What an abyss of forces we gaze down into here. (S 3: 111n)
In this note appended to his First Projection of a System of the Philosophy of Nature for a lecture course at Jena, Schelling marvels at the incomprehensibility of magnetism. Not only do magnets behave differently in the northern and southern hemispheres, but even a slight change in their orientation can drastically change the extent to which they can lose or gain magnetic properties. Our understanding of nature seems marooned among these forces, its compass wholly unable to discern whether we stride atop the world or crawl along its underbelly. Despite the tremendous wealth of forces that had been discovered between Newton’s hermetic mechanical investigations and Lavoisier’s revolutionary chemistry, the science of Schelling’s day had failed to identify what could unify these forces.1 Magnetism, a form of action-at-a-distance far rarer than gravity or electricity, was the most bewildering force of all, with its polarity and contagiousness from one mass of iron to another. Yet Schelling confronts this unfathomability with a sense not of desperation, but of awe. For it is not we philosophers who encounter this alien world, but the abstract understanding. Though any abyss is liable to inspire vertigo, Schelling is confident that we are in no danger of falling in—unless, of course, we choose to jump. The ground of Schelling’s early confidence is his assuredness that reason, which, unlike the understanding, does not make forces its sole object, is identical with the life of the world. That it may be impossible to trace nature’s activity back to a single grounding force is not a challenge to reason, and it is a challenge to the stature of humanity only to the extent that humanity is to be determined by forces. From this standpoint, magnetism seems no longer an abyss of forces, but a phenomenon firmly grounded in the first cause of all motion—for, like all planets, ‘the Earth is nothing other than a great magnet’ (S 3: 122n). The challenge of all Schelling’s philosophy through at least 1809 is to give the ‘infinite opposition’ that comprises this ground as much sense as possible, and it is in the Nature Philosophy that reason first comes to occupy the center of this search for ground.
In this chapter, I will work through the three major works of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, showing how reason becomes concretized not just as a regulative method for approaching nature, but as constitutive of nature itself. In the 1797 Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, Schelling expands on the third Critique’s observation that reason has a particular sort of access to the self-organizing structure of organisms by showing that reason itself has the structure of organic life. In the 1798 On the World-Soul, he argues that reason not only has the structure of organic nature, but is the very source of nature’s intelligible structure. And in the 1799 First Projection of a System of Nature Philosophy, he makes reason the end of nature by presenting the sequence of inhibitions that allows nature to develop into a reason capable of knowing itself. First, however, the almost universally poor reception of Schelling’s Nature Philosophy after 1820 or so has made necessary a justification for examining these texts in the first place—a justification not required of the equally underread System of Transcendental Idealism, for example, which is often dismissed as a superceded moment of philosophy, but not as meaningless juvenilia.2 Long before Hegel,3 in a Zusatz added as an introduction to the 1830 version of the Philosophy of Nature, attempts to distance himself from what he calls the ‘charlatanism’ (Schwindeleien) of the Schellingian Naturphilosophie, others had rejected the Naturphilosophie as pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo. The Dutch physicist Hans Christian Oersted, for instance, categorically denied that there was any but the most superficial connection between his theory of electromagnetism and the one Schelling had been propounding when Oersted was his student.4 Perhaps the greatest hindrance to greater acceptance of the Naturphilosophie was Schelling’s insistence after 1798 that his discussions of such peculiar phrases as ‘universal organism’ and ‘organic reason’ were not meant metaphorically. In claiming that reason is organic, Schelling does not just mean that reason is like an organism in the sense that it takes in external material, gives it its own shape, and expands its boundaries in the process, though reason indeed possesses all these characteristics. Rather, Schelling wants to redefine what it means for something to be organic, clearly a frustration for natural scientists and others who assume the organic has already been sufficiently defined as to make all talk of its ensoulment (Beseelung) unnecessary. Yet Schelling contends that an adequate concept of the organic is inaccessible to the scientific understanding and thus calls for a higher form of thought. If he is right, then the Naturphilosophie cannot merely be replaced by more recent scientific discoveries. The fact that all organic compounds hitherto discovered have contained hydrocarbons does not entail that we can even provisionally define ‘organic’ as ‘containing certain carbon compounds.’
While we have already seen some of Schelling’s reasons for advocating a new concept of the organic in Of the I and the ‘Treatises,’ perhaps his clearest (though not most comprehensive) critique of applying the understanding to nature appears in the 1797 Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature as Introduction to the Study of This Science. Although the work appeared in a second, slightly revised version in 1803, Schelling never added the chapter on organic nature that he thought necessary to complete the project. As Schelling’s first attempt at a comprehensive Naturphilosophie, the Ideas present an account of reason that is more withdrawn and less organic than what we find in later works, with Schelling contending that reason offers a more adequate way of approaching nature than the understanding. In later works, Schelling will develop the thesis that reason is not just the form of thinking most adequate to knowing nature, but governs nature’s development. While there are hints that reason lends its own structure to nature,5 it would take Schelling another year to develop a systematic account of how this could be anything more than mere analogy.6
In the Ideas, Schelling’s primary intention is to show how reason and the understanding converge into a unified philosophy of nature. While at times Schelling associates the understanding with natural science and reason with philosophy, he abandons the Kantian architecture that treats them as faculties of spirit and analyzes them instead as forms of striving. Drawing on his dalliances with natural science, Schelling sees every striving (Streben) as a complex of urges (Dränge). Just as matter achieves its solidity through a combination of attractive and repulsive impulses, reason and the understanding are kept alive by the conflict of their urges. While the Ideas are not as explicit about the structure of this conflict as the First Projection will be two years later, the direction of his argument is to show that reason and the understanding each consist of what I will call a grounding and a guiding urge, which bring the striving into being and struggle (sometimes with each other) for fulfillment.7
I will begin with reason, since Schelling repeatedly emphasizes its organic qualities and deems it relatively unproblematic to describe it as a form of striving. On the second page of the Introduction to the Ideas, Schelling introduces separation (Trennung) as the grounding urge of reason. Philosophy, Schelling writes, begins ‘as soon as the human being sets himself in opposition to the external world’ (S 2: 13). Since it assumes a great deal about the subjective pole of cognition, grounding philosophy in a specifically human act is clearly problematic, for reasons that Schelling expounds upon amply in the Identity Philosophy and Freedom essay. But I do not think that the invocation of humanity here shows anything essentially problematic about the foundations of Schelling’s Nature Philosophy. Immediately after introducing this separation, Schelling states that it also appears as the separation of object from intuition, of concept from image, and of the human being from himself (S 2: 13). By the next page, Schelling has dropped his references to humanity altogether and states simply that reason, as the primary movement of philosophy, is grounded in ‘the original separation’ (S 2: 14).
