Part 2 of 2
Transcendental Deductions and The Idea of NatureIt is typical of Kantian critical method to sidestep the question of the truth or falsity of a claim, and instead to examine the assumptions that support it. “Transcendental deductions,” wherever they occur, aim at the demonstration of the “right to possession” of a claim or knowledge, or at demonstrating the legitimacy of this knowledge, vindicating its employment or possession in the face of the critical objection that such a claim rests on an arbitrary, illegitimate presupposition or “foundationalist” assumption. Deduction, as a method, is the complementary odd half of the critical project. If critique forces thought to reveal its own presuppositions, then deduction is there to show that we must begin with at least some assumptions to which we have a “right.” In a juridical deduction (Kant’s model), there are two questions that are to be answered. The question of right (quid juris) can be settled separately from the question of fact (quid facti), and questions in the form “How is x possible?” are questions of right. Dieter Henrich remarks that deduction is defined by “the process through which a possession or a usage is accounted for by explaining its origin, such that the rightfulness of the possession or usage becomes apparent. . . . In a state of doubt about the rightfulness of our claim to be in the possession of genuine knowledge, it seeks to discover and to examine the real origin of our claim and with that the source of its legitimacy.”32 The task of deduction is then precisely to show that the only assumptions that are made are those that are necessary, or “indispensably necessary,” and not “arbitrary.”
Without this complementary method one remains at the level of analysis, which indeed takes off from the conditioned to search for its conditions, but which cannot itself guarantee the truth or necessity of just those premises it finds and clings to when confronted by antinomy. Moreover, deduction not only shows that the revealed “presupposition” is necessary, but also that it has a “synthetic” character, earning it the moniker “transcendental” (i.e., related to objects, but not derived from experience of objects). Kant tells us that “the explanation of the manner in which concepts can thus relate a priori to objects I entitle their transcendental deduction; and from it I distinguish empirical deduction, which shows the manner in which a concept is acquired through experience and through reflection on experience, and which therefore concerns, not its legitimacy, but only its de facto mode of origination.”33 The Critique provides these transcendental deductions, and most often the “source” of the legitimacy of such claims is found in the “nature” of the understanding or of reason. Schelling uses this strategy to show that thought is compelled or constrained to think the reality of purposive organisms, as shown above, and to think of nature as an organized whole by means of the “idea of Nature,” as shown below.
After Kant it was incumbent upon anyone following in his footsteps to justify the existence of the branches of science they pursue within the system of philosophy, since Kant argued that he had shown exhaustively which faculties and categories are necessary not just for thought and experience, but by extension, for science as well. In the definitive Introduction to the Outline, Schelling deduces the possibility of a “speculative physics,” or Naturphilosophie. Speculative physics would be shown to be possible (i.e., legitimate) as a science if it could somehow be demonstrated that in our investigations into nature we already employ certain ideas or acts of the mind, and that without these conditions natural science itself would not have achieved anything thus far.34 For speculative physics as a science to be possible, one must consider the idea that serves as a principle or a rule for organizing knowledge in that science—the idea of the unconditioned whole. For Schelling, mechanistic physics cannot claim to be a science at all because it treats nature as fragmentary, and does not seek the ground of phenomena. Only the unconditioned can be a final ground and sufficient reason. The idea of nature involves the philosophical postulate of nature’s autonomy and autarchy (analogous to reason’s own), and through it the turn from nature’s “products”—conditioned things, objects of mechanistic physics—to the “final ground” of these products, an unconditioned “productivity,” is accomplished.
