Life, Organisms, and Human Nature: New Perspectives on Classical German Philosophy (Studies in German Idealism, 22) [1st ed. 2023] 3031415574, 9783031415579

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Studies in German Idealism 22

Luca Corti Johannes-Georg Schülein   Editors

Life, Organisms, and Human Nature New Perspectives on Classical German Philosophy

Studies in German Idealism Volume 22 Series Editor Reinier W. Munk, VU University Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands Editorial Board Frederick Beiser, Syracuse University Syracuse, NY, USA Daniel Dahlstrom, Philosophy Department Boston University Boston, MA, USA George di Giovanni, Dept Philosophy McGill University Montreal, QC, Canada Detlev Patzold, University of Groningen Groningen, The Netherlands Paul Guyer, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA, USA Andrea Poma, Dipto Filosofia Scienze dell'Educazione Università di Torino Torino, Torino, Italy

The series Studies in German Idealism aims to publish studies of an historical-­ systematic nature on German Idealism, that is, the period of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and the Neo-Kantians. A new element of the series is that it takes the period of Idealism to include the Neo-Kantians. The series anticipates the growing interest in the 'Golden Age' in the history of German philosophy among scholars and students. The series will serve as a complement to Springer's strong list in philosophy, as it complements the Archives internationales d'histoire des idées and thePhaenomenologica series.All books to be published in this Series will be fully peer-reviewed before final acceptance.

Luca Corti  •  Johannes-Georg Schülein Editors

Life, Organisms, and Human Nature New Perspectives on Classical German Philosophy

Editors Luca Corti Philosophy Department and Padua Research Group on Classical German Philosophy University of Padua Padua, Italy

Johannes-Georg Schülein Philosophy Department 1 and Research Center for Classical German Philosophy Ruhr University Bochum Bochum, Germany

ISSN 1571-4764     ISSN 2542-9868 (electronic) Studies in German Idealism ISBN 978-3-031-41557-9    ISBN 978-3-031-41558-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6 Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Introduction

In recent years, our understanding of Classical German Philosophy has been experiencing something of a revolution. Theories of the natural world were, generally speaking, once regarded as a side issue in post-Kantian thought. The tendency was to say that the primary concern of the epoch was the constitutive powers of the human mind and spirit – and not those of nature, which was, so the story goes anyway, interpreted along the lines of now outdated models. But today, thanks to a new appraisal of the status of nature in the tradition, we are coming to realize that it in fact contains rich resources for understanding nature in virtually all its dimensions. As such, the standard view of the epoch is being revised: there is now a consensus that the thinkers of the epoch are interested in the philosophical exploration of natural issues and phenomena, in providing refined accounts that can explain, among other things, the emergence of organic life in general and, ultimately, of the human being in particular. There are various dimensions to the reassessment of the theoretical landscape of Classical German Philosophy that is currently taking place. One concerns the relevance of nature as such to the epoch. Slowly but surely, the evidence has piled up over the years showing that its treatment of the general idea of nature is profound and comprehensive. Of course, no one has ever denied the fact that philosophers around 1800 do, as a rule, devote not insignificant parts of their systems to the notion of ‘nature’. That has never been a secret. But what is new in the recent literature is that many scholars have brought to light not only the systematic importance of nature for the philosophers of the time, but also that Classical German Philosophy presents a vast amount of untapped potential for those working on philosophical issues related to nature today. The philosophical discourse of the epoch surrounding the natural world has proven to be much less outdated than it initially seemed for generations of researchers.1

 See, for instance, the groundbreaking studies by Breidbach 1982, Zumbach 1989, McLaughlin 1994, Illetterati 1995, Bonsiepen 1997, Houlgate 1998, and Stone 2004. 1

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Alongside the recognition of the untapped potential still found in its general notion of ‘nature’, another dimension to its reassessment has been the realization that the natural sciences play a much greater role – and were taken much more seriously – in Classical German Philosophy than is commonly acknowledged.2 Indeed, many theories of the time provide insightful analyses of various concepts used by the natural sciences and closely examine the metaphysics operating in scientific explanations of nature in a way that shows their ongoing relevance for contemporary debates. This applies in particular (but not only) to a set of notions pertaining to the biological domain. In the context of this new appraisal, the notion of ‘life’ is center stage. One main theme throughout the epoch was the idea that it is next to impossible to make sense of biological life forms in a purely mechanistic explanatory register. This led to new forms of teleological thinking to be developed. But also notions such as that of ‘species’, as well as numerous concepts concerning the environment and how it fits into our overall understanding of nature, have come to take on considerable importance in how we look at the tradition. Moreover, it is worth noting that, in connection with the notion of ‘life’, the related notions of ‘organism’ and ‘organic unity’ became a major talking point when biology emerged as an autonomous science. This set of notions was a topic of hot debate among the philosophers of the time, including but not limited to Kant, Schelling, and Hegel, and influenced their understanding of a wide variety of phenomena, even their conceptions of spirit and of the human being as such.3 Nature in Classical German Philosophy is a nature that is, to a radical extent, alive. Another aspect of the tradition that has recently attracted many scholars, and which to a certain degree builds upon the first two, concerns how our outlook on nature influences and can enrich our conception of the human mind, spirit, and – indeed – life in general. There is certainly one kind of living being that attracts most of the attention in the tradition: us humans. Scholars have come to appreciate the fact that philosophers of the tradition even assigned an irreducible role to the natural world in the shaping of our self-conception and self-constitution as rational, self-­ determining beings. Many post-Kantian thinkers, for instance, were convinced that we cannot think of our subjectivity as a disembodied, purely spiritual mind. Our subjectivity has a bodily, physical dimension. Far from rejecting the domain of nature, the pivotal question for them was, rather, how to reconcile the idea that humans are rational, self-determining beings and subjects possessing mindedness with the fact that humans also, and indeed obviously, belong to the natural world. A  To mention just a few of the many contributions in this reassessment that have been published over the years, cf. Poggi and Bossi 1994, Zammito 2002, 2016, Steigerwald 2019, Azadpour and Whistler 2021, and Nassar 2022. 3  The debate on the notions of ‘life’ and ‘organism’ is very broad. These notions have been presented as key to understanding Classical German Philosophy as a whole. See, for example, Förster 2012, Zammito 2017, and Stone 2018, and Steigerwald 2019. The question regarding how individual thinkers treat the issue of life has been explored in more detail by various scholars – take, for instance, recent work on Kant (Hunemann 2007, Goy/Watkins 2014, Van Den Berg 2014), Schelling (Grant 2008, Matthews 2011), and Hegel (Sphan 2007, Sell 2013, Khurana 2017, Ng 2020). 2