Yet the structure of reason is such that it cannot accept this separation as absolute. Reason strives to show that this original separation is only relative to consciousness, subjectivity, and so on, and that subject and object are essentially identical. Thus identity is what we may call reason’s guiding urge. The Nature Philosophy seeks not only resonance between the real and the ideal, but their identity. Ultimately, this means that reason cannot see itself as distinct in any way from its objects; judged absolutely, they are one. In the context of the Ideas, this means that nature ‘should not only express, but even realize the laws of our spirit, and that it is and is called nature only insofar as it does so’ (S 2: 55-6). With this methodological assumption, Schelling raises the Fichtean doctrine of the primacy of practical reason to a higher level. For Schelling in the Ideas, nature is not the negative of reason, to be submitted to it as reason makes the world its home, but has since its inception been in the process of turning itself into a home for reason.
As we saw in Chapter 1, the fact that reason strives to establish the identity of subject and object was already emphasized by Fichte and the earliest Schelling. But what makes Schelling’s Nature Philosophy unique on this matter is the extent to which he avoids reducing this striving to a human activity (cf. S 2: 13). Though Schelling never wrote the projected third part of the Ideas that was to be devoted to organic life, this highest stage of nature is clearly on his mind as he remakes the Kantian faculties. Like organisms, reason and the understanding are self-organizing, giving living form to what is otherwise lifeless. But also like organisms, each is also subject to its own varieties of disease and dissolution. Reason’s characteristic sickness is what Schelling calls ‘mere speculation’ in the first edition and ‘mere reflection’ in the second (S 2: 13). Mere reflection is an urge that seizes on the original divorce of reason and seeks to cancel the urge of identity. The world for mere reflection is one in which categories are not only natural, but absolute. By separating spirit from the phenomenal world, reflection ‘fills the intelligible world with chimeras, against which, because they lie beyond all reason, it is not even possible to fight. It makes that separation between human being and the world permanent, because it treats the latter as a thing in itself, which neither intuition nor imagination, neither understanding nor reason, reach’ (S 2: 14). By cancerously magnifying reason’s grounding urge, reflection cancels the urge of identity, and thus kills the striving of reason entirely. It does not take an especially acute oncological eye to recognize such neoplasms in philosophy, and unfortunately, they can be malignant. It is far too easy, upon recognizing the triviality of one’s former undifferentiated thought, to make the division and redoubling of categories one’s sole urge, disregarding a sense for the integrity of the whole. As the past few centuries’ repeated resurfacing of romantic defeatism attests, philosophy is continually at risk of becoming ‘a discipline of errant reason’ that grows fixated upon a limitation of human knowledge and takes it as absolute (S 2: 14).
The organic structure of the understanding, on the other hand, is more complex, since whether it can properly be called a form of striving depends on the answer to Schelling’s question, ‘Is not the understanding a dead faculty?’ (S 2: 44). Here Schelling seems to say at once that the understanding is both striving and not striving. In Kant, at least, a faculty is an abstract way of conceiving a cognitive ability possessed by a rational being. As strictly abstract, it is not the sort of thing that can be alive or dead. The very attribution of death to a faculty seems to be what Ryle would call a category mistake. But given the intensity of his attempt to link life and cognition, Schelling clearly intends something by calling the understanding a dead faculty. He could mean it redundantly, as a trope of emphasis, much as we might say of a man going through a divorce, ‘He’s just a dead shell of his former self.’ Obviously, anyone who is just a shell of a man would be equally dead to the world. In this case, Schelling would be suggesting that because the understanding is (now) only a faculty, it is therefore dead. Or we could take ‘dead faculty’ in the same way that we take Schelling’s references to dead matter (S 2: 200, 215), and thus Schelling could be suggesting that faculties—such as reason or perhaps the imagination—can be alive, but the faculty of the understanding lacks the self-organizing force to go on living. In both cases, we can infer that the understanding, or at least some predecessor whose corpse it has calcified into, was once alive.
Ultimately, Schelling grants the understanding only the most tenuous claim to life, suggesting that it can only sustain itself on dead matter. The understanding, ‘instead of creating the actual’ seems to ‘borrow its own reality from actuality itself’ (S 2: 44). This stands in sharp contrast to Schelling’s descriptions of a living organism, which, insofar as it organizes itself into its distinctive form, ‘carries the ground of its existence in itself’ (S 2: 40). Thus the understanding is a kind of parasite, remaining on the exterior of organic things and taking its form from their superficial organization: ‘And is it not merely the slavishness of this faculty, its capacity for describing the outlines [Umrisse] of the real,’ Schelling asks, ‘which sets up a connection [Vermittlung] between itself and the reality?’ (S 2: 44). This recalls Schelling’s discussion of relative animality. What we normally call animals are really only relatively animal, Schelling maintains, for they depend upon the inorganic world to sustain them. Only the ‘world-body’ is absolutely animal, for ‘it contains everything it needs to sustain itself’ (S 2: 218-19).
The understanding, likewise, is relatively animal, because it, too, is parasitic on something inorganic. Rather than containing within itself only what is self-organizing, the understanding props itself up with dead principles. For example, Newtonian mechanics recognizes the invariable copresence of centrifugal and centripetal forces, but so long as it sees them as mere forces, it cannot appreciate the organic basis of their unity. ‘For knowledge of these exalted relationships, the understanding is thus wholly dead—they are evident only to reason’ (S 2: 200). Or, to indulge Schelling’s penchant for mixing metaphors,8 the concepts in which the understanding deals ‘are mere silhouettes of reality’ (S 2: 215). Regardless of whether we conceive it as parasite, saprophyte, or silhouette, the understanding’s flaw is its inability to recognize the identity that organization yields. The difference between the organic and the inorganic, Schelling writes, is that ‘Every organic product carries the ground of its existence in itself, for it is cause and effect of itself’ (S 2: 40). And, to make perfectly clear that this ground is an ideal one accessible only to reason’s striving after identity, Schelling elaborates: ‘Thus a concept lies at the base of every organization, for where there is a necessary relation of the whole to the part and of the part to the whole, there is concept’ (S 2: 41, Schelling’s emphasis). Here the unity of concept and object is not ideal, but real. That is, Schelling’s Nature Philosophy shows the unity of concept and object not in spirit’s knowing, as in the philosophy of Transcendental Idealism, but instead in the object itself. With this claim of immanence, Schelling means primarily that the recognition of an organism’s organization is not arbitrary but necessitated by the very existence of the organism (S 2: 42). We as rational beings have no choice but to see the organism as producing its own end, and yet the understanding is unable to conceive of this self-positing.9 Such self-organizing of the concept is inaccessible to the understanding, for which concepts are merely appended to phenomena. The understanding can attempt to ground this organization in a mysterious ‘life force,’ much as Newton’s successors posited an actual force of gravity somehow inhering in all matter. But the very idea of a life force, Schelling argues, is contradictory, for a force can only be conceived as something finite. If there is any force at all, it must be limited (gehemmt) by another force. Whether we conceive the forces in equilibrium or in eternal polemic, we need an external organizing principle to do so. These forces cannot be unified into a single force, as such a force would itself only be intelligible in relation to other forces. What gives life its determination, namely organization, cannot be a force, and thus cannot be exhausted as an object of the understanding.
