Naturephilosophical Futurism

World without final whole

Naturephilosophical futurism is Grant's name for a philosophy oriented by nature's unrealized consequences rather than by prediction. Its starting point is Schelling's account of world as a duration or determinate period, not as a synonym for planet, universe or completed whole. Worldly, pre-worldly and post-worldly systems are local systems without a final metasystem that contains them all (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/Nature After Nature, or Naturephilosophical Futurism.pdf, pp. 1–2).

Grant defines nature non-exclusively: there is no particular thing nature must be, but neither is there a thing nature must exclude. The open number of systems includes their obtaining and non-obtaining, so the existence of one world cannot close the sequence of possible worlds (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/Nature After Nature, or Naturephilosophical Futurism.pdf, pp. 1–2).

Nature after nature

Thought is a later acquisition of the cosmos. The nature present in thought is consequently a nature after nature: natural processes precede thinking, then acquire in thinking a capacity they did not previously have (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/Nature After Nature, or Naturephilosophical Futurism.pdf, pp. 2–4). This neither reduces thought to a brain state nor removes it into an autonomous intellectual world. Autonomy from precursor states does not cancel irreversible dependence on their occurrence.

Naturephilosophy is therefore the philosophy of the nature in which ontology occurs. It does not make a freestanding representation of nature; it treats philosophical reproduction as another instance of nature doing what nature does (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/Nature After Nature, or Naturephilosophical Futurism.pdf, pp. 5–6). A system in thought is consequent upon systems that obtained before thought, which makes any claim to an eternal first system suspect.

Asystasy, antecedence and consequence

Grant calls the not-system prior to system asystasy. It is not a sufficient causal explanation by itself; its function is to prevent system from being projected eternally backward. On a pull model of causality, a future consequence determines a past as the past of that consequence, provided the future differs from its past and redirects rather than fulfils it (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/Nature After Nature, or Naturephilosophical Futurism.pdf, pp. 6–8). Nature becomes stratified remains of futures that altered what their antecedents would otherwise have done.

This makes antecedence local and revisable rather than a single line running from an absolute origin. A beginning is the time in which what begins is not yet there; consequences multiply beginnings instead of merely departing from one universally recoverable start (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/Nature After Nature, or Naturephilosophical Futurism.pdf, pp. 7–10).

Morphogenesis without programmed adulthood

Evolutionary developmental biology supplies Grant's model of nonfinal morphogenesis. Processes such as organ formation are not discrete programs terminating in a pre-given adult; elementary operations and non-specific tools can be iterated in different structures and localities (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/Nature After Nature, or Naturephilosophical Futurism.pdf, pp. 10–12). Individuation is therefore an episode in a larger ecology of processes, not the completion of an internal essence.

The law of the world

Schelling's Weltgesetz states, in Grant's reading, that all possibilities are fulfilled and none suppressed. Because contradiction is among the possibilities, nature includes obtaining, not obtaining, and their sequencing; ontogeny consequently displaces ontology as first philosophy (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/Nature After Nature, or Naturephilosophical Futurism.pdf, pp. 12–14). A merely second nature fails because it makes one consequence final and thereby stops nature.

Futurism follows at this point. It is not forecasting a state already latent in the present. It is nature's conceptual reengineering of local efficacy: consequences determine what their antecedents will have been, while remaining open to further consequences (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/Nature After Nature, or Naturephilosophical Futurism.pdf, pp. 14–15). Thought becomes one way nature moves beyond where it presently is, not a tribunal that knows the destination in advance.