Philosophies of Nature After Schelling

by Iain Hamilton Grant
Continuum, London, 2006
256 pp. Trade, £75.00; paper, £24.99
ISBN: 0-8264-7902-2; ISBN: 1-8470-6432-9.

Reviewed by Eugene Thacker
School of Literature, Communication & Culture. Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA

eugene.thacker@lcc.gatech.edu


At a time when it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish the natural from the artificial, or the biological from the technological, it would seem that a “philosophy of nature” can only come across as naïve. For those in the sciences, such a project will seem not only antiquated — the sort of thing elderly Greek sages once worried about – but also far behind the latest advances in the ability to engineer nature at the molecular, genetic, and quantum levels. For those members of the various cultural studies tribes, any claims for a philosophy of nature will only elicit critiques concerning discourse and the “cultural construction of nature.” Even science studies, that most diplomatic of orphan quasi-disciplines, will cautiously qualify each and every mention of the word “nature,” often through the creation of new terms that exhibit a desire to have it both ways – nature “in itself” and nature as constructed, nature existing in itself but also there “for us,” and because of us.

Against these albeit generalized notions of nature — nature as something quantifiable “out there,” nature as subjectively constructed “in here,” and nature as the co-production between self and world “here and there” — Iain Hamilton Grant’s book Philosophies of Nature After Schelling proposes that we think about nature as irreducible to the entire dichotomous game of self and world, idealism and realism. Indeed, Grant argues for a reconsideration of “nature” in terms of the classical notion of phusis — this is a “physics” that is less concerned with quasi-verifiable, smallest units of matter, and more a physics in the sense of a dynamical and ideational flux that pervades the very correlation of self and world, idea and thing.

Grant’s book is thus a book of philosophy — it makes no claims about science, culture, or any admixture of them. But it also asks us to think about what a “naturephilosophy” would be like today, an era in which concerns over climate change, natural disasters, emerging epidemics and the like dominate both the “serious” culture of policy discussions and the “leisure” culture of popular disaster movies. Before we ask whether we have adequately assessed this or that aspect of water shortage or the etiology of an epidemic, before we dismiss the very idea of “nature” as romanticized, before we ask about the co-production of “nature-cultures” or “actants,” before any of this, Grant’s book poses the fundamental question: what is required a priori that something called “nature” be thinkable as such? To get at this question, Grant focuses primarily on the work of the German thinker Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, a figure often associated with German Idealism, Romanticism, or naturphilosophie, depending on who one asks. Schelling’s works are not only wide-ranging, but they function for Grant as a counterpoint to the dominant epistemology of nature established by Kant.

As the title of his book indicates, Grant’s main argument is that the real development of the concept of nature-as-phusis takes place in the cluster of 18^th and 19^th century developments in German thought, from Kant’s antinomies of nature (and his famous question about whether we would one day see the equivalent of a “Newton of a blade of grass”), to Fichte’s “sequential” logic of natural striving, to Lorenz Oken’s dynamic, oozing, “universal animal.” Grant focuses on this period for good reason, for it is Kant that stands as both the figure who has a decisive impact in framing the post-Enlightenment discourse on nature, and as the figure which any philosophy of nature must ultimately overcome. It is Kant who attempts to settle the endless debates between realism and idealism, by distinguishing between an inaccessible world out there (noumena) and the world as it appears to us as sensing, thinking subjects (phenomena). What results is what Grant calls a “two-world metaphysics,” in which something called “nature” is eliminated from its thought, world from self, physics from metaphysics, phusis from nous. Nature is eliminated from philosophical reflection, padded by its reduction to language (signs) or cordoned off as the separate, non-philosophical analysis of world (things). This split between self and world, idea and nature, so fundamental to our thinking about nature, entails a further “two-worlds physics” between the inorganic and the organic, the non-living and the living nature. This culminates in Kant’s “antinomy of teleological judgment” concerning nature – we cannot separate the order in nature from the assertion of that order by us. The easiest solution would then be to simply provide disciplinary demarcations – you worry about explicating natural phenomena and we’ll worry about complicating the endless metaphysical aporias that encompass such phenomena.

For Grant, Schelling consistently resists the two-worlds view – indeed, Grant argues that Schelling’s concept of naturphilosophie can be understood as the refusal of the separation of physics and metaphysics. Schelling’s emphasis on the dynamic, processual aspects of nature, on the parallelism between the natural and the ideal (in which the former is not simply deduced from the latter), and his interest in philosophies of the organism, all make for a proto-complexity approach to natural philosophy. Against the poles of traditional idealism (as the projection of self onto world) and realism (as the assumption of the world-in-itself), Schelling offers a “speculative physics,” a counter-Kantian position which argues for the idea as always-already fully exterior, and for a notion of nature as an anonymous, non-human subject. Schelling provides a “physics of the All,” against the Kantian tradition of two-worlds physics and metaphysics, or the Aristotelian “somatism” of bodies and interactions. Grant traces Schelling’s “naturephilosophy” through its twists and turns, often in dialogue with other thinkers: from critical philosophy (Kant on the purposiveness of nature) to naturephilosophy (Schelling’s reading of Kant, Kielmeyer, Buffon), from naturephilosophy to “transcendental physics” (Schelling’s reading of Plato’s Timeaus), from transcendental physics to “antiphysics” (Oken and Fichte on the relation between “number” and “animal”), and from antiphysics to what Schelling refers to as speculative physics, “empiricism extended to the absolute.”

Where does all this lead? For Grant, one of the central challenges posed by Schelling’s naturephilosophy lies in articulating a way around the Kantian two-worlds impasse, and its associated separation of phusis and nous. The absolutism of either idealism or realism leaves little in the way of a counter-Kantian alternative, for idealism simply subsumes the entirety of the self-world relation within itself, while realism, even of the non-naïve strain, must confront the aporia of a verifiable world-without-self. One of the upshots of Schelling’s naturephilosophy is that thought itself be thought as fundamentally non-human. This requires a lot, to be sure; it requires that we think of thought itself in an “elemental” fashion. For Grant, Schelling’s philosophy suggests to us that “nature thinks,” in the same way that nature “rains” or nature “droughts” or nature “mountainizes.” Not the angry god, but an impersonal ideational flux – what Grant calls “transcendental geology.”

Today, the discourses of ecocriticism and climate change often display great ambivalence over whether nature is simply there “for us,” or, if something we can call nature exists in spite of, and not because of, our embeddedness as human beings. Additionally, the current hyper-technicization of the natural world, filled with “smart dust” and “programmable matter,” presents us with entities that renew, in many ways, earlier debates concerning the organic and the inorganic, biology and chemistry, mechanism and vitalism. Grant’s book leverages a counter-Kantian tradition in philosophy, exemplified in the work of Schelling’s naturphilosophie, to suggest that we become adequate to the thought of a nature in itself, in spite or, or indeed, irrespective of, human attempts to intervene in that nature (either to instrumentalize it or to “save” it).

Indeed, Grant’s book is an investigation into a concept of nature that is unqualified and unconditioned, an investigation into the “autonomy of nature.” But this autonomy is not that of an objective nature separate from a thinking, perceiving subject; it is precisely the opposite – nature in the sense of that which pervades the subject-world correlation itself, and that attempts to “explain the assumption of a non-coincidence of nature and idea,” phusis and nous.

Note: As of this writing, there is only an expensive hardcover version of the book available, though a paperback is listed as due to be published in the coming year. In the meantime, interested readers can read Grant’s writing on this topic in the journal Collapse (http://www.urbanomic.com).