Yet despite these limits of the understanding, organic nature is not solely the province of reason. The understanding is vital for apprehending the continuity of nature across the phenomena of electricity, magnetism, and chemistry. Reason, focused as it is on the polarity of measure and identity, fails to apprehend the continuity of nature, for ‘nothing that comes to be in nature comes to be by a leap; all becoming occurs in a continuous sequence’ (S 2: 172, Schelling’s emphasis). While reason strives to find identity in difference, the understanding strives for the continuity of all being. In the terminology I introduced earlier, the understanding consists of the grounding urge of totality and the guiding urge of continuity.
Rather than beginning with separation, the understanding begins by placing all of its objects in a common field (S 2: 21-2). Everything that is, it presumes, can be explained. Schelling addresses this grounding urge most clearly in his discussion of whether chemistry can be a science. In the Ideas, chemistry is the second level of physical science, more basic than Newtonian mechanics, the study of relative motion, but not as fundamental as dynamics, the study of attraction and repulsion as the basic constituents of matter. Since the understanding aims for totality, it takes as complete sciences only those studies that can exhaust their subject matter under a common principle. Schelling contends that the regularities that had been found in affinities between the various forms of matter were not of the sort that can be totalized over the whole range of matters, and thus chemistry could never be a science unless it turned out that all chemical affinities could be explained by matter’s dynamic properties—which, with the electron valence theory, is exactly what happened. But then, the science would be dynamics, and chemistry would be ‘nothing else but applied dynamics, or dynamics considered in its contingency’ (S 2: 276).
Set against this urge for totality is the urge for continuity. Thus, for instance, the understanding takes discrete objects of perception and seeks the inner continuity that comprises them (S 2: 21-2). As Schelling shows in his analysis of the physics of George Louis le Sage, mechanistic atomism is always only a provisional position for the understanding (S 2: 207-11). For upon positing a world of corpuscles, its urge of continuity will lead it to investigate the constitution of these corpuscles, subdividing until it finally reaches something continuous. The understanding cannot conceive of absolute indivisibility, for this forestalls the possibility of a force powerful enough to divide such basic particles. Thus the understanding is compelled to posit not matter but force as the ultimate constituent of the universe. And this is why Schelling places at the foundation of all natural science not physics (by which he means Newtonian mechanics, the study of the motion of already constituted bodies), but dynamics, the study of the expansive and contractive forces that give rise to motion and extension.
Since it is a simpler form of striving, the understanding’s characteristic illness is also simpler than that of reason. Just as reason’s characteristic illness emerges when its grounding urge is uninhibited, so can the uninhibited urge for totality become pathological. But rather than the cancerous opposition of one urge against another, the plague of the understanding is cirrhosis. When the urge for totality is unchecked, it collapses vast ranges of objects into undifferentiated lumps, leaving them unconnected to other vital systems, often leaving a jagged wasteland in its wake. Where reason’s excessive divisions can go undetected or appear benign for a time, the violence of the understanding’s excesses are often felt almost immediately. When the scientist reimagines nature’s joints, we can generally tell that he has eroded its inner continuity. This cirrhosis should not be confused with the normal parasitic and saprophytic functioning of the understanding. Since it lacks the guiding urge of identity, the understanding cannot help but analyze its objects into matter which gets its impetus externally. Cirrhosis results only when the urge for totality vastly overpowers the urge for continuity.
By suggesting that reason and the understanding are vulnerable to sickness, however, Schelling shows that his new determinations of them are far from purely schematic. He no longer conceives them as faculties of a living intelligence, but as organisms themselves. While this content gives a vitality to the concepts of understanding and reason that a schematic conception lacks, we must be aware of the infectious dangers of such content. By the time of the Ideas, Schelling had added a tremendous complexity to Spinoza and Fichte’s already rich concepts of conatus and Anstoss, concepts that Schelling continued to refine in his later considerations of Streben, Sehnsucht, Verlangen, and Wollen. To privilege one of these forms of activity over the others risks obscuring the dynamism of Schelling’s willful mixture of reason and the understanding in tracing nature’s development. Whereas the understanding may see striving as a complex of forces, reason may see it as a longing for return to identity. Since both reason and the understanding are inexhaustible, any such generalizations about the content of the interpretation of striving would be inadequate. With the introduction of the organic into our accounts of the structure of reason and the understanding, we risk privileging reason, since only it can grasp the teleology of organic life. Yet conversely, by interpreting sickness as a disequilibrium of forces, Schelling actually prioritizes the understanding in weighing the comparative health of these two forms of striving. In the First Projection two years later, Schelling will seek to bring illness under the domain of the reason by presenting a new theory that traces illness to the organism’s own inner activity and the disproportion of drives that arises when it takes external stimulants into itself.
Perhaps even more insidious is way we have seen the concept of humanity keep creeping back into Schelling’s accounts. Near the end of the Introduction Schelling warns that it might be impossible to separate the concept of humanity from the Kantian faculties: ‘It is clear that our critique has come full circle, but not that we have become in any degree wiser than we were to begin with, about that antithesis from which we started. We leave behind the human being, as evidently the most devious problem of all philosophy, and our critique ends here in the same extremity with which it began’ (S 2: 54). As Heidegger and other twentieth-century philosophers would also observe,10 it is much easier to disavow the concept of humanity than actually to snuff out all traces of anthropomorphism in epistemology. While Schelling has taken pains to show the discipline necessary to avoid applying reason to the understanding or allowing the understanding to contaminate reason, it is not until his 1809 Freedom essay that he realizes that both are already plagued by presuppositions about the nature of the human.