The deduction proceeds in two stages: Schelling first shows that certain ideas are already employed in natural science, and then he argues that the ideas are not arbitrary or regulative, but constitutive and necessary. He suggests that the very nature of experimentation as employed in the natural sciences betrays the existence of necessary a priori conceptions in the minds of the experimenters, for example, the idea that nature is a whole is inevitably assumed. By showing that experimentation would not be possible without the employment of an idea of Nature, nor the idea itself without the actual existence of a selforganizing Nature, the possibility of natural science is deduced from the actual behavior of scientists and the acts of the mind involved in human knowledge. Ultimately the deduction will be successful if all of the “necessary” phenomena of nature can be deduced from a first principle, and in turn confirm the legitimacy of this first principle when the science is complete. The deduction of Schelling’s natural science differs from Fichte’s deductions in the Wissenschaftslehre in that the latter, according to Fichte, can achieve perfect completeness, while all other sciences (such as nature philosophy) must remain incomplete because a measure of freedom is involved in the first principles of these sciences. Schelling recognizes this incompleteness of his nature philosophy when he speaks of “intermediate links” (“necessary” phenomena) in development, and admits that it is the task of speculative physics only to show the need for them where they have not yet been discovered, not to enumerate them exhaustively. Thus, natural philosophy is, in a sense, incomplete, and relies on “experiment” to fill in the gaps; but this is a necessary incompleteness, since “the complete discovery of all the intermediate links in the chain of nature, and therefore also our science itself, is an infinite task.”35
In his consideration of experimental practice, he says that to know is to know the “principles of possibility” of a thing, the conditions under which and by means of which it was produced, its genesis. It would be impossible to know natural objects if it were not possible for human beings to “invade” nature by means of freedom. Nature can be “compelled to act under certain conditions” that do not exist, or at least not in a pure form, in nature. Such an “invasion” is an “experiment.” But experiments are not random: “every question [put to nature in an experiment] contains an implicit a priori judgment; every experiment that is an experiment, is a prophecy: experimenting itself is a production of phenomena. The first step, therefore, toward science, at least in the domain of physics, is taken when we ourselves begin to produce the objects of that science.”36 Experimentation produces the “necessary” in phenomena, and in effect transforms the a posteriori (some aspect of the experienced) into the a priori (a universal condition of experience). The natural philosopher learns to see all things as necessary insofar as they have their final ground in the principles according to which the unconditioned productivity of nature operates. Construction is the deduction of the unconditioned conditions of natural productivity, and also the reproduction of these conditions in thought. Therefore, “construction by means of experiment is, after all, an absolute self-production of the phenomena.”37
What are “produced” then are a priori principles, such as the idea of polarity, that is, condition of the theories of electricity and magnetism. As universal and a priori, the nature of polarity can never be found in the objects of nature, and so our knowledge of this regularity is not originally produced by means of experimentation on things. We already know that things will behave in certain ways when submitted to certain experiments: this is the element of “prophecy.” Schelling treats polarity, for example, as the “final cause” of phenomena, which itself cannot be phenomenal. We must then “put it into nature, endow nature with it” in our interpretations. This is the result of the first stage of the deduction. The postulation of these final causes is already part of experimental practice. As he moves to the second stage of the proof, he must ask whether these ideas are necessary.
He considers the objection that anything “put into nature” in this way is clearly hypothetical, and that a science founded on such a principle therefore must be hypothetical.38 Schelling answers the objection by admitting that the hypothetical nature of the science “would be possible to avoid in only one case, i.e., if that presupposition [of Nature’s wholeness] itself were involuntary, and as necessary as Nature itself.”39 Again, Schelling notes that one does not choose to view an organism as something purposive; one is forced to think this way, compelled; therefore it is not a merely “regulative” idea:
You feel yourself constrained in your judgment; you must therefore confess that the unity with which you think it is not merely logical (in your thoughts), but real (actually outside you). . . . Or, if it rests with your choice whether or not to impose the idea of purposiveness on things outside you, how does it come about that you impose this idea only on certain things, and not on all, that further, in this representing of purposeful products, you feel yourself in no way free, but absolutely constrained?40
As already mentioned, this apparent fact of compulsion in thought proves that something real corresponds to it, for if our perceived reality is entirely constructed by ourselves it would follow that we would not be compelled to think of it in one way rather than another.41 Therefore, the idea of purposiveness is one that legitimates the project of a philosophy of nature to investigate “nature as subject” (as autonomous productivity) and not only view “nature as object.” Schelling believes himself to have demonstrated both the inevitability and the necessity of the idea of nature as an organic whole. It remains to be shown specifically what is implied in this idea.