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significant part of the current interest in the conceptions of life, nature, and the human being’s natural constitution in Classical German Philosophy revolves around this issue. Among the many questions discussed in this regard, there are a few that are especially salient: What are the defining features of the human life form qua self-determining? What role does organic life play in and for our social lives? How exactly does the biological, natural dimension of subjectivity relate to our rationality? And how can we think of our rationality and the capacity for self-determination as part of nature?4 To think of humans as a specific life form can help us provide an answer to such questions by enabling us to think of the spiritual and mental capacities of humans as something natural. Of course, this just opens up a Pandora’s box of further, related questions  – questions that have spawned the controversies waged in Classical German Philosophy. For instance, a whole host of issues come to the fore such as: Should we conceive of human mindedness as a product of first or second nature? Is rationality a property that is simply added to a natural layer that we share with other animals, or does it decisively transform the way in which we have natural properties? Are there aspects of our existence as rational human animals that might be hard to reconcile with nature? Are there, perhaps, distinct limits to the explanatory power of naturalism that would prevent us from adequately grasping some phenomena? Classical German Philosophy stands out because it discusses all of these issues and puts them in a comprehensive system. The question ‘What is life?’ – taken in its broadest sense beyond the restricted meaning it has in the natural sciences – can be seen as one of the fundamental concerns of the whole epoch, if not the most fundamental, because it frames, as it were, all of the aforementioned ones.5 The fact that it took Classical German Philosophy such a long time to gain any recognition of being a viable source for tackling such issues might have to do with the standard label that has been employed to characterize the tradition as a whole: ‘German Idealism.’ This label is arguably misleading. Approaching the epoch as ‘Classical German Philosophy’ instead presents numerous advantages. It does away with the suggestion that some kind of anti-naturalist ‘idealism’ is what binds the epoch together. Further, it has the benefit of extending the focus beyond the narrow group of philosophers usually denoted by ‘German Idealism’ (the Big Four: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel), thereby giving due to the diverse constellation of figures that shaped the epoch, including thinkers like Schlegel, Novalis, and Humboldt, to name but a few. The conceptions of life, nature, and the human being that were developed in this period were, to put it mildly, in no small way influenced

 This debate is still influenced to a considerable degree by McDowell (1994, 1996) and Thompson (2008, 2017) and the various discussions that evolved around their work (see, for instance, Kern/ Kietzmann 2017). In recent years, a significant part of the debate centered on the question of ‘second nature’ especially – but not exclusively – in Hegel (see the volume edited by Honneth and Christ 2022 and, for example, Ranchio 2016, Khurana 2017, Novakovic 2017, Menke 2018). Notions such as ‘second nature’ and ‘life form’ have also opened up philosophical dialogue with other traditions and authors, such as Wittgenstein and Adorno. 5  See also Sandkaulen 2019 on this. 4

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by both Romantic authors and naturalists like Humboldt who traveled the world beyond the borders of the European continent. There is no denying that Classical German Philosophy is a broader and richer cluster of views and debates than the label ‘German Idealism’ conveys. It is an epoch that needs to be explored beyond pre-established historical categories. The process of looking beyond the standard narratives spun about it and expanding the traditional canon, while taking seriously the unconventional approaches to life, nature, and the human being encountered around 1800, yields a much more accurate account of what the epoch has to offer us. Given the variety of ideas, authors, and insights at stake in Classical German Philosophy, it does not come as a surprise that the current wave of interest in nature, and especially its notions of life, living organisms, and human nature is anything but uniform. Indeed, the literature goes in many directions. But this lack of uniformity is a virtue, not a vice; it speaks to the relevance of philosophical issues related to nature as treated by the tradition and the as-yet untapped potential of the epoch to help us find new ways to understand and cope with them. The aim of this volume is to explore this potential further. It is a contribution to the endeavor of reconstructing – to use a phrase by Richard Bernstein – the “vicissitudes of nature” in their various historical dimensions and conceptual implications (Bernstein 2022). Some recent attempts have been made to explore this territory in a comprehensive way, but the constellation of issues present in the tradition is so vast that they are far from being exhausted and require an ample amount of interdisciplinary inquiry.6 The following 19 chapters follow the path trodden by Classical

 Among the attempts to address this territory is our recent edited volume Nature and Naturalism in Classical German Philosophy (Corti and Schülein 2022), which complements the present collection of essays. However, though both discuss ‘nature’ in the classical German tradition, the two books differ in content and focus and constitute integrated parts of a larger, more comprehensive inquiry into this domain. While the chapters in our previous collection focus primarily on general conceptions of nature and naturalism in the Classical German tradition, this volume focuses more specifically on questions related to the phenomenon of life, the notion of the organism, and the placement of the ‘human animal’ in the natural sphere. Indeed, the present volume is distinct from its earlier companion in the following ways: First, it closely analyzes views of organisms and of biological, spiritual, and social life (such as Kant’s and Schelling’s) – all absent in the previous volume – and also develops new perspectives on Hegel with respect to such issues as his theory of causality, his view of types, and his conception of natural kinds, which were not addressed previously. These interventions represent key conceptual tools offered by the present collection. Second, in providing this analysis of specific concepts in the classical German tradition, the volume highlights connections with contemporary theory of science. Readers will thus find links to current theories of biological autonomy, enactivism, the physics of motion, the theory of space and time, and the theory of natural forms of essentialism. Third, part two of the volume extends our previous analysis in a new direction: it focuses on the relation between the natural dimensions of ‘human nature’ and ‘human mindedness’ and their relation to social and institutional dimensions. Chapters discuss, for instance, topics such as the idea of second nature and freedom and the state and the role of the body in Schelling’s and Hegel’s ethical theories. Fourth, the volume explores methodological questions through chapters which specifically criticize the paradigm of naturalism and highlight the limits of naturalistic interpretation of Classical German Philosophy put forth in the previous volume. Other chapters also discuss the idea of ‘liberal naturalism.’ The two collections are thus in close dialogue with each other. 6

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German Philosophy from the peculiarities of organic life to the peculiarities of the distinctly human life form and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of naturalistic accounts of life. The collection is characterized by a pluralism of views, views that at times contrast with one another. As such, they reflect the pluralism of the tradition itself – the liveliness and polyphonic nature of the issues at stake and the ways in which they were approached in post-Kantian thought.

 nderstanding Organic Life: At the Crossroads Between U Philosophy and the Natural Sciences Understanding the phenomenon of organic life plays a fundamental role in virtually all accounts of nature around 1800. The first part of the volume approaches this topic from the viewpoint of Classical German Philosophy and how it can be put to use in contemporary philosophy of science. Philosophically, Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment sets the stage for the still influential idea that we need to go beyond mere mechanical explanation in order to make sense of what it is to be a living organism. Chapter 1 by Karen Koch introduces this core idea and discusses Kant’s teleological account of life in the third Critique. She offers a reading of the epistemic role played by the concept of ‘natural end,’ highlighting its regulative character as well as the important function that it assumes in shaping the concept of a living organism in Kant. Koch argues that Kant’s concept of the latter must be derived from the concept of ‘natural end’ – and not the other way around, as is often thought. Chapter 2 by Andrew Cooper continues the exploration of Kant’s teleological account of life in the third Critique and relates it to an ongoing debate in the philosophy of biology. He shows how a Kantian conception of teleological judgment continues to be helpful today in terms of integrating the specific causal dynamics of organisms into mainstream biological theory. Cooper focuses on two specific arguments  – the extension and accretion arguments  – and suggests that these arguments can be evaluated in light of their explanatory power in empirical research. The following two chapters are devoted to the accounts of nature put forward in the aftermath of Kant. Schelling and Hegel are arguably the two most influential philosophers who developed accounts of organic life by critically engaging with Kant’s thinking. Chapter 3 by Andrea Gambarotto and Auguste Nahas focuses on Schelling and builds another bridge between Classical German Philosophy and contemporary philosophy of science. They argue that Schelling’s speculative physics is an attractive alternative not only to Kantianism but also to the reductionist Humeanism found in the philosophy of science today. Their argument concentrates on the view that life and mind emerge out of natural processes. They put Schelling’s account in dialogue with ongoing debates on emergence, the notion of ‘constraint’, and thermodynamics. Chapter 4 by Thomas Meyer turns to Hegel and his take on the use of causal language in analyzing the phenomena of life. Meyer focuses on a