While the Ideas contain most of the fundamental insights of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, it was Schelling’s next work that earned him wide esteem (including that of Goethe) and a coveted teaching position in Jena. The full 26 word title of On the World-Soul is verbose even by Schelling’s standards,11 but the audacity of Schelling’s project is apparent already in its third word. By positing the existence of a Weltseele, Schelling explicitly contradicts one of Kant’s most forceful contentions in the third Critique: that experience gives us no reason to conclude that either any inorganic thing or the world as a whole has anything like a soul (K 5: 392). In his discussion ‘Of the Various Systems Concerning the Purposiveness of Nature,’ Kant begins by noting that we generally find it unproblematic to see final causes in nature even when we do not know why the natural process in question originally came into being (K 5: 389). We may judge that an organism’s need to reproduce, for instance, determines it to act in a certain way without grasping why its species exists in the first place. While Kant will ultimately conclude that such judgments are only subjectively valid and do not constitute objectively valid laws (K 5: 404), he devotes this section to entertaining the hypothesis that ‘there is a certain presentiment of our reason or a hint given to us by nature that by means of this concept of final causes we could go beyond nature and unite it to the highest point in the series of causes, if we may abandon or at least set aside for a time the investigation of nature … and seek then to find out where this stranger in natural science, namely the concept of natural purposes, would lead us’ (K 5: 390). In other words, while all of contemporary science’s modest progress rests on shunning teleological explanation, reason still possesses an urge to flip to the end of the book and ground its judgments about nature’s activity in a universal rational purpose.
Kant discusses several ways that philosophers have either embraced or shunned such teleology, but the most relevant for our purposes is hylozoism, the hypothesis that matter itself is purposive. On the microlevel, Kant maintains that this very concept is incoherent. Because matter is by definition something inert, it cannot be conceived as having its own purpose (K 5: 394). Purposiveness can only be meaningfully ascribed to the whole of nature, through the supposition that all matter instantiates a world-soul. But since purposiveness cannot be derived a priori from the concept of matter, such a supposition can only be drawn from experiences of finite purposes, and thus any assertion about the purposiveness of the whole of nature would beg the question (K 5: 394-5). Schelling’s thesis in World-Soul is precisely the reverse, namely, that the concept of a finite natural thing is itself incoherent without an understanding of the whole of nature as purposive. In contravention of Kant’s entire critical apparatus, he claims that not only can reason find itself in nature, but it would not be reason if it failed to do so.
Despite this ambition, Schelling begins his Preface to the first edition rather modestly, insisting on only two things to avoid being misunderstood. First, he wants above all in the work to avoid imposing an artificial (erkünstelte) unity of principles on nature (S 2: 347). ‘I hate nothing more,’ he insists, ‘than that mindless [Geistlose] endeavor to eliminate the variety of natural things through pretentious [erdichtete] identities’ (S 2: 347-8). But at the same time, Schelling refuses to accept claims of the inexplicability of the world due solely to this variety. Such claims represent the worst failures of reason and indicate not only the triumph of superstition, but a failure of character. Schelling thus ups the ante on the contempt for dogmatism displayed in Fichte’s 1797-8 Wissenschaftslehre. One betrays one’s slavish character not only by assuming that the origin of thought is outside the I, but even by failing to work through idealism to its conclusion in the unity of all reality with thought. For Schelling (as for Fichte), idealism carries with it a categorical imperative. The demand of philosophy is not just the hypothetical assertion that one should be an idealist if one wants to be able to explain all reality, but the categorical claim that one simply ought to learn how to identify oneself with all reality.
Unlike the Ideas, On the World-Soul contains parts on both inorganic and organic nature, and Schelling’s main organizational principle holds that both reflect the same universal tendencies in nature. In carrying this project through, Schelling further distances himself from Kant’s metaphysics of nature by breaking down the distinction between determined natural forces and spontaneous rational action. The distinction in the ‘Treatises’ and Ideas between forces as objects of the understanding and identity as the guiding urge of reason is not as sharp in World-Soul, as Schelling now posits forces as the source of nature’s identity. The original forces that Schelling seeks are not those that the understanding posits to explain empirical nature, but ‘limit concepts’ conceived to allow for the intelligibility of nature while at the same time securing its freedom (S 2: 386). The infinity of possible forces that Schelling previously conceived as abyssal opens up ‘an infinite play-space in which [dynamic philosophy] can explain all phenomena empirically, that is, from the reciprocal activity of various materials’ (S 2: 386). Thus the work’s central claim that nature develops according to a universal organizing principle is not an attempt to explain distinct phenomena in terms of categories given by the understanding, but a play-space for advancing and retracting theories of nature. As such, the methodological imperative of idealism does not require one to accept Schelling’s specific analyses of forces in On the World-Soul, but merely to postulate that all nature’s forces can be united under a single account of nature’s necessary development.
This does not imply that we can simply abstract a doctrine of reason from Schelling’s discussions of nature’s specific forces, however. Just as reason is not simply a lens that can be applied to nature from the outside, neither can it be refined and extracted from its activity in nature. Thus while Schelling is committed in Weltseele to the thesis that reason pervades all of nature, he is reluctant to give more than a skeletal outline of what this reason consists in. At minimum, Schelling concludes that reason is a copulative power, able to unite the inorganic and the organic as well as the infinite and the finite (S 2: 361). These unifications are possible because reason itself is the ground of the absolute. What makes possible the union of the finite and infinite is an infinite desire (Lust) for self-revelation, or more simply, a self-willing, or still more simply, a self-affirmation. Nature’s development is accordingly an infinite series of variations on the theme that it must be. This simplicity of the absolute’s primordial activity should not, however, be taken as evidence of a primordial egocentrism in the absolute or the world-soul, the expression of the absolute in nature. Rather, the absolute wills all of reality, in all its forms, degrees, and potencies, and the world is the impression (Abdruck) of this willing (S 2: 362).
