Friedrich Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature – Discourses on Minerva

Friedrich Schelling was one of the late German Idealists and Romantics.  Though he was a contemporary of many greats like Johann Fichte, Johann Herder (briefly), Hegel, and others, Schelling’s philosophy blossomed in the later period of German philosophy after Hegel.  Although influenced by Kant and Fichte, he also attempted to shed the solipsism of Fichte and his misreading of the anti-empiricism of Kant  Thus, in many ways, Schelling promoted a more naturalistic form of Kantian philosophy – mixed with the teleology of Hegel and philosophy of mind bequeathed by Christianity.  In this post we will examine, albeit briefly, the core ideas of Schelling’s philosophy of nature.  Or in the German, naturphilosophie.

Schelling’s enemies were twofold.  While influenced by Fichte, especially in his earlier days, Schelling came to conclude that the implications of Fichte’s philosophy of the absolute ego and consciousness would lead us down the path of a dangerous solipsism.  At the same time, as was the case with the whole of German Idealistic and Romantic thought, he was also vehemently opposed to the anti-teleological and reductionist empiricism and materialism of the dominant Anglo-French schools of thought which eventually produced utilitarianism with the likes of Bentham and Mill.  Schelling sought to reconcile the philosophy of consciousness and transcendentalism of earlier German philosophers (Kant and Fichte) with a form of non-reductionist empiricism that was also teleological (thereby allowing humans to have total knowledge through coming to know the end of the purpose of life).

The core idea of Schelling’s naturphilosophie is that everything springs from nature.  Rejecting the mechanical model of earlier “Enlightenment science,” Schelling was the forefront of integrating the new biological and organicist models of science with philosophy.  Thus, rather than the cold, mechanical, and lifeless philosophy and science that dominated the British and French materialist and utilitarian schools of thought, Schelling embraced an organicist, rhizomatic, and “chaotic” understanding of philosophy.  That is, all life organically grows from an early simplicity to greater levels of complicatedness and intricacy over time – much how biological and organicist models of science understand life.  In time this outgrowth becomes more and more complex with more roots taking hold as life expands over time.  For Schelling, the high points of life come during the rhizomatic phases when flourishing is correlated with creativity which, in turn, is correlated with the uncontrollable nature of rhizomes.

Ahead of his time concerning a process of evolution, rather than natural selection, Schelling also argued that life evolves to its teleology over time.  For instance, the development of strength and greater degrees of comprehension, are all for an end that suits the strengths of particular lifeforms.  Thus, development serves an end (telos) rather than having no purpose at all.  All development, or evolution, is situated toward the consummation of the telos that all life possesses.

Here, Schelling rejects the classical conception of teleology as primarily being ontologically oriented in the sense of situated in the interior.  Rather, he promoted a view that teleology was primarily concerned with external flourishing rather than internal flourishing (e.g. flourishing of the body rather than the soul).  However, the role of consciousness, or mind, was still paramount in Schelling’s philosophy.  For it was the soul (e.g. rational mind) that came to understand what end the body existed for.  (This is the unity of realism and anti-realism, of rationalism and empiricism, and of the objective and subjective in Schelling’s system.)

Additionally, Schelling also applied this system of thought to everything: Art, Culture, animal and plant life, political life, and so on.  As it relates particularly to humans, his philosophy is simply a more naturalistic incarnation of Hegel’s philosophy that religion, mythology, politics, art, and culture, were all going to be united in totality in due time.  That teleology would be understood by the consummation of the totality of consciousness.

Schelling’s absolute transcendental idealism is about the concrete revealing the abstract, which is to say that the transcendental emerged from the natural and that they share a total wholeness in this emergence.  This is the process of coming to know.  Thus, humans – uniquely capable in this philosophical endeavor – would be able to know the meaning, destiny, and end to life.  This would mark the fulfillment of human existence and consciousness which all previously stages of human life were working toward.

Thus, the subjective introspective rationalist traditions of philosophy established by Plato, Plotinus, the broader Christian tradition, and Descartes, needed to be united with the objective and empirical analysis of the natural world.  To understand the self, one had to also understand the world in which the self is situated.  Only in this manner, Schelling believed, could the solipsism of Descartes and Fichte be avoided, the temptation of world flight in Platonism and misapprehensions of the world in Christianity also be avoided, while, at the same time, the nihilism and emptiness of the mechanical and materialist philosophies stretching back to Epicurus but brought to a more frightening revival in Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Le Mettrie, D’Holbach, and Bentham equally be avoided.