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dense passage from Hegel’s Doctrine of Essence and shows why the Kantian is right when she maintains that living organisms cannot be appropriately understood by virtue of a mechanical understanding of causality. However, Meyer argues that the lesson to be learned from Hegel is that, in order to account for organic life, we require not only a concept of ‘teleology’ but also a notion of an ‘ordered whole’. In this regard, Meyer suggests that a Hegelian whole is a more ambitious notion than a Kantian whole. Chapter 5 by Edgar Maraguat picks up the threads of Hegel’s concepts of living organisms and teleology, but now from the point of view of the current debate on natural kinds. Maraguat argues that Hegel’s understanding of species differs from essentialist views in philosophy and biology. Maraguat claims that, for Hegel, natural life forms have their purpose radically in themselves such that it is not even necessary for them to perpetuate the species that they are instantiations of. Chapter 6 by Christopher Yeomans and Ralph Kaufmann proposes a reading of Hegel’s theory of space and time in the Philosophy of Nature. The authors show that Hegel’s theory of space and time, which is frequently seen as an obscure view, is in fact designed to allow for the theoretical possibility of motion. The possibility of motion is of fundamental relevance to not just physics, for Hegel, but also to biology and beyond. They maintain that Hegel’s understanding of animal embodiment and locomotion informs his elementary view of the fabric of space and time.

 nderstanding the Human Life Form: Between Nature, Spirit, U and Society The chapters in the second part of the volume focus on the understanding of the human life form. As mentioned above, the notion of ‘life’ in Classical German Philosophy is not necessarily restricted to a specific kind of natural phenomenon to be investigated by biology; it is also the word used to conceptualize practical and social phenomena. Put briefly, life is not only an issue of first nature but also of second nature. For many philosophers in the post-Kantian German tradition, such a broader notion of ‘life’ animates their theories, especially when the human life form is at stake. Chapter 7 by G. Anthony Bruno gets the ball rolling with the radical position that Fichte defends in the Vocation of Man and previous writings. He calls this position ‘Fichte’s immortalism.’ It unequivocally claims that human life is not a natural phenomenon; it is eternal, rational, our true being, and the final cause of nature and death. Bruno demonstrates how Fichte insists on the inexplicability of his immortalist notion of ‘life’ in a naturalist register. But that does not entail that nature has no significance in Fichte. Rather than reducing life to nature, Fichte envisions a moral perfection of nature through human activity. Chapter 8 by Philipp Weber then traces a deeply ambivalent attitude toward nature and life that we encounter in Fichte and German Romanticism. Romanticism, as Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel understand it, should not be seen – as it often is – as a striving for harmony between humanity

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and nature. Quite to the contrary, the Romantic attitude toward nature is defined by tension. Weber identifies this attitude not only in Fichte’s idea of the education and perfection of nature through humanity but also in Novalis’ views on feeling and Schlegel’s idea of infinity. A leitmotif in these positions is that humanity strives for an overcoming of tension. However, this striving can never be completed. As such, a genuinely Romantic relationship between humans and the natural world will always be one full of conflict, conflict that we have to learn to live with. In reaction to Fichte’s idealism, Schelling and Hegel count among the most influential thinkers who tried to reconcile the spiritual and mental as well as the practical and social aspects of human life with its natural dimension. Chapter 8 by Charlotte Alderwick shows in this regard that Schelling develops a philosophy of nature that contains an original theory of freedom. She argues that human freedom is, according to Schelling, a potentiated form of a kind of freedom that is already present in organic life. Human and natural forms of freedom are therefore different only by degree, not in kind. She then makes the case that Schelling’s Freedom Essay builds upon this notion of ‘freedom’ first introduced in the philosophy of nature and offers a solution to the problem of the human ownership of freedom. Chapter 9 by Kyla Bruff addresses Schelling’s account of second nature by exploring his conception of the state in the System of Transcendental Idealism. She goes on to argue that Schellingian ideas can contribute to the contemporary debate on second nature where Schelling still does not significantly feature. She highlights how intersubjectivity is crucial for Schelling’s conception of the legal system and has to be grasped as a precondition for morality and human freedom. She also examines Schelling’s early political philosophy in relation to his later eschatological philosophy. Chapter 10 by Sebastian Rand turns to Hegel and his views on the difference between animal and human nature. To reconstruct Hegel’s position, Rand hones in on Hegel’s remarks on pregnancy, the fetus, and childbirth in the Encyclopedia Anthropology. Against the backdrop of recent neo-­Aristotelian readings, he argues that the kind of second-natural spiritual self-­relation by virtue of which humans distinguish themselves from other animals is not only an issue of genera and species. Rather, Hegel describes pregnancy and childbirth as a concrete transformative process in which the fetus acquires the form of life specific to human animals. In this process, the natural and spiritual domains are intertwined: the gestating fetus already is influenced by the mother’s spirit. Chapter 11 by Thimo Heisenberg continues the exploration of the relation between nature and spirit by examining the role that the physical body – as part and parcel of the natural world and a component of our biological constitution – plays in Hegel’s social theory. Heisenberg argues that developing and maintaining a good relationship with one’s physical body is only possible in a society with good institutions. Without such institutions, humans are generally unable to relate to their bodies in a healthy way. Heisenberg thus demonstrates how one’s relationship to one’s own body depends, in a broad sense, on the establishment of various kinds of collaboration with others. Chapter 12 by Susanne Herrmann-Sinai discusses two conceptions of second nature that are currently attributed to Hegel. To that end, she investigates how Hegel construes the transition from sound to speech and the transition from natural will to ethical will in the

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Phenomenology of Spirit. She argues that second nature is neither a falling back into nature nor a limiting of human freedom. Just the opposite is the case: second nature should be understood as a product of human freedom by virtue of which spiritual beings relate to themselves. Chapter 13 by Christoph Schuringa looks at the early Marx’s view of the human being and traces it back through Feuerbach to Hegel. While it is commonly assumed that Marx understood the human ‘genus-being’ (Gattungswesen) as a species among others, Schuringa argues that a generality of a different order is, in point of fact, involved. Although Marx does defend a form of naturalism, he nonetheless insists that humans are not members of their species in the way that other life forms instantiate a natural species. More precisely, the human genus-being is a concrete universality in the Hegelian sense in that it includes the productive activity of living individuals.

Naturalism and the Bounds of Nature The third part of the volume explores the power and problems of naturalistic accounts of life. Classical German Philosophy also proves to be useful in this respect. It resembles a laboratory in which different kinds of naturalism were put to the test. However, not only were the potential limits of scientific naturalism discussed but also new forms of naturalism were proposed. Chapter 14 by Mario de Caro opens this part by focusing on the perennial problem of how to reconcile nature and freedom. He presents Kant’s Third Antinomy as a paradigmatic way to pose the problem and delineate the limits present in the explanations pursued by scientific naturalism. De Caro traces the antinomy through contemporary debates and argues that we have to abandon some of the doctrines of scientific naturalism if we are to preserve beliefs about freedom that are important to us. He argues against the idea that scientific explanations must be able to incorporate everything and argues, in its place, for a pluralistic, ‘liberal’ form of naturalism. Chapter 15 by Daniel Whistler analyzes a particular form of naturalism which, according to Whistler, would go on to be pivotal for the whole German tradition, namely Charles Bonnet’s project of naturalizing the metaphysical principle of perfectibility as an alternative to scientific naturalism. Whistler interprets Bonnet’s project as an ‘anomalous naturalism’ in which naturalizations do not lead to a complete identification with the natural order. Anomalous naturalism rather insists on a minimal difference between the metaphysical and the natural domains. This view was influential for thinkers like Lessing, Jacobi, and Herder. Chapter 16 by Christina Pinsdorf turns to Schelling and Humboldt. She argues that their naturalism is essentially a Romantic form of empiricism. Schelling and Humboldt defend a holistic view of nature which can still be a source of inspiration today for those wishing to revise prevalent ideas about the relationship between humans and nature, a task that is urgent. Pinsdorf maintains that Romantic empiricism proves to be a fruitful alternative to scientific naturalism, especially from the viewpoint of the environmental humanities. Chapter 17 by Sebastian Stein makes the case that Hegel is not a