Once these methodological considerations have been established, Schelling begins his speculative analysis of nature by positing gravitational force as the most fundamental instance of nature’s urge to establish identity from out of difference. Gravity is nature’s insistence on continual self-presence, on pulling back from expansion into the abyssal, and so is opposed to light-essence (das Lichtwesen),12 which struggles against identity to spread itself throughout the whole of nature (S 2: 369). Whereas gravity works externally on things, pulling them toward a longed-for presence, light-essence begins from the all-present center and thrusts outward. And since it begins from absolute presence, this expansive force is completely atemporal.13 Unlike gravity, which strives to bring bodies to presence, light-essence strives to bring pure presence into the differentiatedness of matter, to find itself in what is not itself. It is only through this dual movement both toward and away from identity that natural things can appear: ‘The dark of gravity and the gleam of light-essence first produce [bringen … hervor] together the beautiful shining of life and complete the thing to what we will call the authentically real’ (S 2: 369). Nature’s coming-to-shine, then, is the atemporal happening of the simultaneity of unity in totality (gravity) and totality in unity (light-essence).
Though there are strong correlations between this theory of nature’s original differentiation and Schelling’s account in Of the I of the original differentiation in subjectivity, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie should not be taken as a mere application of idealistic epistemology to nature. The theory of gravity and light-essence is not based on anything like the presumed harmony of nature and intellect found in Kant’s exhortation in the third Critique that we think nature as if it had been created in accord with an intelligible model.14 Schelling is not arguing that in order for human reason to comprehend nature, nature must have the same repulsive/attractive structure that guides reason; rather, he is arguing that for nature and reason even to be possible, there must be such a structure as to allow for self-showing. In striving to know (erkennen) itself, nature at once strives to bring totality into itself and to find itself in totality (S 2: 371).
Nevertheless, although he does not take human reason to be the origin of nature’s identity, Schelling does anticipate his Identity Philosophy and contend that it is the highest form of identity nature has reached, its strongest convergence of gravity and light (S 2: 377). That is, unity in totality and totality in unity are throughout nature implicitly one and first shine together in the human need to unite the attractive and expansive urges through contemplation. Unlike in the Identity Philosophy, however, this reason is a distinctly human one, one which ‘bears witness to our spirit’ (S 2: 377, emphasis mine). Schelling means this not only in the sense that humanity represents the highest development of nature in which its rationality at last comes to shine for itself, but also in the sense that reason consists of nothing beyond what nature has developed in humanity. Reason involves ‘nothing extra- or supernatural … no bounds are superseded, no limits overcome, because there indeed are no such things’ (S 2: 377). Schelling insists that his conception of reason involves no self-transcendence and that the Kantian distinction between immanent and transcendent knowledge-claims is meaningless in Nature Philosophy. If reason presupposes a knowledge of God, then it does so only through accepting Spinoza’s proposition that the more we know individual things, the more we know God (S 2: 378).15 Human reason is nothing but nature coming to know itself through a wholly natural (if extremely complex) process of self-organization. Yet the fact that there is nothing beyond nature in the activity of reason does not make it something prosaic or profane. A person who learns to see every individual thing as an expression of God, who realizes that ‘the violent drive toward determination is undeniably in all metals and stones, in the immeasurable power of which all existence is an expression,’ surrenders all hope to grasp nature through the understanding and ‘at last enters reason, the holy Sabbath of nature, where it, at peace with its earlier works, recognizes and construes [erkennt und deutet] itself as itself’ (S 2: 378).16
The question this elegant formulation leaves unanswered is how we come to see every natural thing as an expression of God, how the Sabbath is to be observed. If reason is the eternal unity of the finite and infinite and human reason the point at which this unity is brought to self-consciousness (S 2: 360), then how is human reason activated? Merely showing that human reason represents a more complete form of purposiveness than chemical attraction or organic growth does not show that they are all instantiations of a single force. The Naturphilosophie needs not only to show the various stages of nature’s evolution, but to explain the necessity of the transitions from one stage of nature to the next.
A year later, Schelling attempted to explain these transitions in the 1799 First Projection of a System of Nature Philosophy. In the Erster Entwurf, Schelling gives his clearest and most systematic account of the whole of Nature Philosophy, relying primarily on the opposing concepts of activity and inhibition. In the book’s second sentence, Schelling gives the theme that will dominate the entire work: ‘In order for a real activity to come to be out of an infinite (and to that extent ideal) productive activity, that activity must be inhibited [gehemmt], retarded [retardiert]’ (S 3: 5). The goal of the book is to trace the various inhibitions that allow infinite, ideal activity to be transformed into the products of nature. Unlike in the Ideas and Weltseele, however, Schelling begins not with nature at its most basic level, but instead with organic nature. The reasons for this organizational principle are obscure in the ‘Outline of the Whole’ that serves as the book’s introduction, but become clearer as Schelling moves into his investigation of organic nature. Instead of justifying his starting point by reaffirming his hypothesis of the world-soul and asserting that everything is organic, Schelling argues that the organic and inorganic must be distinct in order for the organic to have any sense at all. There are, in a very real sense, both living and dead things—that is, both self-organizing systems and inert bodies that owe their movement to something external. While the former are dependent for their existence on the latter (for of course living bodies are composed of inorganic bodies), the latter are equally dependent on the former, as the absolute can only shape itself into inanimate bodies by imposing a limit on itself. According to Schelling, this limitation would not be intelligible if we could not identify a reason for it. But this means that the inorganic and organic are mutually limiting and hence mutually dependent. Thus it is artificial to follow the example of the Ideas and begin with the absolute’s limitation into inorganic nature, since the organic and inorganic ground and determine each other. Since he must begin with one or the other, Schelling now chooses to begin with the organic, since it more clearly shows the role that inhibition plays in giving nature form at every level.
Inhibition in general is a limitation of the infinite activity of the absolute so that it may be formed into products. But here, Schelling assures us, the emphasis is on the activity and only secondarily on the products, for all products are only relatively so. Everything in nature has the capacity to be articulated (zerfallen) into products (S 3: 5). But since any static conception of this productive activity in itself risks reducing it to a mere product, we can never arrive at an experience [Erfahrung] of it, and thus must postulate it. As Peterson notes,17 Schelling did not choose the term ‘postulate’ lightly; it indicates the inseparability of theoretical from practical philosophy by grounding all theoretical knowledge in the activity of a positing self. In contrast to an axiom, which has the strange form of a product not recognized as having been produced by anything, a postulate is always the product of a postulating activity. In the ‘Treatises Explicatory of the Idealism in the Wissenschaftslehre,’ for instance, Schelling argues that the postulates of a science gain their validity from a similarity to moral postulates. A postulate is only held to be valid so long as it can be posited with universal validity, and thus every postulate can be taken as a formulation of idealism’s categorical imperative (S 1: 416). Postulation is the beginning of all knowledge, at once a theoretical and a practical act of a free spirit. Nature, therefore, is unanalyzable beyond this foundational postulating activity, which serves as the necessary ground of any rational account of nature.