In the end, Schelling’s naturphilosophie is one of absolute transcendental idealism.  He is not necessarily unique in this particularly German philosophical phenomenon.  That said Schelling worried that the hyper rationalism of Descartes, Kant, and Fichte would exhaust itself in a rejection of this world in which we find ourselves occupying.  At the same time he worried that the reductionist monism and materialism of the mechanical philosophers of England and France would exhaust itself in a life-negating nihilism and mindless hedonism.  Because in the former there was too much emphasis on the subjective self, and because in the latter there was a total rejection of teleology and, ultimately, a rejection of classical rationalism (philosophies of mind), the dominant strands of philosophy would not be sufficient for sustaining life or understanding the meaning and purpose of life.  One can say that Schelling’s ultimate foe was nihilism.  One of the ironies of Schelling is that he thought fellow comrades who opposed the nihilism of the mechanical philosophies and philosophers (such as Kant and Fichte) were, unknowingly, also nihilists of their stripe.

But before some laud Schelling’s general philosophy that I have tried to condense and explain, one must also understand that he was naturalistic nationalist.  This, some say, could be explained away from the trauma and reality of the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Era, in which Germany was dominated by French hegemony.  Others, however, take Schelling at his word when he states that the national community is the final product of that organicist evolution have taken final form (in totality).  Thus, ethically, Schelling’s deontology (duty and responsibility based ethics) is to fellow citizens and compatriots rather than the fuller world at large.

Yet, at the same time, Schelling was a great defender of particularism and pluralism.  That is, he saw many multiple cultures and communities, all following the same general path of organic evolution and development.  The universality of History, mythology, and religion, would become particularized to a given peoples which embodied and reflected their culture, language, and historical experiences.  The national spirit was embodiment of the universal made concrete (or particularized) with full embodiment of a nation’s culture: art, religion, mythology, and literature fused into the Volksgemeinschaft.  The telos of human life was, for Schelling, the flourishing of national communities.

At the same time, Schelling’s ecological and naturalistic philosophy holds much appeal, especially in relation to broader developments in the history of philosophy.  His synthesis of transcendental rationalism and materialistic empiricism is one of his enduring legacies.  Involved in this entire project is an explanation of the origins of human consciousness, and the consummation of human consciousness, from which absolute knowing is made possible.  That is, the ideal, in Schelling, emerges from the natural.

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Schelling’s main emphasis was the grounding of reality in an organic/natural world which organically develops to consciousness in the phenomenal realm of space and time. This teleological evolution ties the present with the biological, or organic.

While influenced by Kant and Fichte, Schelling deviates from them insofar that he does not start with mind (as Kant and Fichte) but with nature (per Goethe). Therefore, Schelling’s axiomatic foundation is not the mind, the rational (or transcendental) but the natural; nature. The mind, for Schelling, is an outgrowth of the forces of conflict within nature and organic/morphologic growth.

Schelling recontextualizes the dialectic of the I/Not-I through the morphologic realities of biology and also through an ingenious reimagining of space and time from Christian theology. Nature is internally dialectical, one might say paradoxical or even “contradictory.” There is, on one hand, an infinite expansion of the nature (thesis) which is reacted against (antithesis) by an infinite contraction of the natural. The forces of nature are simultaneously moved to expansion (growth and life) and contraction (decadence and death). This results in a disequilibrium which sets off a generative teleological evolutionary byproduct leading to the “new nature” (synthesis) that grows out of this generative disequilibrium within the forces of nature: The movement to self-consciousness and realization within the realm of nature.

The first generative principle of nature is space and time. The expansive and contracting principles then take place in the realm of space and time and recapitulate a new outgrowth, gravity and light (with further smaller recapitulations producing chemistry and electricity, etc.). Gravity is the new outgrowth of space. Light is the new outgrowth of time.  Space was the outgrowth of the force of expansion and time the outgrowth of the force of contraction. This process of dialectical recapitulation continues to cycle (like Goethean plant biology) producing newer iterations of the natural. From the gravity and light recapitulation emerges organic bodies, first beginning with plants. Then from organic bodies recapitulation produces animals. And from animals emerge humans. The generative movement of nature culminates in the “creation” of the human, which is the first and only lifeform that becomes aware of these generative processes of expansion and contraction and, as such, becomes self-conscious of his place in the natural realm through the emergence of self-conscious thought and reflection rooted, ultimately, in the generative germ of natural forces acting against one another. This plays out in human physiology: The growth, consummation, frailty, and death of the body; libidinal or biological urges (expansion) being curtailed by rational constructs and edifices which order eros (contraction) which makes ethical life possible (but not at the expense of destroying eros as in Fichte’s though concerning the emergence of the ego and ethical life and community); ultimately leading to the standard Christian consciousness of love as expansive and life-giving and the corruption of love, lust, as contractive and therefore life-denying.

