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The “eternal and necessary bond between Philosophy and Physics”

2005; Routledge; Volume: 10; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09697250500225164

1469-2899

Iain Hamilton Grant,

Philosophy and Historical Thought

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Notes 1 In the Exposition of the True Relation of Naturephilosophy to the Improved Fichtean Theory (1806), Schelling writes: “Above all, the true significance of the eternal and necessary bond between philosophy and physics remains a mystery even in our time” (SW VII: 101). References are to Friedrich Willhelm Joseph von Schellings sämmtliche Werke, XIV vols., ed. K.F.A. Schelling (Stuttgart and Augsburg: J.G. Cotta'scher, 1856–61). Where available, translated sources follow these citations; otherwise, all translations are my own. 2 That Oken remains despised is clear from the most recent treatment of his work by the historian and philosopher of science Nicholas Jardine (Scenes of Inquiry (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) 1), who delights in the “grotesque” nature of his system. The biologist and theoretician Gould (Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1977)), meanwhile, does not bellow his disdain with the same excess of sobriety. Pursuing the contrasting degrees of abstraction tolerable by the natural as opposed to the human sciences would be instructive. 3 I use Habermas's (Citation1992) formulation not only because it can stand tolerably well for all those who assert the end or death of metaphysics to have occurred as either an historical or as a metaphysical fact; but specifically because Habermas delights, like Cromwell in a cathedral, in liberating moral-practical problems from conceptual stringency of any sort, and in reducing metaphysical to discoursive-historical objects. In place, then, of standing like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, at the gateway Moment, at the juncture of eternity and recurrence, post-metaphysics confronts philosophy with a decision: “Left and Right Hegelianism?” And in place of the manifest impracticality of metaphysics as textual scholarship, the equally transparent practicality of post-metaphysics as – speech. 4 In part this paper has been provoked by having spent a year in the company of several colleagues, especially Peter Jowers and Sean Watson, wondering repeatedly how exactly it might be possible to develop a metaphysics that “embraces all the concepts of nature and freedom” (Deleuze Citation1994, 19). The paper's title is an expression of my thanks to them, and its use of the collective “we,” therefore, not even empirically inaccurate. 5 To say nothing of the more overt statements to this effect in What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 11–12, 102, 208), amongst the developments in Difference and Repetition indebted to Idealism we might number the discussion of the relation between good sense, science and philosophy in terms drawn from Hegel's Differenzschrift (1994, 224f.); while the geo-logical articulation of depth, ground, ungrounding, the profound, and “transcendental volcanism” (1994, 228–32, 241) draws on Schelling's citations and development of Steffens’ geological researches (SW IV: 504–05, citing Steffens’ essay, “On the Oxydation and Deoxydation Processes of the Earth,” published in Schelling's Journal of Speculative Physics I.1 (1800), in Schelling Citation2001, 100–01). Catherine Malabou (in Paul Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) 114–38) has prompted a reconsideration of Hegel's role in Deleuze's metaphysics, an unpopular view seconded by James Williams's argument, in his Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2003) 26, that “generalized anti-Hegelianism” is a trap laid by the book. As noted elsewhere, Eric Alliez recommends the philosophical value of a “confrontation with the Fichtean standpoint” in his The Signature of the World (London: Continuum) 30. 6 Fichte agreed with this verdict of Eschenmayer, whose anonymous review of Schelling's First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature and Introduction to the Outline (both 1799) had appeared in the Erlanger Literatur-Zeitung for April 1801, and which Fichte expressly praised in his letter to Schelling of 31 May 1801. It is Eschenmayer's (“increasing,” according to Durner, in Schelling Citation2001, 2: xix) Fichteanism that makes his “Spontaneity = World Soul,” which appeared in volume II.1 (1801) of Schelling's Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik, along with Schelling's simultaneously published response, “The True Concept of Naturphilosophie and the Proper Technique for Resolving its Problems” (SW IV: 79–104), into a theatre in which the divergence of Fichteanism from physics is played out. In the Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy (published September 1801), Hegel claims that “Schelling's answer to Eschenmayer's idealistic objections against the Naturphilosophie” (Hegel Citation1977a, 79) precisely fails to bring the distinctness of the two systems out into public discussion, and notes the “distortion” of the Schellingian by the Fichtean system this occasions. Hegel's derogatory use of “idealistischen” here is to be noted. 