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The Universe in the Universe: German Idealism and the Natural History of Mind
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 April 2013
Abstract
Recent considerations of mind and world react against philosophical naturalisation strategies by maintaining that the thought of the world is normatively driven to reject reductive or bald naturalism. This paper argues that we may reject bald or ‘thoughtless’ naturalism without sacrificing nature to normativity and so retreating from metaphysics to transcendental idealism. The resources for this move can be found in the Naturphilosophie outlined by the German Idealist philosopher F.W.J. Schelling. He argues that because thought occurs in the same universe as thought thinks, it remains part of that universe whose elements in consequence now additionally include that thought. A philosophy of nature beginning from such a position neither shaves thought from a thoughtless nature nor transcendentally reduces nature to the content of thought, since a thought occurring in nature only has ‘all nature’ as its content when that thought is additive rather than summative. A natural history of mind drawn from Schellingian premises therefore entails that, while a thought may have ‘all nature’ as its content, this thought is itself the partial content of the nature augmented by it.
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- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 72: Phenomenology and Naturalism , July 2013 , pp. 297 - 316
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2013
References
1 ‘That a universe exists: this proposition is the limit of experience itself’ F.W.J. Schelling SW II, 24; Ideas 18. Schelling's works are cited according to the edition of Schelling, K.F.A., Schellings sämmtliche Werke (SW), XIV vols. (Stuttgart and Augsburg: Cotta, 1856–61)Google Scholar. The Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur is in SW II, 1–343, and is translated as Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (hereafter Ideas) by Harris, E.E. and Heath, P. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).Google Scholar
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3 Rescher argues this convincingly in Rescher, N., Nature and Understanding. The Metaphysics and Method of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar and Reality and its Appearance (London and New York: Continuum, 2010)Google Scholar.
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8 ‘Actual’, that is, in the broad sense, indicating some state minimally susceptible of predication rather than, for instance, the modal contrary of ‘potential’.
9 A condition of possibility is a ‘possibiliser’ just when it is necessary and sufficient for the possibility, i.e. just when it creates a possibility.
10 See, KRV A409/B436; Kant writes: ‘reason demands the unconditioned’ (KRV A564/B593); ‘Reason is a power of principles, and its ultimate demand aims at the unconditioned’ (KUK Ak.V, 401). References to Kant's works are to Kants gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (AK), XXIX vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902-, which pagination is retained in all referenceable translations. Of these, I refer as KRV to Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Smith, N.K. (London: Macmillan, 1929)Google Scholar; KUK to Critique of Judgment, trans. Pluhar, W.S., (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987)Google Scholar; Op.p = Opus postumum, trans. Förster, E. and Rosen, M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.
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13 See especially McDowell's ‘Responses’ to Pippin's ‘Two cheers for the abandonment of nature’, in Smith, Reading McDowell on Mind and World, 273–5.
14 As Bell, David writes in ‘Transcendental Arguments and Non-Naturalistic Anti-Realism’, in Stern, R. (ed.) Transcendental Arguments. Problems and Prospects. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 189–210Google Scholar, here 192, ‘The transcendental argument must not invalidly infer objective and or unrestricted conclusions from purely subjective and/or merely parochial premises’.
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16 SW XIII, 161n; Schelling, F.W.J., The Grounding of Positive Philosophy trans. Matthews, Bruce (Albany NY: SUNY, 2008), 203nGoogle Scholar.
17 SW II, 56; Ideas 42.
18 In The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy, trans. Harris, H.S. and Cerf, W. (Albany NY: SUNY, 1977), 117, 133–5Google Scholar.
19 KRV A85/B117.
20 Lyotard, J.F., Leçons sur l'analytique du sublime (Paris: Galilée, 1990), 15Google Scholar.
21 KUK, AK V, 314.
22 KRV A26/B44.
23 McDowell has emphasised this point in responding to Robert Pippin on ‘leaving nature behind’, insisting that ‘our conceptual capacities’ are not limited to overt conceptual activity, but figure equally in ‘operations of receptivity outside our control’ (Smith, Reading McDowell on Mind and World, 274).
