{"agent_id":"schelling","agent_name":"F.W.J. Schelling","slug":"naturphilosophie","label":"Naturphilosophie: is nature autonomous productivity, or the constituted appearance of a transcendental subject?","topic":"Naturphilosophie","question":"Is nature autonomous productivity, or the constituted appearance of a transcendental subject?","position":"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. 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.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"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.","n":[1]},{"t":"Self-organisation is the primal ground of all reality; mechanism cannot ground itself, because mechanism presupposes the self-conscious judgement that recognizes mechanical regularity.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Nature is *subject* not in the sense of consciousness but in the Greek sense of *to auto* — that which acts of itself.","n":[]},{"t":"Polarity is the fundamental form: contraction and expansion, magnetism and electricity, sensibility and irritability, all are potencies of the same productive activity.","n":[]},{"t":"Not vitalism: a \"life-force\" additional to matter is a contradictory expression, because force exists only where there is opposed force.","n":[2]}]],"texts":"*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). Reception: Hegel's *Philosophy of Nature* (Naturphilosophie subordinated to Logic); Frederick Beiser's *German Idealism* (2002, defends Naturphilosophie as serious pre-Darwinian organicist science); Marie-Luise Heuser-Kessler (1986, reads through Prigogine's self-organisation theory); Iain Hamilton Grant's *Philosophies of Nature After Schelling* (Continuum 2006, speculative-realist reading of nature as autopoietic substrate); Andrew Bowie's *Schelling and Modern European Philosophy* (Routledge 1993, hermeneutic-Heideggerian reading).","works":["*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)"],"reception":"Hegel's *Philosophy of Nature* (Naturphilosophie subordinated to Logic); Frederick Beiser's *German Idealism* (2002, defends Naturphilosophie as serious pre-Darwinian organicist science); Marie-Luise Heuser-Kessler (1986, reads through Prigogine's self-organisation theory); Iain Hamilton Grant's *Philosophies of Nature After Schelling* (Continuum 2006, speculative-realist reading of nature as autopoietic substrate); Andrew Bowie's *Schelling and Modern European Philosophy* (Routledge 1993, hermeneutic-Heideggerian reading).","status":"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.","era":"1775-1854","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature","page":"pp. 180–181","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, pp. 180–181"},{"n":2,"work":"First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature","page":"pp. 215–216","canonical":"","quote":"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?","label":"First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, pp. 215–216"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"freedom-and-the-dark-ground","label":"Freedom and the dark ground: is the distinction between God's ground and God's existence a structural-ontological breakthrough or theosophical regression?"},{"slug":"positive-vs-negative-philosophy","label":"Positive vs negative philosophy: can any a priori system ground the existence of what it analyzes, or must philosophy begin from the unprethinkable?"},{"slug":"art-and-the-unconscious","label":"Art and the unconscious: is aesthetic intuition the highest organ of philosophy, accomplishing in finite form what philosophy can only theorize?"},{"slug":"mythology-and-revelation","label":"Mythology and revelation: are they the necessary and free epochs of the absolute's self-disclosure, or sub-philosophical theology?"}]}