7 Reinhard Löw's critique of “the modern, mathematico-physical philosophy of nature,” against which he positions what he styles as Schelling's advancement of “the interests of reason: how must nature be thought so as to conceptualize actuality on the one hand and on the other, so that man can understand himself as an intellectual and moral being?”(in Hasler Citation1981, 103), perfectly and falsely exemplifies the tendency that Bonsepien follows and that Zimmerli and Châtelet reject. 8 Heuser-Kessler's study concentrates on establishing conceptual likenesses between the precepts of specifically Schellingian Naturphilosophie and the contemporary natural-scientific paradigm to which the study's title adverts. The current context, however, is oriented towards the problem of an ontology of nature rather than theoretical homologies. 9 Noting that Aristotle's name for his forebears is physiologoi, Heidegger asks what this means: “the physiologoi are neither ‘physiologists’ in the contemporary sense […] nor are they philosophers of nature. The physiologoi is rather a genuine primordial title for a questioning about beings as a whole, the title for those who speak out about physis, about the prevailing of beings as a whole […]” (1995, 28). Thus arises a merely logico-discursive nature. 10 As philosophers of the concept, Deleuze prefers Hegel, Schelling and even Maimon (cf. Deleuze Citation1993, 89) to Fichte, while the latent existentialism of Alexis Philonenko's Fichte (La Liberté humaine dans la philosophie de Fichte, 2nd ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1980)) appeals to Guattari. To advance the cause of philosophy as onto-ethology, which is how he reads Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy?, Alliez notes the timeliness of a “confrontation with the Fichtean standpoint” (2005, 30). 11 Jaspers (1955, 178) inaugurates this Fichteanised Schelling with his mid-century Schellingian revival: “For Schelling, Kant is the turning-point, Fichte's idealism the foundation, and he himself the completion of the philosophy of freedom that can recreate metaphysics quite otherwise than all prior metaphysics.” Similarly, despite citing Schelling's condemnation of Fichte from the Stuttgart Seminars (SW VII: 445; 1994, 215; Heidegger Citation1985, 93) to the effect that the “Science of Knowledge” delivers “a complete deathblow to nature,” Heidegger's Schelling wavers between Fichteanism and Schellingianism precisely as regards the problem of nature. 12 See Walter Schulz (ed.), Briefwechsel Fichte-Schelling (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), and the “Selections from Fichte–Schelling Correspondence,” translated in Jochen Schulte-Sasse et al. (eds.), Theory as Practise (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997) 73–90. 13 Blumenbach does not so much create a wholly new method in the natural sciences as translate outmoded Stahlian debates surrounding vitalism into a positivistic-naturalist context. Similarly, it is not so much in its great utility to natural history, whatever Kantians such as Girtanner had to say, as it is in the transformation of this from a straightforwardly naturalistic into a transcendental problematic that the Kantian principle acquires its philosophical significance. 14 For Kant's brief acknowledgement of Blumenbach in the third Critique, see Ak.V: 424; 1987, 311. For a naturalistic solution of this transcendental gulf, see my “Physics of Analogy” in Rachel Jones and Andrea Rehberg (eds.), The Matter of Critique. Readings in Kant's Philosophy (Manchester: Clinamen, 2000) 37–60. 15 Although Badiou (Citation2000, 45) likes to think that his classicism surpasses its criticist precursors, “criticality” is more properly the dimension he retains, mistakenly jettisoning the transcendental in its stead. Further, the sense Fichte gave to “philosophical critique” in Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre accords with the usage Badiou intends of precisely such distinctions between classicism and criticism: “One can philosophise about metaphysics itself […] One can embark on investigations into the possibility, the real meaning, and the rules governing such a science. And this is very advantageous for the cultivation of the science of metaphysics itself. The philosophical name for a system of this sort of inquiry is ‘critique’” (W I: 32; 1988, 97). However, the dimension of criticality to which we wish to draw attention at the present moment consists in its eliminative one: “a pure critique,” stipulates Fichte, “is intermixed with no metaphysical investigations” (ibid.), i.e., expels all metaphysical elements from its field. 16 It is equally important to note that the “standard story” regarding Fichte – the one that is standardly derived from Hegel – is not the only one told. See Pippin in Sedgwick (2000, 147–70). Regarding Fichte's Naturphilosophie, see the revealing and heavily guarded acknowledgement by Breazeale (in Sedgwick 2000, 179) that Fichte's philosophy of nature, while barely developed, is concerned with the nature of experience, or in Breazeale's own terms, with “what experience, and hence ‘nature’, necessarily is and must be” (emphasis in original). 