of the sciences of the mid-nineteenth century i n the historians of
science of the present.
3 1 Schelling, F . , System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath (Charlottes
ville: University Press of Virginia, 197 8). References to the English translation
will be marked as 'STI' and give the page number of chis edition.
32 Wallace, W., Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy and Especially of his
Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 1 894), 1 07 .
33 It is therefore false to say of Schelling that h is dynamics presuppose an equi
librium or symmetry between the attractive and repulsive forces, as Dale Snow
does in her Schelling and the End of Idealism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1 996), 90. It
is true that the emergence of natural things presupposes a relative equilibrium of
the forces, but nothing guarantees a priori chat these forces (a) u•ill reach
equilibrium, or (b) reach this equilibrium. 'Dynamic and living' yes; but on
condition that the 'and' is a tension.
34 Kielmeyer, Natur rmd Kraft, 56, 2 7 .
3 5 Recapitulation, according t o Kielmeyer, often credited w i t h having offered the
first scientific theory of recapitulation, gave it thus: 'Since che distribution of
forces in the series of organizations follows the same order as their distribution
in the developmental states of given individuals, it follows that the force by
which the production of the latter comes about, namely the reproductive force,
corresponds to the force by which the series of different organisms of the earth
were called into existence' (Natur und Kraft, 93).
36 Ibid., p. 29.
3 7 Ibid., p. 98.
38 With Guatcari, F., What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh
Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1 994), 1 1 .
39 See Akinous, The Handbook ofPlatonism, crans. John Dillon (Oxford: Clarendon,
1995), 4. 7-8, 5.7, and especially 4. 8: 'For it is by virtue of possessing a narural
concept of the fine and the good, by using our reason, and by referring to
�rural c�ncepts as definite units of measurement that we j udge whether certai n
given actions are of one nature or another.' See also John Dillon's commentary
�P· 67?, where he advances the translation 'natural concept formation'. The same
JSSue is more broadly dealt with by Plotinus' discussion of the 'materiality of
the Forms i n general' (Enneads VI.6.vi), and stems from Plato's 'unwritten
doctrines' (Aristotle, Physics 209b 1 5 ), from which Plotinus draws his theory of
the logoi as powers rather than ideas: 'Nature i s a logos which produces another
logos' (Enneads 11.3.xvii). For a concise commentary on the unwritten doc trines,
•PHILOSOPHY
40
41
B B C C> IVI B
O E N •T I C •
, ...
which centrally revolve around the materiality of the ideas, see Martin, Etudes
sur Le Timee de Platon, 2 vols (Paris: Ladrange, 184 1 ), vol. 1 , 349-5 3.
Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 24 1 .
Horst Fuhrmans, F. W.J. Schelling. Briefe und Dokumente II: 1 7 75-1 803 (Bonn:
Bouvier, 1 973), 195.
42 Steffens, H., Lebenserinnerungen aus dem Kreis der Romantik (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1908), 176-7.
43 Ritter, Fragmente, 140.
44 The annotated line clearly replicates the tide of Kielmeyer's Rede ( 1793).
45 'The will of the ground {Grund } excites the self-will of the creature from the
first creation' (VII, 375; HF, 52). Schelling makes clear that this Grund is
naturalistic: 'The empirical concept of the ground, too, which will assume an
important role in all natural science, must, if scientifically thought out, also
lead to a conception of selfhood and individuality' (VII, 376; HF, 53).
46 Schelling here calls this 'evil', after the Neoplatonist equation of the theory of
Platonic matter and its errancy; cf. Plotinus, Enniads I.8.vii f.f.
47 Schelling, F., (ed.), Zeitschrift fiir speculative Physik, ed. Manfred Durner, 2 vols
(Hamburg: Meiner, 1 800-2, reprinted 200 1), vol. 1 , 1 92.
48 Henrik Steffens, Beytriige zur innern Naturgeschichte der Erde (Freyberg: Craz.,
1801), cited in Snelders, H. A. M. 'Romanticism and Naturphilosopohie and
the inorganic natural sciences 1797-1 840', Studies in Romanticism ( 1 970) vol. 9,
1 93-2 1 0.