With this conception of postulation, Schelling revises and complicates the account of the grounding urge of reason developed in the Ideas. At the beginning of the Nature Philosophy stands not just a separation, but a postulate: a continual act of positing a ground not found in experience, which is nevertheless to be unified with experience. In the Erster Entwurf Schelling takes this ground to be construction itself, which, since it is always active, is never reducible to being. As in the Ideas, Schelling still contends that this postulate is a separation, but now he notes that this separation responds to more than a mere epistemological urge for measure. The postulation of activity recognizes nature’s need to be free: ‘To philosophize about nature means to lift it out of the dead mechanism to which it appears predisposed, to quicken [beleben] it with freedom and to set it into its own free development’ (S 3: 13). Schelling’s use of the word beleben calls to mind the role we saw it play in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. There Kant maintains that a beautiful object (especially in nature) is one that belebt the imagination and understanding in such a way that it stimulates a free play of the faculties, which ultimately, in turn, leads one to judge the object as if it were created by a divine understanding. Here in the Erster Entwurf the relationship is reversed: it is now reason that is being called upon to animate nature. In response to Kant’s critique of hylozoism (K 5: 392), Schelling claims that the purpose of Nature Philosophy is precisely to show the reality and necessity of a world-soul, even to the extent of making an animal out of matter.
From this grounding urge to establish the essence of nature in its unconditioned activity, philosophy (and again, Schelling here means a philosophy structured by reason) embarks on an infinite striving for the identity of all natural products with this unconditioned activity. This striving of reason is infinite not in the sense that completing its task would require an infinite amount of time but in the sense that reason must strive after the idea of infinity in order to account for the freedom of nature. If reason instead sought the identity of finite products with original unconditioned nature, then it would be forced to appeal to an infinite series of intuitions of products, which, as we saw in Kant, the imagination could not encompass. ‘Therefore,’ Schelling concludes, ‘reason determines either to obliterate the series, or to assume an ideal limit to the series which is so far removed that in practical employment one can never be compelled to go beyond it, as the mathematician does when he assumes an infinitely large or small magnitude’ (S 3: 15). If reason obliterates this infinite series, all that remains is a sense of the infinitude of the self. This leaves the self empty of all content and abstracted from all empirical intuitions. In order to represent the infinite becoming finite of nature, reason must opt for the second option and give a quasi-mathematical account of the origin of nature. Thus the question becomes, how to represent this infinite series? Since the series is postulated to be originally infinite, it cannot be represented as a mere aggregate (Zusammensetzung). Instead, it can only be shown in the evolution of the infinite through its infinite encounters with the various inhibitions of nature.
One of Schelling’s favorite examples of natural production through inhibition is a whirlpool: ‘a stream flows forward in a straight line as long as it encounters no resistance. Where [there is] resistance—a whirlpool [forms]. Every original product of nature is such a whirlpool, every organism, for example’ (S 3: 18n). The whirlpool is in constant motion, and yet it achieves a certain constancy through nature’s constant activity in opposition to a fixed inhibition. Only when pure activity is inhibited is determination possible. By putting such emphasis on the concept of inhibition, Schelling aims to show that even though in nature panta rhei, there are nevertheless fixed natural products. Such fixity must not be seen as a side-effect of activity’s inhibition, but must instead be apprehended in its necessity at every stage of nature’s becoming (S 3: 42). Inhibition is not only relatively necessary in order to allow natura naturata to arise from the indeterminacy of natura naturans; rather, both inhibition and natura naturata must be necessary in themselves if nature is to be explained at all. For in order to conceive of nature as active, we must think of even its inhibitions as activity, albeit activity considered differently. Otherwise, there would be no explanation for inhibition itself. The reasoning here is similar to the claims in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre of 1794 and Schelling’s Vom Ich that the not-I must have its ground in the I, but there is an important methodological difference. Whereas Fichte and the Fichtean Schelling appeal to the experience of positing oneself in order to ground their Transcendental Idealism, the Schelling of the Erster Entwurf appeals to a reason independent of experience in grounding his conception of nature. Schelling does not begin with the observed existence of an infinitely productive nature and ask how it is possible. Rather, he begins with activity and asks how it could become anything other than activity.
At every stage of nature—that is, when confronting every type of inhibition—nature runs through all possible determinations or shapes (Gestaltungen) until one is closed off to it, a process that Schelling calls ‘formation into the infinite’ (Bildung ins Undendliche). While this formation is a becoming-free (just as the child’s Ausbildung or education is her becoming-free), at every stage nature is bound to its particular Gestalt (S 3: 43). Nature as such ‘contests the individual; it longs [verlangt] for the absolute and continually endeavors [bestrebt] to present [darstellen] it’ (S 3: 43). Since nature strives to find an equilibrium in which all of its activity is evenly discharged, individual whirlpools ‘can only be seen as misbegotten attempts to achieve such a proportion’ (S 3: 43). If such equilibrium were present, then nature would have produced a permanent product incapable of being split into other products. Yet through the inhibition of sexuality,18 nature on the level of the organism splits its formative capacities into the two sexes. Schelling’s reasoning is as follows: if the infinite activity of nature is to be anything other than absolute activity, it must be inhibited. But if it were inhibited to such an extent that only a single inert product were produced, then nature would immediately cancel its own activity and thus have no being at all. Thus organic nature’s first inhibition must be one that inhibits its own activity and yet allows this activity to go on in an infinite, though now determined way. Such an inhibition is sexuality, which inhibits the constant reproduction of the asexual organism but nevertheless allows nature to reproduce itself continuously. In a sense, the asexual organism is not an organism at all, since no inhibition has determined it as an individual.19 It is merely a moment in nature’s continual reproduction.
Here we see the importance of Schelling’s choice of the word Bildung to indicate organic nature’s formative drive. Bildung, literally an image-ing, denotes formation in a very broad sense, and has the senses of shaping, education, (normative) culture, and even acquisition. Given Schelling’s lifelong flirtations with Spinozism and mythology, we also should not forget that God’s shaping of nature can also be called an act of Bildung. In the Erster Entwurf, Bildung is simultaneously the sexual and the technical drive (S 3: 44-5). In insects these drives are split, so that every individual participates in only one or the other. The separation of sexes is shown to be a true inhibition because it gives distinct shape (Gestalt) to the plant and animal realms by preventing nature from dissolving into complete nonindividuality. If the formative drive were not checked by sexuality, the individual organism would not be an object [Objekt], but instead an instrument of nature’s activity. While nature always aims to cancel out the individuality of the organism through the continual formation of life, sexual differentiation paradoxically forces it to rely on individuals to do so.