I have mentioned that the idea of nature as a whole entails an essential duality.Nature is both conditioned and unconditioned at once, natura naturata and natura naturans, product and productivity. Thus a perpetual dialectic between the productivity of nature and its products is implicit within the idea of nature, an idea forced on us by the constraint to conceive nature in a certain way, even while acting (thinking) freely or spontaneously. One can never hold that the productivity of nature, the final cause of all things, is identical to the sum of its products, since this would amount to holding fast the dynamic movement or “oscillation” between nature insofar as it is productive and nature insofar as it is product. This universal duplicity of principles maintains nature in continual activity, and thus universal duality must also be a principle of the explanation of nature, “as necessary as the Idea of nature itself.” But this “deduction of all natural phenomena from an absolute hypothesis” means that “our knowing is changed into a construction of nature itself, that is, into a science of nature a priori.”42What in Kant was called “transcendental deduction” becomes (by way of Fichte) the method of construction, and what Schelling calls an “absolute hypothesis” no longer has the character of the speculative, Kantian regulative idea possessing “objective validity” and only an indirect “objective reality.” The first postulate of nature philosophy expresses the reciprocal presupposition of an actually organized nature and its idea, or the identity of real and ideal.
All of these provisions culminate in the theory of construction. It emphasizes the element of “causality through freedom” involved in postulating or positing the idea, and reciprocally concerns the structures or principles of experience that are necessary in order for one to be able to think and experience nature at all. Nature produces (freely), but this production can occur only according to necessary regularities. The idea of the whole is “involuntary”—a necessary or “absolute” presupposition that does not spring from the relativity of our knowledge but from the real constitution of the cosmos. For Kant the notion of the regulative idea or of the reflective judgment entailed a deep tie to his theory of freedom: we must understand the realm of appearances as necessitous, but there is some amount of interpretation respecting the causes assigned to phenomena (an empirical or intelligible character). This indeterminacy is a space opened up by the regulative judgment, which is interpretive and merely guided by the idea of system. Schelling goes beyond this to show that there must be a real content that forces thought to think, otherwise our judgments would be arbitrary. For Schelling to think a whole is to think constitutive self-production, and to think self-production is to think a whole. Through experiment one is led to lawfulness, through lawfulness to the whole, through the whole to self-production. This means that we do not merely translate, through knowing, the experience of objects into the necessity of thought, but that nature is necessary “in itself ”: “It is not that we know nature [as a priori], but that nature is a priori, that is, everything individual in it is already determined through the whole or through the Idea of nature in general.”43 Thus the philosophy of nature is at once an epistemology, an ontology, and an eminently practical philosophy (in the Kantian sense, meaning “pertaining to freedom”).
Logogenesis, Construction, and Potency in the Philosophy of NatureFrom the dualism of productivity and product implicit in the idea of nature, Schelling attempts to derive an entire graduated series of increasingly complex stages in the evolution of nature. From simple qualities to inorganic forces, from light to organic sensibility, he shows that, as in transcendental philosophy, construction is not designed to trace an actual, empirical or experiential awareness of development, but is the extraction of the necessary from the contingent in a deductive development. It is the determination of necessary “conditions of possibility” of the experience of an objective world and a justification of their legitimacy. In natural philosophy and its graduated series of stages Schelling sketches the categories of natural ontology and epistemology, deploying the least number of concepts needed to provide an account of the world and experience. Hermann Krings calls this a “logogenesis.”44 Since construction reveals the “necessary,” and the necessary is such because the real compels thought, then Schelling can also sometimes say that nature “constructs itself.” For example, the “dynamical process” is nothing other than the “selfconstruction of matter.”45
If, as has been mentioned many times, it is Schelling’s objective to define the set of concepts necessary for us to be able to think experience and nature at all, and to furnish a genetic account of both the subject and the object from a single source, it is obvious that he cannot be satisfied with the inventory of concepts supplied by Kant because they are strictly subjective. He deduces such categories as the understanding possesses in the 1800 System, but a deduction of “objective” categories is needed as well. He calls the phenomena of gravity, magnetism, and electricity the “categories of physics,” precisely in resonance with Kantian usage.To have a complete system of the categories of experience, we need to uncover not only the subjective but the “objective” categories that are also “conditions” of our experience of things or objects in nature. The simple Kantian dualism between the synthetic, form-bearing subject and the unknown content-in-itself to be informed must be superseded by an account of both a form and content of spirit as well as a form and content of nature. Just as we cannot experience an object that does not occupy space or time (as Kant asserted), we also cannot experience an object that is not involved in the operation of gravitational, electromagnetic, and chemical forces. If Kant’s critique of Sir Isaac Newton is to have any force, then it is not enough to say (as does Kant) that space is a “form of intuition,” but the specific nature of space and the matter that fills it (e.g., dynamical rather than atomic) must be tied to our deduction of categories. It is in Schelling’s variously executed “construction of matter” that these categories are deduced.
