Abstract
The paper proposes a novel reading of Schelling’s speculative physics in light of debates concerning the notion of emergence in philosophy of science. We begin by highlighting Schelling’s disruptive potential with regard to the contemporary philosophical landscape, currently polarized over a false dichotomy between reductionist Humeanism and liberal Kantianism. We then argue that a broadly Schellingian approach to nature is unwittingly being revived by a group of scholars promoting a non-mainstream process account of emergence based on the notion of constraint and grounded in far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics. Such an account, we argue, represents an effective theoretical platform to re-read Schelling’s philosophy of nature today. This reading provides a picture of life and mind as emerging out of self-organizing processes that take place through the self-inhibition of nature’s inherent tendency to disorder.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
We owe this idea to a talk by Paul Franks at KU Leuven: “From World-Soul to Universal Organism: Toward an Understanding of Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature.”
- 2.
Though contemporary dispositionalism usually leans toward an Aristotlean-like substance ontology, it has recently been argued that dispositionalism can productively be understood in processual terms (Anjum and Mumford 2018).
- 3.
While the general account of process emergence we present in 3.1 can be extended all the way to quantum mechanics, the more specific ‘work-constraint’ account of 3.2 and 3.3 –which we see as a subset of the more general theory– is tied to thermodynamics, meaning that it remains unclear how that specific account would be relevant for understanding emergence at certain levels, such as the level of quantum mechanics, if at all.
- 4.
“While, in the past, biologists have tended to think of organization as something extra, something added to the elementary variables, the modern theory, based on the logic of communication, regards organization as a restriction or constraint” (Ashby 1962, 257).
- 5.
The striking parallels between Schelling and Deacon may be due to the deep influence of Charles Sanders Peirce on Deacon’s work. Peirce saw himself as pursuing “an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth, and to a Schelling-fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere specialized and partially deadened mind” (1892, 533; see also Dilworth (2016) and Franks (2015). Though Peirce was also quite critical of German Idealism, and Deacon for his part quite critical of Peirce (particularly of his panpsychist tendencies) it is clear that we find a common thread running through their respective works. (For an introduction to Deacon’s distinctively ‘semiotic’ approach, see: Deacon 2015)
- 6.
- 7.
For a further account of Schelling’s understanding of organisms in relation to other options in his era cf. Kabeshkin 2017. While we agree with the categorization thereby provided, we are less convinced by the reading of Schelling as an epistemological pluralist à la John Dupré (1993)
- 8.
There remain many questions concerning the extent of this parallel, and there are certainly some key differences in their respective accounts. We do not deal with this question here, but we deem it to be a question which requires further investigation in subsequent work.
References
Alderwick, Charlotte. 2016. Nature’s Capacities: Schelling and Contemporary Power-Based Ontologies. Angelaki 21 (4): 59–76.
———. 2021. Schelling’s ontology of powers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Allison, Henry E. 1983. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Anjum, Ranil L., and Stephen Mumford. 2018. Dispositionalism: A dynamic theory of causation. In Everything flows: Towards a processual philosophy of biology, ed. Daniel Nicholson and John Dupré, 61–75. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ashby, William Ross. 1962. Principles of the Self-Organizing System. In Principles of Self-Organization: Transactions of the University of Illinois Symposium, ed. Heinz Von Foerster and George W. Zopf. Headington Hill Hall: Pergamon Press.
Berger, Benjamin, and Daniel Whistler. 2020. The Schelling-Eschenmayer Controversy, 1801:Nature and Identity. Trans. Judith Kahl, Daniel Whistler. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bickhard, Mark H. 2004. Part II: Applications of Process-Based Theories: Process and Emergence: Normative Function and Representation. Axiomathes 14 (1): 121–155.
Brandom, Robert B. 2019. A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Breitenbach, Angela. 2014. Biological purposiveness and analogical reflection. In Kant’s Theory of Biology, ed. Ina Goy and Eric Watkins, 131–148. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Campbell, Richard J., and Mark H. Bickhard. 2011. Physicalism, Emergence and Downward Causation. Axiomathes 21 (1): 33–56.
De Caro, Mario, and David Macarthur. 2004. Naturalism in Question. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 2010. Naturalism and Normativity. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deacon, Terrence W. 2012. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
———. 2021. How molecules became signs. Biosemiotics 14 (3): 537–559.
Deacon, Terrence, and Tyrone Cashman. 2013. Teleology versus Mechanism in Biology: Beyond Self-Organization. In Beyond Mechanism: Putting Life Back into Biology, ed. Adam Christian Scarfe and Brian G. Henning, 290–311. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Deacon, Terrence W., and Tyrone Cashman. 2016. Steps to a metaphysics of incompleteness. Theology and Science 14 (4): 401–429.