Thus the formative drive (Bildungstrieb) unites freedom and necessity in the individual. The individual is not bound to any mechanical laws of productivity, but instead raises itself to a whole, actively differentiating itself from its external world and reproducing this differentiation. And yet, this drive also imposes necessity on the individual, for it is compelled to reproduce itself and cannot reproduce anything other than itself (S 3: 61n). For this reason, Schelling wants to distinguish the formative drive from a formative force (bildende Kraft) (S 3: 61n).20 In contrast to a force, a drive is always complex and always striving for a return to self. Or, what is the same, whereas a force has no object and thus projects into infinity, a drive makes itself its object and thus is capable of rest (S 3: 152n). In the immediate context, Schelling is arguing that it is necessary for the formative drive to separate into sexes in order to fulfill itself, but he also asserts on a wider level that ‘dualism is the condition of all of nature’s activity’ (S 3: 62n). Activity could not exist if it did not have to struggle against separation. Thus activity must presuppose a division between inner and outer and always ‘works from the inner toward the outer’ (S 3: 70). As manifested on the level of the individual organism, this separation, Schelling tells us, functions roughly in harmony with John Brown’s conception of excitability21 (Erregbarkeit in Schelling’s German), which Schelling takes up primarily through Kielmeyer. According to this conception, what is proper to the organic world is a mutual determination of an organism’s receptivity (Empfänglichkeit) and its activity (S 3: 70). While an organism’s activity is inhibited by its surrounding world, this is only the case because its activity allows the surrounding world to affect it. This is true even of threats to the organism. For example, a poison is only a poison to the extent that an active organism attempts to incorporate it into itself; or rather, ‘poison does not attack the body, but the body attacks the poison’ (S 3: 72).
Yet the reverse is equally true: an organism’s activity is also conditioned by its receptivity, for otherwise it would have already expanded its inner world throughout the outer. Thus Schelling defines excitability as the ‘indirect affectability (Afficirbarkeit) of an organism’ (S 3: 83n). Opium may excite a body, but it does so only through the body’s own activity (through blood flow, neurological processes, etc.). In other words, excitability is the polemic copresence of activity and receptivity in every organism. Schelling’s system of Nature Philosophy thus combines the subjectivity of vitalism with the objectivity of a biochemical theory of life (S 3: 90n). Whereas vitalism sees life only in its activity and chemistry only in its receptivity, the Nature Philosophy realizes that neither of these is conceivable without the other.
Against this conception of organic nature Schelling opposes a Lamarckian ‘assumption that different organisms have really formed [gebildet] themselves from one another through gradual development’ (S 3: 63). Schelling criticizes this view not as irrational but as a misuse of reason. Under the misguided evolutionary conception, nature is a unified product because it has developed according to an original archetype. But if reason leads us to posit the identity of all nature too easily—that is, if we ignore the role of inhibition in suspending nature’s self-identity—then we will have to conclude that this original archetype could only have been the absolute. But then we would be left with the same problem with which we began: an explanation for the emanation of species from the original archetype. It is not enough to show a continuity in the anatomy or even the physiology of organisms of various species, for this proves nothing with respect to the identity of all nature. Not only does it not prove that nature is a single, self-identical product, but it does not even show how nature could be such a product. Identity cannot be conceived through the continuity of forces, but instead arises from a centripetal drive for return-to-self. Indeed, for the physicist who seeks only continuity in nature, it is disingenuous to speak of nature as a product, for production only makes sense if activity is inhibited. The physicist’s emphasis on forces fails to portray both nature’s infinite activity and its formation through inhibition. Though Schelling argues that nature can only be thought in its activity by showing its evolution from an undetermined absolute, this evolution cannot be understood by looking for evidence of continuity in nature. Rather, organic nature’s evolution can only be understood as the striving to overcome inhibitions.22
As such, all activity in nature can take place only ‘on the border of two worlds’ (S 3: 147n): namely, on the border between the organic and the inorganic, between dead and self-organizing matter. And if the organism is the site of this border, then the organism must itself be a dyad containing both the inorganic world of inert bodies and the self-organizing principle of life. In this latter, higher principle, the organism is no longer a part of nature, but has removed itself, or better has been ‘removed [hinweggenommen] from nature and raised to a higher potency’ (S 3: 154n). Yet since this higher principle has been removed from nature, it cannot be observed therein. Thus there must be in all life a principle that explains the possibility of separation, and hence excitability, that nevertheless cannot be observed in life. Schelling’s name for this principle (following Brown) is sensibility (Sensibilität). Sensibility can never be observed in another organism, but is known only to a subject that already knows itself to be identical with organic nature. Thus sensibility is possible only to the extent that an organism makes itself its own object (S 3: 159).
If the objective organism is not to be a dead product, it has to allow itself to be continually disturbed and yet remain self-same—a capacity that Schelling (again following Brown) calls irritability (Irritibilität). Irritability is accordingly an organism’s ability to continuously produce a state of indifference to those objects that must make a difference to it as a sensible being (S 3: 170). Sensibility and irritability are mutually determining in that sensibility requires a relative equilibrium in order to sense something opposed to the organism and irritability requires a disturbance in order to return to equilibrium. This duality is manifested in the organism as a continual expansion and contraction, with the organism alternately contracting to take the external world into itself—which Schelling gives the generic name intussusception to indicate that it includes more than just nutrition23—and expanding to expel this world from itself.
Though reason will lead us to this opposition of expansion and contraction, the understanding will lead us to see a continuity across the various organic forces. After showing how the activity of organisms cannot be conceived without opposed drives, Schelling traces how ‘one and the same force fades from sensibility into irritability, from there into the force of reproduction, and from this (under a certain condition) into the technical drive [Kunsttrieb]’ (S 3: 180-1). Each is in its own way an expression of the formative drive. While an analysis of the various potencies of organisms in terms of forces can yield scientifically relevant conclusions, the analysis of reason as a force continuous with these potencies will inevitably fail. The technical products of bees and other animals do indeed show a purposiveness and are in their own way perfect, but they do not exhibit reason any more than the elegant orbits of the planets (S 3: 181). It is misleading to say that bees and the like demonstrate a primitive form of reason ‘because reason is simply one, because it does not admit of degrees, and because it is the absolute itself’ (S 3: 182). To say that technical beings are rational is to say that they are absolute, which assumes that they are capable of intuiting themselves and absolving themselves of all relations to nature.