Schelling’s dialectic is driven by the persistent attempt of the (absolute) subject to become an object for itself, making its way to higher powers of subjectivity or inwardness in the process.46 Thought is necessarily and inherently synthetic, and begins with a genuine opposition of factors; either something is opposed to thought itself or there are two factors contesting in thought. From these initial factors a dialectic ensues that necessitates a third synthetic moment, and this new whole can itself be treated as one factor or product at the next level or stage of development.We obtain the image of nested spheres of activity or “products.” A product consisting of two simple “factors” can itself become one of two factors constituting another product or sphere of activity, and so what is a mere factor for one stage of development could itself be a product from the perspective of an earlier stage. Schelling sought not only to think organic life as a single unfolding continuum, but also Nature as a whole, including the inorganic realm. The organic and the inorganic could be unified only if at bottom both realms were constituted by the “same” forces. The dialectic of forces in the inorganic realm, specifically the “construction of matter” out of chemical, electrical, and magnetic forces, must in some sense be contained or be implicit in the organic realm. In the “General Deduction of the Dynamical Process, or on the Categories of Physics” (1800), written after the System and appearing in the first issue of his Journal of Speculative Physics, Schelling takes to its furthest development the basic construction of matter and force that he has approached in various ways since 1797. The “Dynamical Process” names the perpetually active “self-constructing of matter recapitulated at diverse levels,” and a deduction of the dynamical process will be equivalent to the complete construction of matter itself. In it “we distinguish various moments in the construction of matter that we allow it to pass through,” but we do not have to think that “Nature actually passes through these moments in time, but only that these moments are dynamically—or if this is more meaningful—metaphysically grounded in Nature.”47 Since “all genuine construction is genetic,” it is necessary to think of “moments” analytically where in Nature itself (from an ontological standpoint) there is unity and no temporal sequence. From the dynamical extension of space itself into three dimensions (length, breadth, depth) as a consequence of the dialectical interaction of fundamental forces, Schelling deduces or constructs the categories of gravity, magnetism, electricity, and the chemical process as forms as fundamental to our apprehension of objects as is space itself. Magnetism, for example, because it must necessarily be conceived as a duality in identity and a unification of polar opposites, is the “form” or category of physics under which length itself must be thought, and magnetism is the conditioning factor of all length. This means that magnetism is a universal function or power of matter, and is not bound to any particular substance in nature (in contrast to the representation of a “magnetic fluid,” a notion current at the time). Magnetism is an expression of the synthesis of repulsive and attractive force in one and the same body, and Schelling even holds that every magnet, because it is a synthesis of opposites, is “a symbol of Nature as a whole.”48 Magnetism is itself a product of force relations, and constitutes matter as such (not any specific material); only the addition of a further determination through “negative conditions” makes this matter a specific body or object.