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naturalist of any kind but rather an idealist. He argues that Hegel’s idealism is grounded in a metaphysics of ‘the Concept’ and differs from positions that Stein calls ‘being-’ or ‘essence-based naturalisms.’ What Hegel’s idealist account of spirit does enable is the autonomy of minded agents. According to Stein, a robust account of autonomy in the Hegelian sense lies beyond the naturalist grasp. Chapter 18 by Paul Giladi explores the relationship between Hegel and ongoing debates revolving around different kinds of naturalism. He argues that Hegel’s metaphysics is a speculative naturalism that contains powerful conceptual tools for identifying and explaining certain pathologies of scientism understood as the view that the natural sciences alone define the standards that any sense-making practice about the world must conform to. Giladi suggests that scientism – also in its modern-day form – can be overcome if we develop alternative speculative sense-making practices that are rooted in a pluralist dialectical discourse about sense-making itself. Luca Corti Johannes-Georg Schülein

References Azadpour, Lydia, and Daniel Whistler, eds. 2020. Kielmeyer and the Organic World: Texts and Interpretations. London: Bloomsbury. Bonsiepen, Wolfgang. 1997. Die Begründung einer Naturphilosophie bei Kant, Schelling, Fries und Hegel. Frankfurt: Klostermann. Breidbach, Olaf. 1982. Das Organische in Hegels Denken: Studie zur Naturphilosophie und Biologie. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Corti, Luca, and Johannes-Georg Schülein, eds. 2022. Nature and Naturalism in Classical German Philosophy. London/New York: Routledge. Förster, Eckart. 2012. The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Goy, Ina, and Eric Watkins, eds. 2014. Kant's Theory of Biology. Berlin: De Gruyter. Grant, Iain H. 2006. Philosophies of Nature after Schelling. London: Continuum. Honneth, Axel, and Julia Christ, eds. 2022. Zweite Natur: Stuttgarter Hegel-Kongress 2017. Frankfurt: Klostermann. Houlgate, Stephen, ed. 1998. Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature. Albany: SUNY Press. Huneman, Philippe, ed. 2007. Understanding Purpose: Collected Essays on Kant and Philosophy of Biology. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Illetterati, Luca. 1995. Nature e Ragione: Sullo Sviluppo dell’Idea di Natura in Hegel. Trento: Verifiche. Kern, Andrea, and Christian Kietzmann, eds. 2017. Selbstbewusstes Leben: Texte zu einer transformativen Theorie der menschlichen Subjektivität. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Khurana, Thomas. 2017. Das Leben der Freiheit: Form und Wirklichkeit der Autonomie. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Matthews, Bruce. 2011. Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy: Life as a Schema for Freedom. Albany: SUNY Press. McDowell, John. 1994. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 1996. Two Sorts of Naturalism. In Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory. Ed. R. Hursthouse, G. Lawrence and W. Quinn. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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McLaughlin, Peter. 1990. Kant’s Critique of Teleology in Biological Explanation: Antinomy and Teleology, Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press. Menke, Christoph. 2018. Autonomie und Befreiung: Studien zu Hegel. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Nassar, Dalia. 2022, Romantic Empiricism: Nature, Art, and Ecology from Herder to Humboldt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ng, Karen. 2020. Hegel’s Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Novakovic, Andreja. 2017. Hegel on Second Nature and Ethical Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Poggi, Stefano, and Maurizio Bossi, eds. 1994. Romanticism in Science: Science in Europe, 1790-1840, Dordrecht: Kluwer. Ranchio, Filippo. 2016. Dimensionen der zweiten Natur: Hegels praktische Philosophie. Hamburg: Meiner. Sandkaulen, Birgit. 2019. Der Begriff des Lebens in der Klassischen Deutschen Philosophie – eine naturphilosophische oder lebensweltliche Frage?. In Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Vol. 67, Issue 6, 911–929. Sell, Annette. 2013. Der lebendige Begriff: Leben und Logik bei Hegel. Freiburg: Alber. Spahn, Christian. 2007. Lebendiger Begriff—Begriffenes Leben. Zur Grundlegung der Philosophie des Organischen bei G. W. F. Hegel. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Steigerwald, Joan. 2019. Experimenting at the Boundaries of Life: Organic Vitality in Germany around 1800. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Stone, Alison. 2004. Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press. —. 2018. Philosophy of Nature. In The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Michael N.  Forster and Kirsten Gjesdal, 319–335. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, Michael. 2008. Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 2017. Formen der Natur: erste, zweite, lebendige, vernünftige und phronetische. In Selbstbewusstes Leben. Ed. Christian Kietzmann und Andrea Kern, 29–77. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Van den Berg, Hein 2014. Kant on Proper Science: Biology in the Critical Philosophy and the Opus Postumum. Dordrecht: Springer. Zammito, John H. 2017. The Gestation of German Biology: Philosophy and Physiology from Stahl to Schelling. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Zumbach, Clarck. 1984. The Transcendent Science: Kant’s Conception of Biological Methodology. Dordrecht: Springer.

Acknowledgments

July 2023 This volume reflects a series of conversations on the concepts of nature, life, and cognition in Classical German Philosophy that took place at the Universities of Padua and Bochum over several years. We are grateful to the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for funding a collaborative research project (rethinkingnature.com) that made it possible to bring together a unique group of international scholars to discuss these issues. We would like to thank all who participated in this project as well as researchers at both institutions for many inspiring discussions. Special thanks go out to Joseph Carew, Jonathan Dési, Emilie Maes, and Amanda Swain for their invaluable assistance with the proofreading of this volume. We also owe thanks to Christopher Coughlin and Shanthini Kamaraj for their kind patience and support in helping us to finalize this book during the difficult time of the COVID-19 pandemic. We appreciate very much the helpful feedback which was provided to us by two anonymous referees who reviewed this collection. Last, but not least, we would like to say thank you to all the scholars who contributed chapters to this collection. Padua Italy Bochum Germany Luca Corti Johannes-Georg Schülein

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Part I Understanding Organic Life Between Philosophy and the Natural Sciences Organisms and Natural Ends in Kant’s Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    3 Karen Koch Kant and Biological Theory����������������������������������������������������������������������������   21 Andrew Cooper Rethinking Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature Through a Process Account of Emergence������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   39 Andrea Gambarotto and Auguste Nahas “Inadmissible Application”: Some Notes on Causality and Life in Hegel ��   59 Thomas Meyer Concepts with Teeth and Claws. On Species, Essences and Purposes in Hegel’s Organic Physics������������������������������������������������������   79 Edgar Maraguat  Hegel’s Theory of Space-Time (No, Not That Space-Time) ������������������������   97 Ralph Kaufmann and Christopher Yeomans Part II Understanding the Human Life-Form Between Nature, Spirit, and Society  ‘All is Act, Movement, and Life’: Fichte’s Idealism as Immortalism ��������  121 G. Anthony Bruno “True Life Is Only in Death.” On Rejecting Life and Nature in Romanticism (Fichte, Novalis, Schlegel)����������������������������������������������������  141 Philipp Weber