17 The important Fichtean texts in the present context – Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre, Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with Respect to the Theoretical Faculty, Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre, Foundations of Natural Right and the “Propositions for the Elucidation of the Essence of Animals” – were all published between 1794 and 1800, while the relevant texts of Kant's Opus postumum (1993, known by Schelling (SW VI: 8) as übergang von der Metaphysik zur Physik, as noted above) were written between 1798 and 1801 (see Kant 1993, xxvi–xxix for the chronology). 18 This is Fichte's first recorded use of the term Potenz, which, having been one of the conceptual mainstays of Schelling's philosophy since the latter's Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (SW II: 314 n.; 1988, 249 n.) took it from Eschenmayer's Principles from the Metaphysics of Nature (1796), demonstrates that the Propositions is a response to Schelling (cf. GA II,5: 419). Further demonstrations of this can be found by comparing the substance of the Propositions with the exchange of letters between Fichte and Schelling, specifically those Fichte drafted or sent to Schelling on 27 December 1800. 19 Fichte's animal is thus exceptional in the Goethean age, where morphogenesis and comparative anatomy were determined almost exclusively to search for the Urtyp. For more exceptions to this supposed rule of natural science during the Romantic era, and in Naturphilosophie in particular, see my Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (Continuum, forthcoming 2006). 20 R.J. Boscovich's theory of “point-atoms” (in Crosland Citation1971, 210–14), and J.B. Priestley's definition of matter by “powers” rather than substances (ibid. 115–19) were amongst the eighteenth-century sources for the “dynamic atomism” in Schelling's First Outline of a System of Naturephilosophy (SW III: 22–24; 2004, 20–22); Hans-Christian Oersted discovered electromagnetism in 1820 (although this is usually credited to Faraday in 1831), and thus prepared the way for the field theories of force promulgated by Michael Faraday, for example, for whom “the substance is composed of its powers” (Experimental Researches in Electricity, 3 vols. (London: Taylor 1839–55) 1: 362. 21 In the 1844 Presentation of the Process of Nature, for instance, Schelling demonstrates a marked shift from the position he adopted forty years earlier as regards Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment. In the earlier text, Kant's work divides organic being from nature in general (SW VI: 8), contrasting with the more positive use of that Critique in the later work (SW X: 366–75). 22 The prime example of this tendency remains Heidegger (cf. n. 9, above), whose etymology of physiologia demonstrates him incapable of a philosophy of nature precisely because his is a philosophy of logos. Amongst other philosophers promoting an essentially logocentric naturephilosophy, Krings (in Hasler Citation1981, 73–76; 1982, 350) and Peterson (2003, xxvff.) propose a “logogenetic” approach even to Schellingian Naturphilosophie, which Löw (in Hasler Citation1981, 103) summarises thus: If modern, mathematico-physical philosophy of nature shows us a real-genetic image of actuality, which men are neither familiar with nor can form concepts of, then Schelling's transcendental construction characterized the countervailing interests of reason: how must nature be thought so as to conceptualize actuality on the one hand and on the other, so that man can understand himself as an intellectual and moral being? Hermann Krings has introduced the concept of logogenesis for such a construction. Meanwhile, Roland Omnès, rather than giving a logocentric naturephilosophy, undertakes a naturephilosophical examination of Logos in Quantum Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999) 275: “Unlike reality, Logos never offers itself in a concrete form, even if it is present everywhere […] We may not know much about Logos, but we possess a sort of living mirror of it: the brain, which […] carries a trace of its matrix as a meteor carries that of an inaccessible planet.” Thus biocentrism and logocentrism share the same formal insufficiency, and both hinge around an essentially phenomenological approach to nature. 23 See, for example, Gernot Böhme's “Introduction” to Phänomenologie der Natur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), esp. 41f.: “The phenomenology of nature is nature-knowing as self-knowing.” 24 The project retreats at moments of great tension to the French-Heideggerian rubric of philosophical “discourses” (2003, 2), thus supplying a general validation of the empirical accuracy of Bernouilli and Kern's (1926, viii) division of Naturphilosophie into the biocentric and the logocentric. 25 Such relations might be further explored in the context of the renewed interest in Bergson and Nietzsche from the point of view of the life sciences. In both instances, Keith Ansell Pearson has blazed trails that may bear fruitful comparison with a properly understood Schellingian naturalism.