24 KRV A85/B117.
25 ‘A critique of pure reason […] would be incomplete if it [had not] already explored the terrain supporting this edifice [of a system of metaphysics] to the depth at which lies the first foundation of our power of principles independent of experience […]’ (KUK AK V, 168).
26 ‘He who would know the world must first manufacture it – in his own self, indeed’ (AK XXI, 41; Op.p., 240).
27 The Introduction is a sustained four-way (unhelpfully, Schelling does not structure it accordingly) analysis of transcendental philosophy, empiricism, rationalism (especially Leibniz's) and Naturphilosophie with respect to their emergence. The critique of transcendental philosophy runs from SW II, 12–34; Ideas 10–26.
28 For reasons the translators do not explain, Harris and Heath render both Idee and Vorstellung (Kant's ‘representation’) as ‘idea’, rendering it unclear, bluntly, where in the Introduction Schelling criticizes transcendentalism and where he praises Platonism.
29 SW II, 55–6, Ideas 41–2.
30 SW II, 55–6, Ideas 41–2.
31 A thorough working out of these problems is dexterously performed by Hindrichs, Gunnar in Das Absolute und das Subjekt (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2009)Google Scholar.
32 SW II, 12; Ideas 9.
33 SW VI, 207; cf. VI, 185.
34 SW II, 13; Ideas 10.
35 SW II, 55–6; Ideas 41–2.
36 SW II, 39; Ideas 30.
37 SW II, 11; Ideas 9.
38 SW II, 6; Ideas 5.
39 SW II, 14; Ideas 11; t.m.
40 ‘The essence of man is action. But the less he reflects upon himself, the more active he is […]. As soon as he makes himself object, the whole man no longer acts; he has suspended one part of his activity so as to be able to reflect upon the other. Man is not born to waste his mental power in conflict against the fantasy of an imaginary world, but to exert all his powers upon a world which has influence upon him, which lets him feel its forces.’ (SW II, 13; Ideas 10).
41 SW II, 6; Ideas 5.
42 ‘[W]e may think of force only as something finite. But no force is finite by nature unless it is limited by one opposing it. Where we think of force therefore we must always presume a force opposed to it.’ (SW II, 49–50; Ideas 37).
43 SW II, 44; Ideas 33.
44 Franks, Paul W., All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments and Skepticism in German Idealism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.
45 Ibid., 18.
46 David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Part II, in Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, ed. Gaskin, J.C.A. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 50Google Scholar.
47 SW II, 55–6; Ideas 41–2.
48 SW III, 340; Schelling, F.W.J., System of Transcendental Idealism (hereafter System), trans. Heath, Peter (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 5Google Scholar.
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50 SW IV, 119; trans. Vater, Michael G., Philosophical Forum 32 (2001), 343–371, here 352Google Scholar.
51 See Grant, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling, 174. Jason Wirth discusses this point in his paper ‘The solitude of God: Schelling, Deleuze and Nature as the Image of Thought’, presented at the Schelling Tagung, Universität Bonn, July 10 2011 and forthcoming in Schelling-Studien 1 (2013).
52 Kant, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, tr. Jaki, Stanley L. (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981), 160Google Scholar, AK I, 321. The ‘World-Phoenix’ is recurrent throughout Carlyle. See, e.g., Sartor Resartus Part 3 ch.7, and French Revolution Book VI, ch.1: ‘Behold the World-Phoenix enveloping all things: it is the Death-Birth of a World!’ See, finally, Schönfeld's, Martin fine essay ‘The phoenix of nature: Kant and the big bounce’, Collapse 5 (2009), 361–376Google Scholar.
53 SW VIII, 164.
54 SW II, 39; Ideas 30.
55 SW II, 4; Ideas 3.
56 SW II, 6; Ideas, 5.
57 SW II, 11; Ideas, 9.
58 SW III, 553; System 172.
59 SW VI, 185.