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Schelling on the Nature of Freedom and the Freedom of Nature: The Role of the Naturphilosophie in the Freiheitsschrift������������������������������  159 Charlotte Alderwick The State as Second Nature in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism ����������������������������������������������������������������������������  177 Kyla Bruff The Psychical Relation������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  197 Sebastian Rand  The Physical Body and Its Role in Hegel’s Mature Ethical Theory������������  215 Thimo Heisenberg Second Nature and Self-Determination in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  229 Susanne Herrmann-Sinai  Gattungswesen and Universality: Feuerbach, Marx and German Idealism������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  247 Christoph Schuringa Part III Naturalism and the Bounds of Nature  The Third Antinomy in the Age of Naturalism ��������������������������������������������  265 Mario De Caro Post-Bonnetian Naturalism ����������������������������������������������������������������������������  281 Daniel Whistler Romantic Empiricism in the Anthropocene: Unlocking A. v. Humboldt’s and F. W. J. Schelling’s Potential for the Environmental Humanities����������������������������������������������������������������  297 Christina Pinsdorf Beyond Naturalism, Spiritualism and Finite Idealism: Hegel on the Relationship Between Metaphysical Truth, Nature and Mind��������  321 Sebastian Stein Scientism as Ideology; Speculative Naturalism as Qualified Decoloniality��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  343 Paul Giladi

Contributors

Charlotte Alderwick  University of the West of England, Bristol, UK Kyla Bruff  Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada G. Anthony Bruno  Royal Holloway University of London, London, UK Andrew Cooper  University of Warwick, Coventry, UK Mario De Caro  Università Roma 3, Rome, Italy Andrea Gambarotto  IAS Research Centre for Life Mind and Society, University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain Paul Giladi  SOAS University of London, London, UK Thimo Heisenberg  Rice University, Houston, TX, USA Susanne Herrmann-Sinai  Oxford University, Oxford, UK Ralph Kaufmann  Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA Karen Koch  University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland Edgar Maraguat  Department of Philosophy, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain Thomas Meyer  Humbold-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany Auguste Nahas  University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, USA Christina Pinsdorf  Institute for Science and Ethics (IWE), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany Sebastian Rand  Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA Christoph Schuringa  Northeastern University, London, UK Sebastian Stein  University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

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Philipp Weber  University of Bochum, Bochum, Germany Daniel Whistler  Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK Christopher Yeomans  Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

Contributors

Part I

Understanding Organic Life Between Philosophy and the Natural Sciences

Organisms and Natural Ends in Kant’s Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment Karen Koch

In the first part of the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment (CJ) Kant discusses the relevance of introducing the concept of a purpose1 to understanding things in nature. This discussion is quite puzzling. On the one hand, Kant claims that there are things in nature whose experience occasions our judging them as natural ends and that the concept of a natural end plays an indispensable role in our grasping of these natural things. On the other hand, he holds that we can conceive this concept but not comprehend it. In this essay, I will concentrate on the question as to how we can make sense of these two claims. I will suggest a reading which, on the one hand, focuses and strengthens Kant’s claim that the concept of a natural end is not comprehensible to us, but which, on the other hand, makes a strong case for teleology. In contrast to heuristic readings, which come with the claim that we need teleological principles only for our scientific investigations into nature and especially into organisms,2 I will show in the second part of the paper that the teleological principle of inner purposiveness, by which we judge a natural thing to be a natural end, plays an even more fundamental role in Kant’s philosophy of biology: we cannot draw the distinction between organic and inorganic things without applying this

 I regard the concepts of a purpose and of an end to be synonyms.  See e.g. McLaughlin (1989), Kreines (2005).

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K. Koch (*) University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Corti, J.-G. Schülein (eds.), Life, Organisms, and Human Nature, Studies in German Idealism 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_1

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principle because we derive the concept of an organism from the concept of a natural end.3 However, this stronger reading does not imply that the natural things in question are natural ends. The concept of a natural end is not constitutive for these objects. The reason Kant gives for its solely regulative status, and which I will pursue in the first part of the paper, is that the concept of a natural end is an obscure one.4 We have only an indeterminate representation of this concept, which we cannot apply to nature in a determinate way, and that is why this concept remains incomprehensible to us.5 To begin with, I give a short contextualization of the passages discussed mostly in this essay (§§ 64/65) by drawing on the introductions to the third Critique, in which Kant presents his general conception of a purpose, and by drawing on Kant’s notion of external purposiveness, which he distinguishes sharply from his notion of inner purposiveness. Next, I elaborate on Kant’s thesis that our judging nature purposively is occasioned by our experience of certain natural phenomena and by our lack of a mechanical explanation of these phenomena. More precisely, it is occasioned by the natural things we experience being both the cause and effect of themselves. This is Kant’s first provisional definition of a natural end: A thing is called a natural end, when it is both the cause and effect of itself. However, according to Kant, this definition remains indeterminate. The concept of a natural end needs a derivation from a determinate concept, to which I turn to in the next section. As I will argue, Kant shows that the analogies, by which we aim to determine the concept of a natural end, in the end, are not adequate analogies. They fail to give a  I will only focus on the indispensable role of the concept of a natural end that it plays in drawing the distinction between organic and inorganic things in nature. However, that is not the only important role of this concept. Its introduction into nature also allows seeing nature as grounded in an idea of reason. This leads to the further claim that the introduction of the concept of a natural end into nature allows judging that nature be compatible with our practical needs; it makes the idea comprehensible that the realm of nature and the realm of freedom are not separated by a strict gulf but can be combined in such a way that makes clear that the highest good can be realized in this world. For the first claim see Breitenbach (2009), Zuckert (2017). For the latter claim see Khurana (2017, esp. 198 ff.) On the transition from judging certain things in nature to be natural ends to judging the whole of nature to be a system of ends, cf. Watkins (2014). 4  One might think that it is clear from the introductions of the third Critique that the principles of purposiveness that we apply to nature are regulative, since purposiveness in Kant is always bound to an understanding that represents and realizes purposes, yet nature does not represent anything; cf. McLaughlin (1989, 36). I agree with this claim; I also think that the thesis about the regulative status of teleological principles is already established when it comes to the derivation of the concept of a natural end. However, the principle of inner purposiveness is a teleological principle on its own, and therefore in need of clarification and justification with regard to its status. 5  I do not see this point in one of the most sophisticated readings of Kant’s theory of natural ends, i.e. in Ginsborg’s reading. In contrast, in developing the notion of ‘thin normativity’ that shall obtain in organisms, Ginsborg argues that the concept of a natural end is intelligible. On her reading though, it is not clear if this kind of thin normativity obtains in organisms themselves or to our judging of them. I think that is because on her account, it is not entirely clear why this kind of thin normativity is supposed to be regulative. Cf. Ginsborg (2015, esp. 255–280). On this critique of Ginsborg, see also (Goy 2017, 217). 3

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proper understanding of what it means that there are natural ends. Thus, there is no determinate application of this concept, which leads Kant to the conclusion that it is not a constitutive but only a regulative concept. Finally, I will argue that, despite its obscurity, only the application of the concept of a natural end allows for judging the corresponding natural things to be organisms, since we derive the concept of an organism from the concept of a natural end. Hence, the fundamental function of teleology within theoretical philosophy lies in opening the possibility of thinking the concept of an organism – however only in a regulative way.6

1 Kant on Judging Nature Teleologically Kant’s discussion of the introduction of the concept of a purpose into nature is framed by the considerations he puts forward in the introductions to the third Critique. There, the derivation of the principle of purposiveness is embedded in our seeking to establish a systematic unity among particular empirical laws. Since we cannot deduce a priori that the systematic unity, we seek to establish, corresponds to the unity of nature, we do not know if the principles by means of which we systematize particular empirical laws are adequate. Rather, we must presuppose the adequacy of our systematization to the order of nature. The principle of purposiveness consists in the presupposition that nature conforms to our way of systematizing it. By analogy to our own intentional actions according to purposes, we think of the order of nature as being established by a purposive understanding, i.e. in such a way that the order of nature conforms to our systematization.7 In these passages, it is clear that in Kant’s view a purpose is bound to an understanding representing and acting according to it. A purpose is a ‘concept of an object insofar as it at the same time contains the ground of the reality of this object’ (CJ 68/ AA 5:180), and according to Kant, a concept is a representation bound to an understanding representing it. To the representation of a purpose, it is peculiar that it motivates its realization. Regarding the representation of a table for example, the purposive features we ascribe to it motivate our realizing it. Regarding the analogy we draw to the other understanding in systematizing particular empirical laws, we think of the understanding as being motivated by the purpose of making the order of nature intelligible to us, in establishing an order of nature that conforms to our own way of systematizing. Now, the distinguishing moment of the principle of purposiveness, as introduced in the introductions and in the Teleological Power of Judgment, consists in the