According to the central tenet of natural philosophy’s critical epistemology, in contrast to mechanical and atomistic philosophy, the main objects of investigation are dynamical forces or productivity, and not static objects or products. The static object is always secondary with respect to the forces and powers (“functions” or “factors”) that generate and maintain it. Thus there is unity at the level of production and diversity at the level of products in nature. Nature is conceived to be in perpetual becoming, while being is “becoming suspended.” A major problem for nature philosophy emerging from these ontological theses is then the nature of permanence. It is no longer the task of philosophia naturalis to solve the problem of hylomorphic “substantial change,” but to explain how products appear to be permanent at all in this continual flux. Schelling’s preferred figure to characterize the product of nature is the whirlpool:
A stream flows in a straight line forward as long as it encounters no resistance. Where there is resistance—a whirlpool forms. Every original product of Nature is such a vortex, every organized being. E.g., the whirlpool is not something immobilized, it is rather something constantly transforming—but reproduced anew at each moment. Thus no product in Nature is fixed, but it is reproduced at each instant through the force of Nature entire. (We do not really see the subsistence of Nature’s products, just their continually being-reproduced.) Nature as a whole co-operates in every product.49
“Products” are specifically the result of a production through a relation of forces, and will constitute the ground of an existing body (matter), from which a determinate body is formed.50 If each product is a relatively “permanent process,” the continual reproduction of its own substance and processes, and yet all products are suffused by the powers of nature as a whole, what are the factors that distinguish one product from another? One product is specifically different from another not only in its material composition, but in the relation and proportions of its constitutive forces among themselves (and the former depends on the latter). As in his earlier essays on transcendental philosophy where the self, in striving to preserve its identity, “imitates” the absolute as far as it can by exercising “absolute causality,” all of the vortical existents are preserved in their existence by their striving to express the whole, in increasing individualization, to approximate a single perfect organism, a single archetype.51 On the other hand, Schelling speaks often of the tendency of nature to return to a state of indifference, where no strife exists, where all individuality, therefore, is eliminated. He repeatedly insists that the “individual exists, as it were, against the will of nature.”52 The perfect balance of these two tendencies is expressed in the preservation of the genus or species at the expense of the individual. On a larger scale, what a species expresses of the whole is not a particular mixture of materials and forms, but a certain proportion and intensity of primary organic functions. It is through the continuity of organic functions that the whole diversity of the natural world is connected and forms a single whole organism.
In contrast to the school of comparative anatomy and the old natural history, Schelling establishes a “comparative physiology” of organic functions. Just as “speculative physics” is a science of the fundamental powers of matter, he endeavors to establish a science of the various degrees and proportions of essential powers that belong to all organic beings. Through these diverse expressions in various proportions, nature as a whole achieves the realization of its ideal of unity in plurality. Just as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck oriented his system of zoology with attention to the basic functions of reproduction, circulation, and sensation, rather than to structure or external form, Schelling defines every organism as a permanent process by attending to its specific proportion of reproductive force, irritability, and sensibility. Every organism is defined, not primarily by its external form (although its form and organs will follow from the disposition of its powers), but by the particular proportion of forces active within it. All organic beings are suffused with all three powers, and yet plants, for example, have a preponderance of reproductive force while sensibility in them approaches zero. Mammals, in contrast, have a preponderance of sensibility but produce few offspring, their reproductive power narrows to a capacity to reproduce only the organism itself through growth, assimilation, and maintenance.
The order of the powers of matter I have presented is also one of decreasing extensity and inversely proportional intensity. Light (or chemical process) reaches everywhere, electricity is less widely distributed, and only a few bodies are magnets (although magnetic force permeates the entire cosmos). The organic functions are isomorphic with the inorganic. Force of reproduction is positive, expansive, and the most widely distributed. Irritability is reactive and designates the juxtaposition of inner and outer worlds, and is less widely distributed. Sensibility is the synthesis of the two because it is the source of movement and cause of life’s reproduction of itself and of its reactions to the world. Because these powers are dialectically related however, and because they are all modifications of a single omnipresent power of nature, neither the second nor the third in each group is absent from the the manifestation of the first. In a sense, the third is there from the beginning. This is the reason why Schelling analyzes these powers in the Introduction in the opposite order, elucidating their dialectical genesis more explicitly. Magnetism is the first power of inorganic nature because its factors are in a state of unity: in one and the same being opposite factors are expressed, a unity in difference. In electricity these poles are separated into different bodies, independent products in their own right, and here two products are opposed in the electrical process; they are in a state of explicit difference. In the chemical process two initially separate products are seen to recombine, to achieve an “intussusception” and unification, or return to a state of “indifference.” The dialectical formula is repeated in the organic. Sensibility is, therefore, the stage of unity in difference, irritability that of explicit differentiation, and reproductive drive the stage of return to unity or indifference. Provocative statements based on these parallels (or “analogies”), such as “sensibility in the organic is the higher power of magnetism in matter,” always attract the most ridicule in negative receptions of the philosophy of nature. While some followers of Schelling abused the method of analogy, Schelling was committed to its employment in a determinate form. It is the notion of “potency” that allows Schelling to present these structural repetitions in a determinate concept.