49 This is evolution understood in a mathematical sense. As D'Arcy Wentworth
Thomson points out in On Growth and Form, ed. and abridged by J. T. Bonner
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 966), 1 98, 'The mathematician can
trace one conic section into another, and "evolve" for example, through
innumerable graded ellipses, the circle from the straight line: which tracing of
continuous steps is a true "evolution", though time has no part therein. It was
after this fashion that Hegel, and for that matter Aristotle himself, was an
evolutionist - to whom evolution was a mental concept, involving order and
continuity in thought but not an actual sequence of events in time. Such a
conception of evolution is not easy for the modern biologist co grasp . . . '
50 Gilles Chatelet notes in his Les enjeux du mobile: physique, philosophie, mathbna
tique (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 1 37, concerning his reproduction of J.-F. Marquee's
reproduction of the diagram in his Liberte et Existence (Paris: Gallimard, 1 974),
1 1 5, that it first appeared in K. A. Eschenmayer, Versuch die Gesetze magnetischer
Erscheinungen aus Seltzen der Naturmetaphysik mithin a priori zu entwickeln
(Tiibingen, 1 798; date and tide corrected).
5 1 Chatelet, Les enjeux, 1 39.
5 2 Georges Louis de Buffon, Histoire naturel!e, ed. Jean Varloot (Paris: Gallimard,
1 984), 1 9 1 .
5 3 Proclus, The Commentaries of Proclus, 1 .
5 4 John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginnings in Plato's Timaeus (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1999), 56.
5 5 Cornford, Plato's Cosmology, 28ff.
56 J. G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, trans. and ed. Peter Heath and John Lachs
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 17.
5 7 Appended to Schelling's Timaeus essay ( 1 794) ( 1994), 1 2 1-2.
58 Immanual Kant Critique of judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1 987), 1 82.
59 Immanual Kant, Lectures on Metaphysics, trans. Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 997), 4 19.
60 See Plotinus Enniads I.8.ii, III.4.iii, V. l .ix, and, especially, 11.4.iv: 'Further, if
there is an intelligible universal order [kosmos noetos} There, and this universe
t lSO
THE
N BW
SCH ELLI NG
here is an imitation of it, and this is composite, and composed of matter, then
there must be Matter There too. Or else how can you call it a universal order
except with regard to its form?' and 11.4.v: 'intelligible matter [noetois hules}'.
61 Proclus, Commentaries on the Timaeus, 1.
62 Heidegger gives the clearest example of what Proclus calls 'illiteracy' and
Schelling calls 'the common deficiency of modern European philosophy', in The
Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: 'The phusiologoi are neither "physiologists"
in the contemporary sense of physiology as a special science of general biology
. . . nor are they philosophers of nature. The phusiologoi is rather the genuine
primordial title for those who speak out about phusis' (Fundamental Concepts of
Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas
Walker (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1 995), 28).
63 See Schelling, F., Ergiinzungsband zu Werke Band 5 bis 9: Wissenschaftlicher
Bericht zu Schellings Naturphilosophischen Schriften 1 797-1800, eds Manfred
Durner, Francesco Moiso and Jorg Jantzen (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann
Holzboog, 1 994), 60-5 and passim. See also Philebus, 24a-30a.
64 This occurs most overtly in Schelling's Freedom essay, VII, 360, 374; HF, 35,
50-1, but also at II, 20, 1 06; HF, 1 5, 144; II, 3 5 6.
65 Badiou, A., Deleuze: the Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 1 0 1 .
66 For the indefinite dyad i n Deleuze and Guattari, see their What is Philosophy?
38ff: The plane of immanence has two facets as Thought and Nature, as Nous
and as Phusis', write Deleuze and Guattari (What is Philosophy, 38). The stan
dard modern derivation of this diphasic single substance is Spinoza's deus sive
natura; but its true root is the classical One-Many relation stemming from Plato
- as it is for Schelling. The overlooking of this in both cases, although espe
cially in the former, is due, as Badiou is correct to note, to our 'not having done
with overturning Platonism' (Clamor of Being, 1 02).
67 Echoed by Schelling: 'matter is precisely just matter, that is, the basis of bodies,
but immediately therefore, not corporeal' (X, 328).
68 Alcinous, The Handbook of Platonism, 67 .
69 Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought (Ithaca
NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1 996), 2.
70 Immanuel Kant The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. James
Ellington (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1 970), 8-9.
7 1 Omnes, Quantum Philosophy, 229.
72 IV, 5 ; although at III, 324n., Schelling questions the grounds for this dynamic
identity.
7 3 Ritter, ]. W., Entdeckungen zur Elektrochemie, Bioelektrochemie und Photochemie, eds
Hermann Berg and Klaus Richter (Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft/
Geest & Portig, 1 986), 87.
74 Kant, I., Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 998), A370.