 Kant certainly also highlights the role teleological principles play for our scientific research of these natural things. For the purpose of this paper however, I will only focus on the derivation of the concept of a natural end and on that one of the concept of an organism. 7  It is not easy to see how the principles introduced in every part of the third Critique form a unity, and I do not seek to discuss this here. For readings focused on the unity of the third Critique, see Zuckert (2007), Ginsborg (2015), Haag (2019). 6

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content that is judged to be purposive. By means of the principle of purposiveness in the introductions, we regard the laws of nature to form a systematic unity. We judge them to be in accordance with our own cognitive needs, and therefore, we judge them to be purposive with respect to these. By means of the principles of purposiveness in the Teleological Power of Judgment however, we regard cause and effect relations themselves to be purposive. That is, we judge relations of cause and effect, the nexus causalis, to be relations of means and ends, to be a nexus finalis, i.e. we regard them to be causal relations that are beneficial to things in nature. According to Kant, there are two specific ways of doing so: We judge causal relations according to the principle of external purposiveness or according to the principle of inner purposiveness. It is worth discussing the difference between these two judgments because such a discussion will give us a first hint as to what judgments of inner purposiveness are about.

1.1 Judgments According to External Purposiveness Following the Kantian background given in the first Critique, nature is throughout determined by causal relations. However, Kant argues that we do not judge every causal relation to be purposive. Take for example a claim such as: The withdrawing of the sea is purposive in relation to the growth of pine trees, as this withdrawing leaves fertile sand soil. Compare it to a claim such as: The motion of tectonic plates is a means for the formation of mountains. According to Kant, the first claim attributes purposes to nature in an appropriate way, whereas the second does not. Kant thinks that we are justified in regarding the withdrawing of the sea as a means for growing pine trees (CJ 240/AA 5:367), whereas we are not justified to regard ‘water, air, and soils […] as means for piling up mountains’ (CJ 293/AA 5:425), although these elements certainly have contributed to the existence of mountains. Why are we justified in attributing purposiveness to the one case but not to the other? The abovementioned first claim is made in accordance with what Kant calls the principle of external purposiveness. According to this principle, we judge causal relations between natural things to be beneficial or useful to the natural thing, which we regard as a purpose (CJ 239/AA 5:367).8 However, the usefulness attributed to causal relations remains external to the natural things judged as a purpose. For, on the one hand, according to these judgments, we already presuppose that there are things in nature that must be judged as purposes. Thus, we judge the

 Kant’s usage of language with regard to the subject matter that is judged to be purposive is unclear. On the one hand, he claims that we regard causal relations as purposive (CJ 239/AA 5:366). On the other hand, he claims that objects can be purposive with regard to other objects (CJ 239/AA 5:367, 293/AA 5:425). In my view, both claims do not contradict each other. That is because I think the former expression is just the more precise one. Hence, if Kant claims that there are ‘certain natural things as means for other creatures’ (CJ 240/AA 5:367), he actually means that certain causal processes are purposive for the coming to be of other things in nature, and in judging a thing to be purposive, we regard the causal relations taking place in it to be purposive. 8

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withdrawing of the sea and the emergence of the sandy soil as purposive only by already implying that pine trees are to be judged as purposes. And this implication distinguishes the claim about the purposiveness of the sandy soil from the claim according to which the shift of tectonic plates is supposed to be purposive for the formation of mountains. We do not judge water, air, and soils as a means of piling up mountains, because they ‘do not contain in themselves anything at all that requires a ground for their possibility according to ends, thus nothing in relation to which their cause could be represented under the predicate of a means (useful for that end)’ (CJ 293/AA 5:425). On the other hand, judgments of external purposiveness do not explain the constitution of the objects of nature we regard as purposes. Coming back to the example given above, in such judgments, we do not learn anything about the structure and functioning of pine trees themselves. Nor is the attribution of purposiveness to the appearance we judge as a means itself a necessary element for the existence of these means. The purposiveness that we attribute, for example, to the emergence of the sandy soil for the growth of pine trees is not itself a necessary element in the explanation of the formation of the sandy soil. In an explanation of the coming to be of the sandy soil, we do not need to refer to its usefulness for pine trees.9 Therefore, Kant concludes that ‘if all of this natural usefulness did not exist, we would find nothing lacking in this state of things for the adequacy of natural causes’ (CJ 241/ AA 5:369).10 Now, based on the conception of external purposiveness alone, it is not possible to determine if a natural thing needs to be judged as purpose because of its inner constitution, since external purposiveness does not relate to the inner constitution of natural things. Rather, judgments of external purposiveness already presuppose the constitution of certain natural things as natural purposes. They therefore remain hypothetical: We can interpret causal relations to be purposive to things in nature, only if there are certain natural objects we need to judge as purposes. It follows that ‘relative11 purposiveness, although it gives hypothetical indications of natural ends, nevertheless justifies no absolute teleological judgments’ (CJ 241/AA 5:369).

 Cf. McLaughlin (1989, 41).  In contrast to Illetterati, I do not think that external purposiveness ‘is […] the model of purposiveness at the basis of artifacts’ (Illetterati 2014, 87), and that this characterization distinguishes external from inner purposiveness. Rather, I think that Kant’s overall conception of a purpose is based on the artifact model. The distinguishing moment between external and inner purposiveness lies in the existence claim that judgments of inner purposiveness come along with. In judgments of inner purposiveness, we claim that something exists because it is purposive. As made clear above, judgments of external purposiveness are not about the specific constitution of natural things. 11  Kant uses the expression ‘external purposiveness’ and ‘relative purposiveness’ synonymously. 9

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1.2 The Paradoxical Feature of Ends in Nature The discussion of the concept of external purposiveness has shown that its application is dependent on our judging natural things to be natural ends, according to the principle of inner purposiveness. Thus, teleology is brought into nature only through the application of the principle of inner purposiveness. In contrast to judgments according to external purposiveness, judgments of inner purposiveness refer to the inner constitution of things. In such judgments, we claim that a thing exists because it is purposive, i.e. we claim that a part of the whole thing exists because it is a means for the existence of the whole – its existence and behaviour fulfils a certain function for the existence of the whole. Now, judging a thing to be inner purposive is judging it to be a natural end. This reveals that introducing ends into nature brings problems: we only know purposes, i.e. purposive products, within the realm of practical reason. Things as realized purposes are products of practical reason; they are realized by our intentionally guided actions. In contrast, natural things are subject to the causal principle, which Kant often also calls ‘blind mechanism’.12 They are constituted by the causal-­ mechanical laws of nature. Neither do intentionally constituted purposive products have a place within nature and nor do intentional actions.13 Both kind of causalities seems to exclude each other when taken for an explanation of the existence of a thing. Taken like this there lies a strong tension if not a contradiction (CJ 242/AA 5: 370) in invoking the concept of a natural end. So, the following question becomes pressing, and needs to be answered before further engaging with the derivation of the concept of a natural end: Why would we bring teleological principles into nature at all?