To achieve a unified view of nature means to reduce the domains of inorganic and organic nature to a single expression, and Schelling can do this by employing his ontological and dialectical methods. The distinctions between products are drawn on the basis of their limited expression of universal powers. One could argue that univocal being expresses itself as a whole in each being, but each being receives univocal being only to the degree that it is able. Being is not unevenly distributed into substance and property or quality; this substance-predicate model is rejected along with the primacy of static objects. Being is expressed in processes whose material conditions facilitate the expression of greater or lesser degrees of intensity. Schelling therefore understands the powers of reproductive force, irritability, and sensibility as isomorphic with chemical process or light, electricity, and magnetism, respectively, and the former are nothing other than the latter “raised to a higher power.”53 In his much later lectures On the History of Modern Philosophy Schelling notes that the idea of “potency” is more determinate than the idea of “analogy.” In speaking of light, he says it “is obviously an analogy in the extended world for spirit or thought, and if we reduce this indeterminate concept of an analogy to a determinate concept, then light is nothing but spirit or thought at a lower level or at a lower potency.” 54 Here analogy is to be distinguished from potency. As Kant held, for example, analogy does not entail a similarity between things, but only a likeness in the relations between things.55 But just as Schelling goes beyond Kant’s regulative idea to a positive ontology, he uses the indeterminate concept of analogy as a means to indicate where a determinate concept of potentiation may be thought. There is a likeness of relation or proportion of one power to another (e.g., reproductive drive is most extensive in the organic as chemical process is in the inorganic), but there is also an ontological community that the concept of analogy does not imply. It is the determinate conception of a difference in intensive quantity of being that produces a qualitative difference within the structure of dialectical development, driven by the endeavor of Nature as subject to become object to itself. He uses this concept to show that organism and the inorganic are not essentially opposed. One cannot simply oppose mechanism by developing a “philosophy of organism,” but must seek the common expression of both. For Schelling the opposition between the inorganic and organic realms of nature is merely apparent, and in closing the Introduction to the Outline he notes that the attempt to reduce one to the other is futile, and a false problem. They are not opposed at all; the organic is nothing but a “raising to a higher power” of the inorganic forces. The word Potenzierung names Schelling’s original and powerful concept for conceiving this identity in diversity.
ConclusionFor the philosophy of nature, universal nature is a whole, a living organism, and every individual in nature is an expression of this whole. All things in nature are conjoined by virtue of a universally omnipresent but virtual power that manifests itself in various modes, depending on the material conditions of its manifestation. Every individual is defined not as a static formed substance, but as an enduring process or contest of forces restricted to a particular sphere of activity. The play of forces within every limited sphere obeys a regularity and logic that is necessarily dialectical, and in accord with which their expressions in products, of whatever type, can be situated in a graduated scale of development that indicates the intensity or degree of evolution (emanation) of the powers of nature manifest in a particular being. Schelling’s philosophy of nature is dynamic and genetic, but the processes it describes are “static geneses,” the expression of virtual powers in actual materials, and not the historical description of a genesis from actual term to actual term. As Krings notes, Schelling’s philosophy of nature may be thought of as a logogenesis, not a real genesis. Construction, or the deduction of the categories necessary to think and experience the natural world, is the method employed to span the depths and heights of the graduated series in nature. It is often overlooked that the method of construction I have described also involves, in the act of postulating, the engagement of human freedom in transcending mechanism from the start. Not only epistemological and ontological, the philosophy of nature is an expressly ethical project.
It is hoped that the appearance of the following text in English for the first time will not only contribute to the current Schelling revival that has been gradually gaining momentum among philosophers and theorists in the English- speaking world, but will also provide a valuable resource for those interested in holistic metaphysics, environmental philosophy, ecology, and the sciences of complexity and self-organization.
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