Nature’s generative process of coming to self-consciousness culminates in the human. Thus, Schelling is—in the most traditional and proper sense and usage of the term—a humanist. Schelling believes the human, among all the lifeforms generated by the natural seed of generative recapitulation so it could, itself, understand itself, is set apart (the exception, hence, exceptional). Humans are exceptional because they are the exception in coming to self-consciousness and understanding. Schelling believes that animals feel and have all the basic self-perceptions which allow basic sensational awareness, but animals lack the ability to self-consciously reflect and come to know who they are, where they are, why they exist, etc., and neither can other animals come to understand all the generative laws of the natural world in which they dwell in. Animals simply have, in Christian language, the grace to be what they are and they are what they.

Thus, in the human—the ultimate coming to understanding is the consciousness of love. Love is the prime generative principle; hate (or sin) is the contractive principle. This was, for Schelling, the internal mythological truth of the Christian understanding of Original Sin and Divinization. Original Sin is that aspect of the human which leads us to do evil which is a negation of life and therefore a contraction of the generative principle of love and expansion; divinization is that embodiment of love and the principle of self-giving which brings two self-contracting forces (dying humans) into propagating further expansion (the generative/expansive principle) which leads to the creation of new life. Schelling, also being a theologian along with a scientist and philosopher, tied this back to the book of Genesis in which God implants into creation the generative principles of self-propagation (reproduce after one’s own kind) which, after moving from space and time to light and gravity to plants to animals to, finally, humans. The arc of the evolution of nature, the morphological impulse of all life, reaches fruition in the human who is the single lifeform that fully develops the seed of intelligibility and consciousness to the point of self-reflection and the understanding of the generative principle of nature as love.

Schelling grounds his philosophy in the natural because love, eros, is the basic creative force of nature; the spirit. (Schelling follows a contemporary of his, Friedrich Holderlin on this account.) In the larger contests of philosophy and the world, as it relates to civilization, sterile rationalism, mechanicalism, and the material (i.e. “the scientific” as we tend to think of the term today) is that which threatens to severe us from the rational and, therefore, cut us off from the erotic which is the first generative principle of natural expansion. It is here that Schelling considered himself the true heir of Kant, who was much afraid of the same encroachments of the scientistic and mathematical (hollow) worldview of Anglo-French material utilitarianism. However, by starting with mind, according to Schelling, Kant started with the teleological end product and was still, despite his opposition to the monistic material reductionists, cut-off from the natural which would not resolve the problem of our alienation and destruction of nature. By beginning with nature itself, and tying the mind (transcendental self-consciousness) to nature, Schelling hoped to show how true self-consciousness—true transcendental idealism—must always remained grounded to nature itself and not separated apart from it. (As was the unfortunate and unintentional cases of Kant and Fichte.)

Thus, in Schelling we can see the essential biological, morphological, and organic reality of life. Nature embodies two principle forces (hence avoiding reductionist monism): expansion and contraction. The dialectic between expansion and contraction is not an equal dialectic; the disequilibrium of the two (following Newton: equal and opposite reactions would cancel each other out) which is the superiority of the expansive over the contractive “wins out” so to speak which leads to the generative seed of nature which slowly produces new life. In theological language this is the triumph of love over hate, of divinization over sin. The cycles of nature recapitulate this basic dialectic leading to ever more complex lifeforms moving through atoms to plants to animals to humans. It is in humans, the culmination of nature’s movement to self-consciousness, that there is a mind (the human mind) that is fully capable of conscious self-reflection and an understanding of these morphological laws.

The intelligibility of the natural world reaches fruition in the human and the gift of love in self-conscious humans who, unlike with Fichte, do not need to destroy nature to be moral, but need to embrace their most primal nature (through understanding) to be moral. The moral is both an outgrowth of, but still linked to, the natural. It is in the biosphere that the generative principle of life, love, waits to be unleashed; the world of edifice, construction, and industry is really the embodiment of the contractive principle. As it relates to human minds, the truly self-conscious mind is that which exudes the generative principle of morphological growth; the mind that has severed itself from nature, which has therefore severed itself from true self-consciousness (understanding of the generative) is the contractive germ of morphological decline. This also puts humans in the most precarious position as we control our destiny of generative life or contractive death where other lifeforms don’t.

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Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Muses of a Fire, Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.

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