2 On the Pecularity of Natural Phenomena Kant claims that our empirical observations of certain natural things occasion our judging them purposively. For we observe that they behave in a way that makes causal-mechanical explanations of them insufficient. Rather, these things express a certain regularity on their own, according to which they behave as cause and effect of themselves. This kind of regularity manifests itself in three different respects, in the generation, growth, and preservation of these natural things. Kant refers to the behaviour of a tree to illustrate the rule following character of these things. First, in contrast to, for example, mountains, trees are subject to a kind of regularity that governs the generation of natural objects with the same makeup, i.e. in contrast to mountains, a tree generates another tree according to its genus, ‘in which  For the purpose of this essay, I do not differentiate between causal relations and mechanical relations. 13  Cf. Lindquist (2018, 383). 12

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[in the generation, K.K.] it, on one side as effect, on the other as cause, unceasingly produces itself’ (CJ 243/AA 5:371). The seed of a maple tree develops – good environmental conditions provided – into a maple tree, and not into some other kind of tree or living being. Second, we find this kind of regularity in the growth of a such a natural thing. A tree processes the material it needs for its growth in a way that is peculiar to it. It causes its growth ‘by means of material which, as far as its composition is concerned, is its own product’ (CJ 243/AA 5:371), and thus the effect of the tree. In photosynthesis, for example, the tree absorbs water and carbon and transforms them into the carbohydrates it needs for its growth through the peculiar regularity, it is subject to. A mountain, however, does not generate itself as an individual by external influences, but rather changes its shape through external influences. Third, we observe this kind of regularity in the mutual preservation of the parts of such a natural object. One part ensures the preservation of the other parts, which in turn ensures the preservation of this part. They are cause and effect of their preservation. The leaves of a tree, for example, are ‘products of the tree, yet they also preserve it in turn, for repeated defoliation would kill it, and its growth depends upon their effect on the stem’ (CJ 244/AA 5:372). The parts of a mountain, on the other hand, do not mutually ensure their preservation, but change over time by causal mechanical forces. The meaning of the concept ‘mechanism’ introduced by Kant in the third Critique is highly controversial, and I cannot engage with this debate here. For the purpose of this essay, I adopt one main aspect of the reading Ginsborg puts forward in order to explain what Kant has in mind when claiming that such a natural thing and its form respectively14 is not ‘possible in accordance with mere natural laws’ (CJ 242/ AA 5:370).15 According to Ginsborg, Kant is concerned with the question of how there can be this kind of regularity of the form only by the forces of matter alone, that is only by attractive and repulsive forces. In general, Kant believes that we can

 Kant is not clear about whether the form or the existence of the thing is mechanically inexplicable. There are passages indicating the first, and passages indicating that the second element is in question (CJ 242 /AA 5:370, 245/AA 5:373). However, this is grounded in the subject matter. In judgments of inner purposiveness, we judge that a thing exists because of its peculiar form. Compare to my first characterization of such judgments in 1.2.. 15  I do not agree with Ginsborg’s general conception of mechanism. According to Ginsborg, mechanism is to be understood strictly separated from causality. Mechanism is the kind of power that structures matter, whereas causality is about the structuring of time. However, Kant holds that mechanical laws are causal laws (CJ 234/AA 5:360). Ginsborg’s distinction between these two principles is supposed to offer a solution to the puzzle of the principle of causality being an objective one, but the principle of mechanism being a subjective one. In my view, however, the reason for treating the mechanical principle in the third Critique as a subjective one is to be found in the introductions to the third Critique. There, Kant claims, that we must gain knowledge of the empirical-mechanical laws through empirical research. However, since we do not know the way nature is structured as a whole, all empirical-mechanical laws discovered are fallible. In this sense, they lack the kind of strong necessity the principle of causality has. On this reading see also Breitenbach (2006, 2009). 14

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explain phenomena as consequences of the natural laws based on these forces.16 Thus, a mechanistic explanation of a natural thing is one according to which phenomena can be explained according to the forces of matter alone. On Ginsborg’s reading, a mechanistic explanation of such things is impossible because we always already have to presuppose the form of such natural things in our mechanical explanations of them.17 We cannot explain the form itself mechanically. To give an example: A mere mechanical explanation of natural things, like trees, would be such that it explains the existence of the parts successively and independently of each other, without presupposing that body’s form, that is the whole, as an explanandum for the existence of its parts and their behaviour. According to such an explanation, it is highly contingent that a tree has precisely the physique that it has, allowing to perform the behaviour it performs. Hence, to explain the existence of the tree with this special makeup as a contingent result from what Kant calls ‘blind mechanism’ is no explanation of this regularity at all.18 For every solely causal mechanical explanation of a tree, would leave out an explanation of this kind of regularity we observe within nature, and therefore, it would leave us unsatisfied.19 Now, it is important to differentiate between the observed regularities and our seeking to explain them. We observe that certain natural things are cause and effect of themselves. However, we cannot explain the existence of one part of such a whole independently from the whole itself to account for this observed kind of regularity, as mechanistic explanations actually suggest. Rather, we need to refer to the special character a part has with regard to the existence of the whole to give a reason for the existence of that part. That is, we need to explain the existence of a part by the function it has in the existence of the whole. We need to draw on a kind of causality according to which the whole has priority over the parts. The only kind of causality we know having this feature is purposive causality. Thus, we must judge these things being cause and effect of themselves to be natural ends. Consequently, Kant’s first definition of a natural end is: ‘I would say provisionally that a thing exists as a natural end if it is cause and effect of itself’ (CJ 243/ AA 5:370 f.).

 Ginsborg refers to these laws of attraction and repulsion as the paradigm of a mechanical law but suggests that Kant also has a broader conception of mechanical laws in mind ‘including laws which govern the behaviour of particular kinds of matter’(Ginsborg 2015, 266). 17  Cf. Ginsborg (2015, 263–267). 18  I am thankful to Anton Kabeshkin for stressing this point in discussion. 19  I do not think that in Kant’s view we are able to overcome this insufficiency by means of scientific progress. Rather, we must presuppose their specific form necessarily. However, a discussion of this topic exceeds the scope of this paper. 16

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3 The Application of the Concept of a Natural End by Analogy Coming back to the paradoxical feature of the introduction of ends into nature described in 1.2., according to Kant, only the conception of a natural end to be cause and effect of itself dissolves this contradiction: in this [the concept of a natural end as a thing being cause and effect of itself, K.K.] there lies a causality the likes of which cannot be connected with the mere concept of a nature without ascribing an end to it, but which in that case also can be conceived without contradiction but cannot be comprehended (CJ 243/ AA 5:370 f.).

