Naturphilosophie: is nature autonomous productivity, or the constituted appearance of a transcendental subject?

F.W.J. Schelling, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Nature is autonomous productivity — natura naturans before natura naturata — whose products (organisms, magnetic poles, chemical compositions) are inhibited moments of an underlying activity that never itself appears as object.¹ Self-organisation is the primal ground of all reality; mechanism cannot ground itself, because mechanism presupposes the self-conscious judgement that recognizes mechanical regularity.

Nature is subject not in the sense of consciousness but in the Greek sense of to auto — that which acts of itself. Polarity is the fundamental form: contraction and expansion, magnetism and electricity, sensibility and irritability, all are potencies of the same productive activity. Not vitalism: a "life-force" additional to matter is a contradictory expression, because force exists only where there is opposed force.²³

Sources

1. Thus, this is the law reigning throughout Nature, in this inner contradiction lies the ground of all of its activity. 4) But this inner contradiction cannot be known originally, it is known only in the phenome- non of magnetism; in the latter alone do we distinguish universal duplicity in its first origin. Just as sensibility is the organic source of activity, so magnetism is universal source of activity.

   First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, pp. 180–181

2. Schelling: Outline of the Whole Schelling: Outline of the Whole 9 c) Extinction of this activity in the product—force of production, with all its offshoots (nutrition, p. 125, secretion, pp. 126-130, growth, p. 130, technical drive (animal instincts in general), pp. 130-139. —Metamorphosis, reproductive drive, pp. 138-140). III. Consequences of the preceding.

   First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, [73]

3. Individual products are brought into Nature; but in these products productivity, as productivity, is still held to be always distinguishable. Productivity has not yet absolutely passed over into product. The subsistence of the product is supposed to be a continual self-reproduction. The problem arises, by what is this absolute transition—exhaustion of the productivity in the product— prevented?

   First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, pp. 215–216

Where the argument is made

• Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797), On the World Soul (1798), First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799), On the True Concept of Philosophy of Nature (1801), Aphorisms on Naturphilosophie (1806)

How the argument was received

Held throughout the authorship and re-affirmed in the 1844 Presentation of the Process of Nature. The empirical detail (specific deductions of the polarity series, the fluid-dynamics analogies in On the World Soul) did not survive 19th-century natural science, and the mature position acknowledges this while defending the principle. Vindicated rather than refuted by 20th-century self-organisation theory and complexity science.