Schelling thus rejects On the World-Soul’s simple identification of reason and nature’s activity and reinstalls reason as an absolute freedom independent of all nature. He accordingly calls into question the scientific importance of claims (including his own) that nature is sleeping or inchoate rationality. While it is tempting to say that nature is the cancellation of the duplicity of spirit, since nature knows nothing of this duplicity it is rather the case that spirit is the cancellation of nature’s identity (S 3: 182). Echoing Kant in the third Critique, Schelling asserts that the positing of intelligence in nature is merely the projection of human intelligence: ‘And thus you see your own understanding in nature, so it seems to you to produce for you. And you are only right to see in its lawful productions an analogue of freedom, because even unconditioned necessity becomes freedom again’ (S 3: 186). As such, even though it is possible to note a great deal of continuity between the forces of nature, such a focus on forces can never grasp how nature could give rise to itself. Only a reason that strives for a return to itself in the face of inhibitions can appreciate the freedom of nature.
Yet in the First Projection even reason cannot accomplish all that Schelling wishes. In addition to the empirical difficulties that Schelling admits have yet to be resolved (e.g., an adequate account of the origin of magnetism and its parallels with sensibility), there is also the fundamental problem of the origin of inhibition. Just as Fichte cannot explain why (certain) people are able to posit an I and an opposing not-I, Schelling here fails to show what gives rise to the first duality in nature (S 3: 220). By the Third Division, Schelling has replaced his inquiries into the first inhibition of organic nature with inquiries into the first inhibition of nature in general. He can offer no explanations for how the pure activity of the absolute is forced into the determinate form of mechanical motion, a gap that will lead him to conclude that Nature Philosophy is inherently incomplete and must be supplemented with a Transcendental Idealism that advances from the simplicity of pure consciousness to the full complexity of nature.
But near the end of the First Projection, Schelling abruptly introduces a new problem that will take him at least until 1809 to solve, at the expense not only of the categories of the understanding, but of reason itself. As if to underscore its unsettled place in the Erster Entwurf, Schelling confronts the concept and phenomenon of disease in an appendix to Chapter 3 of the Third Division, in which he has laid out the continuity of the various organic drives and showed their analogues in inorganic nature.24 All of these drives must remain susceptible to disease, as, indeed, must all of life. Disease cannot simply be dismissed as an exception to nature’s laws or as antinatural, for ‘If disease is a state counter to nature, then so is life—and admittedly it is unnatural to the extent that life is really a state extorted (abgezwungener) from nature, not favored by nature, but a state enduring against nature’s will … [L]ife is a continual sickness, and death only the recovery from life’ (S 3: 222 n2). Thus before he can explain sickness, Schelling must explain how death is possible. Normally, an organism’s receptivity decreases as its activity increases and vice-versa. This inverse relationship also holds between the organic drives, so that an organism’s sensibility decreases as its irritability increases and vice-versa. For example, when an organism is exposed to a nonlethal dose of poison, its sensibility (or receptivity) may surge and its irritability (or activity) fall. But when an organism dies, both sensibility and irritability, both receptivity and activity, diminish simultaneously: the organism loses both its ability to incorporate external stimuli and its power to maintain the equilibrium of its activity. Thus sensibility and irritability must be inversely proportional only above a certain limit, below which they decrease proportionately until life fades away entirely (S 3: 233).
Disease, as opposed to death, always works within the inverse relationship of sensibility and irritability. By drastically stimulating one of the organic drives, it drastically compromises the other. But if we are to avoid a mechanistic account of life, we cannot take disease as a pathogen external to these drives, but as a disproportion in the drives themselves. Accordingly, physicians are wrong to identify diseases with their physical symptoms (by claiming, for instance, that disease is identical with a disproportion in the humors), since these symptoms are only effects of the higher organic drives. While the stimulus can disrupt the irritability in the organism, it can do so only through the activity of the organism itself.
Yet even with these qualifications, Schelling still fails to show how organisms are vulnerable to disease. As active natural beings, organisms are constantly organizing themselves in response to external inhibitions. Through the nutritive and other drives, organisms seek out diversity, which they then bring into proportion with the rest of the organism. If disease is not something external to the organism, then it is itself an organizational principle. But this would imply that disease itself is more alive than life and that the disease is more of a subject than the organism it infects. Just as the organism becomes an individual by opposing itself to nature through the sexual inhibition of the formative drive, the disease would seem to become an even more developed individual by withdrawing itself from the proportionality of the organism’s formative drives. In one sense, this conclusion is compelling, since the disease is an outgrowth of the organism’s activity and yet constantly strives to assert its independence of it just as an individual organism does in relation to nature. The fact that disease works counter to the organism’s activity poses no conceptual problems, since the organism is a similar inhibition of nature’s reproductive activity. Yet if disease is to organism as organism is to nature, then the striving of a disease should be more determinate than that of the individual organism. Where nature strives simply to reproduce itself, the individual organism strives for sexual maturity, sexual intercourse, technical production, and so on. Disease, on the other hand—and recall that we are not speaking of pathogenic organisms, but of disease as a specific capacity or possibility of the organism—has no such determinacy of purpose, and it is questionable whether it even partakes in nature’s goal of self-reproduction.
The Erster Entwurf does not, however, end with an acceptance of defeat in the face of disease, but instead with a reflection on the conceptual possibility of differentiation in nature. As he had in the Ideas, Schelling reaffirms that difference is only intelligible on the basis of identity and identity on the basis of difference, but now he adds physical content to this law of identity: ‘Unity in diremption only exists where the heterogeneous attracts, and diremption in unity only where the homogeneous repels’ (S 3: 250-1). Thus the condition of all diversity in nature is the separation of an absolutely self-identical nature, but nature’s self-identity itself presupposes a duality. This can only be possible if the original homo/heterogeneity of absolute nature is a matter of indifference. In the inorganic realm, such indifference is seen in premagnetized earth. Rocks can be split apart and forced back together, and their homo/heterogeneity is a matter of indifference until one rock becomes magnetized. In the same way, inorganic nature is indifferent with respect to life until one collection of bodies becomes sensible. In its ground, nature is indifferent to life, and hence to reason—a conclusion that will continually haunt both Schelling and Hegel through 1809 and beyond.