Deacon, Terrence W., and Spyridon Koutroufinis. 2014. Complexity and dynamical depth. Information 5 (3): 404–423.
Dilworth, David A. 2016. ‘Peirce’s Transmutation of Schelling’s Philosophie Der Natur’. Cognitio: Revista de Filosofia. 17 (2): 253–290.
Franks, Paul. 2015. Peirce’s “Schelling-Fashioned Idealism” and the Monstrous Mysticism of the East. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: BJHP: The Journal of the British Society for the History of Philosophy 23 (4): 732–755.
Gambarotto, Andrea, and Luca Illetterati. 2020. ‘Hegel’s philosophy of biology? A Programmatic Overview. Hegel Bulletin: 1–22.
Goy, Ina, and Eric Watkins. 2014. Kant’s Theory of Biology. Boston: De Gruyter.
Grant, Iain Hamilton. 2006. Philosophies of Nature After Schelling. Transversals. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
———. 2020. All the principles of being and becoming: Schelling’s ontogenetic hypothesis. Rivista di Estetica 74 (2): 22–38.
Huneman, Philippe. 2017. Kant’s concept of organism revisited: A framework for a possible synthesis between developmentalism and adaptationism? The Monist 100 (3): 373–390.
Kauffman, Stuart A. 2000. Investigations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2019. A world beyond physics: the emergence and evolution of life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kim, Jaegwon. 1998. Mind in a physical world: an essay on the mind-body problem and mental causation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———. 2006. Emergence: Core Ideas and Issues. Synthese 151 (3): 547–559.
———. 2007. Physicalism, or Something Near Enough. Princeton University Press.
Leijnen, Stefan, Tom Heskes, and Terrence W. Deacon. 2016. Exploring constraint: Simulating self-organization and autogenesis in the autogenic automaton. Artificial Life Conference Proceedings 28: 68–75.
Lewis, David. 1986. Philosophical Papers (Volume II). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Longo, Giuseppe, Maël Montévil, and Stuart Kauffman. 2012. In No Entailing Laws, but Enablement in the Evolution of the Biosphere, ed. Terrence Soule. New York: Association for Computing Machinery.
Maher, Chauncey. 2012. The Pittsburgh School of Philosophy: Sellars, McDowell, Brandom. London: Routledge.
McDowell, John. 2009. Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel and Sellars. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Meincke, Anne Sophie, and John Dupré. 2020. Biological Identity: Perspectives from Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Biology. 1st ed. New York: Routledge.: History and Philosophy of Biology.
Michelini, Francesca. 2012. Hegel’s Notion of Natural Purpose. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (1): 133–139.
Michelini, Francesca, Matthias Wunsch, and Dirk Stederoth. 2018. ‘Philosophy of Nature and Organism’s Autonomy: On Hegel, Plessner and Jonas’ Theories of Living Beings’. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (3): 56.
Montévil, Maël. 2019. Possibility spaces and the notion of novelty: From music to biology. Synthese 196 (11): 4555–4581.
Moreno, Alvaro, and Matteo Mossio. 2015. Biological Autonomy.A Philosophical and Theoretical Enquiry. Dordrecht: Springer.
Ng, Karen. 2020. Hegel’s Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nicholson, Daniel J., and John Dupré. 2018. Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pinkard, Terry. 1994. Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason. Cambridge University Press.
Pippin, Robert. 1989. Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rand, Sebastian. 2007. The Importance and Relevance of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Nature”. The Review of Metaphysics 61 (2): 379–400.
Schelling, F.W.J. [Ideas] 1988. Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature. Trans. Herrol E. Harris, Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. [Outline] 2004. First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature. Trans. Keith R. Peterson. Albany: SUNY Press.
———. [World-Soul] 2010. On the World Soul. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. Collapse VI: 58–95.
———. [True Concept] 2020. On the True Concept of Philosophy of Nature and the Correct Way of Solving its Problems. In: The Schelling-Eschenmeyer Controversy, 1801. Benjamin Berger & Daniel Whistler. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Sellars, Wilfrid. 1963. Philosophy and the scientific image of man. Science, Perception and Reality 2: 35–78.
Stone, Alison. 2005. Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press.
Strawson, Peter. 1966/2018. The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. New York: Routledge.
Wheatherson, Brian. 2014. David Lewis. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/david-lewis/#pagetopright).
Woodard, Ben. 2020. Schelling’s Naturalism: Space, Motion and the Volition of Thought. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Zammito, John H. 2006. Teleology Then and Now: The Question of Kant’s Relevance for Contemporary Controversies over Function in Biology. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (4): 748–770.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gambarotto, A., Nahas, A. (2023). Rethinking Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature Through a Process Account of Emergence. In: Corti, L., Schülein, JG. (eds) Life, Organisms, and Human Nature. Studies in German Idealism, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-41557-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-41558-6
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)