This quote is somewhat complex and needs to be unpacked. I take Kant to claim the following here: We need to apply the concept of an end to certain things in nature to understand their constitution and form. We can conceive this kind of causality or natural purposiveness, to which the concept of a natural end refers, without contradiction only if we understand this kind of causality as a kind of causality which is not guided by an intentionally represented purpose, i.e. only if we do not ascribe an end in the sense of an intention to it. Thus, the concept of a natural end refers to a kind of causality that shall obtain to the behaviour of things in nature without this behaviour being guided by a purpose in need of being represented subjectively, and the expression of a thing to be cause and effect of itself refers to this kind of non-­ intentional purposiveness. Obviously, the very fact that we have the concept of a natural end shows that we can think of such non-intentional purposiveness. However, Kant claims we cannot comprehend it. This is because there is no determinate application of this kind of concept. In the following, I will elaborate on that claim. In §65 Kant discusses the determinate application of the concept of a natural end, and this discussion results in the acknowledgement that such an application fails. Kant first states that his provisional definition of a natural end is still too vague: ‘a thing that is to be cognized as a natural product but yet at the same time as possible only as a natural end must be related to itself reciprocally as both cause and effect, which is a somewhat improper and indeterminate expression, in need of a derivation from a determinate concept’ (CJ 244/AA 5:372). Now, as has been argued, the observed behaviour of natural things being cause and effect of themselves cannot be explained by mechanical laws of nature, because it presupposes a whole-part dependency that is not addressed in mechanical explanations. The only kind of causality we know of, which carries a ‘descending as well as ascending dependency, in which the thing which is on the one hand designated as an effect nevertheless deserves, in ascent, the name of a cause of the same thing of which it is the effect’ (CJ 244/AA 5:372), is purposive causality. Consequently, the determinate concept in question, from which the concept of a natural end needs to be derived, is our kind of intentional purposive causality. According to our kind of purposive causality, a purpose is the cause of the same thing of which it is the effect. Taking Kant’s example: ‘[T]he house is certainly the cause of the sums that are taken in as rent, while conversely the representation of this possible income was the cause of the construction of the house’ (CJ 244/AA 5:372). However, nature does not itself represent

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purposes, neither does it act intentionally according to a purpose. So, we cannot attribute such a kind of purposiveness directly to nature, rather, we attribute it by analogy. Analogies consist of three elements from which we infer the fourth element.20 With regard to the analogy in question, we transfer a property from one thing to another thing of the same genus. That is, by analogy, we first transfer a property we attribute to our capacity of reason to another kind of reason, unlike ours, by which we then judge the corresponding natural thing to be purposive. Here, the three elements of the analogy are: (i) our purposeful rational activity, (ii) a purposive product, i.e. an artifact, iii) a different kind of reason from ours. Based on these three elements, we draw the analogy from an artifact to the natural thing. However, the analogy fails with respect to that natural thing. For the thing is characterized by the fact that it is a natural thing and not an artifact realized by reason. Thus, it must have an opposite property as the artifact – it must have come into existence by the forces of nature alone. So, in a second step, we must interpret the natural thing not as caused by reason, but as cause and effect of itself; it ‘must be related to itself reciprocally as both cause and effect’ (CJ 244/AA 5:372). This second step is not covered by the original analogy; as we shall see, it must be formed by a second analogy. Let us take a closer look at these two analogies by which we derive the concept of a natural end.

3.1 The Two Steps of the Derivation of the Concept of a Natural End Regarding our own purposive activity, a purposive thing is made possible by the fact that the parts of a thing are grounded in the whole. The whole is first a subjective representation that gets realized in a successive way. Take for example a house. Here, the existence and form of the parts are grounded in the subjective representation of the house (the whole). For example, a roof is only a roof if it fulfils a certain function within this whole, and for this, the roof must already be in a grounding relation to this whole, to the house. This relation of the parts to the whole, precedes the actual realization of the whole by the realization of the parts. We would not build a roof at all, if we did not have the purpose of building a house, i.e. if there was no preceding representation of the whole. Kant takes this to be the paradigmatic case of purposive activity. There is a subjective representation of the whole before it is realized intentionally by an understanding, and it is this subjective representation  Kant uses prominently two kinds of analogies, which we would call today attributional analogies and proportional analogies. In attributional analogies, we transfer a property from one thing to another thing of the same genus. In proportional analogies however, we determine the relation of the four elements by attributing proportions. On Kant on analogies see Pieper (1996, 92–112). Breitenbach (2009, 70–75). 20

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that grounds the parts as parts of the whole. We transfer this whole-part characteristic to the natural thing by analogy: Now for a thing as a natural end it is requisite, first, that its parts (as far as their existence and their form are concerned) are possible only through their relation to the whole. For the thing itself is an end, and is thus comprehended under a concept or an idea that must determine a priori everything that is to be contained in it (CJ 244 f./AA 5:373).

However, a natural object is not an artifact that is created by the purposive activity of a subject. On the contrary, it must be understood as being created only by the forces of matter itself (CJ 250/AA 5: 378). Kant makes this explicit at the end of § 65: an analogy between natural purposive things and artifacts fails, since the purposiveness from which we draw the analogy presupposes the subjective representation of these objects through reason. However, natural ends must be purposes that are not represented in a subjective way before they are realized. Consequently, these natural things cannot be understood in analogy to artifacts (CJ 246/AA 5:374). The way in which the whole must be regarded to precede the realization of the parts in natural things cannot be grounded in a subjective representation of a subject. Therefore, a natural thing, which must be regarded to be possible only as a purposive product, must meet another criterion: But if a thing, as a natural product, is nevertheless to contain in itself and its internal possibility a relation to ends, i.e., is to be possible only as a natural end and without the causality of the concepts of a rational being outside of it, then it is required, second, that its parts be combined into a whole by being reciprocally the cause and effect of their form (CJ 245/ AA 5:373).

This second step of judging the natural thing as a purpose is no longer part of the first analogy, since, as I have argued, in the first analogy, the purposive product cannot be thought of as a cause of itself. On the contrary, based on this analogy, a subject produces this purposive product. A natural thing that is to be judged as a natural end however must be regarded in such a way that the whole must neither exist independently of the parts, nor must the parts exist independently of each other or independently of the whole. Hence, while reason represents the idea of the house independently of the material by which we realize this subjective purpose, this must not be the case with a natural thing that is to be regarded as a natural end. Here, the parts must be grounded in the whole, but in such a way that they reproduce the whole in reproducing each other because of their purposive behaviour. In contrast to artifacts, such natural things must be regarded as having a ‘formative power’ (CJ 246/AA 5:374).

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3.2 The Failure of the Second Analogy in the Derivation of the Concept of a Natural End What element makes the second analogy possible, if it is not the analogy to the purposive activity of reason in producing artifacts? At the end of §65 Kant discusses another possible candidate from which we could draw the analogy: the analogy to life. Here, ‘life’ refers to something being ensouled.21 I think Khurana is right in referring to Kant’s definition of life given in the Critique of Practical Reason (CPrR) in order to elaborate on what life means here. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant describes life as ‘the faculty of a being to act in accordance with laws of the faculty of desire’ (CPrR 7/AA 5:9 f.). Thus, the same way a being aims to realize the representations that are grounded in the faculty of desire, natural things organize themselves in accordance with such a faculty. Now, if we attributed this faculty to natural things and claimed it as the reason for their organization, we would attribute a self-organizing force to matter. In this case, however, we would have to ‘either endow matter as mere matter with a property (hylozoism) that contradicts its essence, or else associate with it an alien principle standing in communion with it (a soul)’ (CJ 246/AA 5:374 f.). The attribution of the property of self-organization to matter, however, contradicts what matter is essentially supposed to be; it is essentially supposed to be inertia (CJ 246/AA 5:374). The second option, the association of matter with another self-organizing principle leads to no explanation, either. For in associating it with such a principle, we either already presuppose that matter is organized or we claim that this principle organizes matter. If we already presuppose organized matter with the association of this principle, we would not have explained anything. Rather, we would have committed a petitio principii. If we were to claim that this principle organizes matter, we would make the natural product an artifact again (CJ 246/AA 5:375). Consequently, according to Kant, the analogy to life in the sense mentioned above also fails. In sum, analogies that are based either on our own realizations of purposes in artifacts or on our ability of self-movement fail. Hence, Kant concludes that the organization of natural things is ‘not analogous with any causality that we know’ (CJ 246/AA 5:375.). On theoretical grounds, we do not have the resources to make the concept of natural end comprehensible to us; i.e. there is no determinate application of it.22 Thus, Kant claims that inner natural perfection, as is possessed by  Cf. Khurana (2017, 95).  One could object that Kant’s claim that we can think over the ‘highest ground [of these natural objects, K.K.] in accordance with a remote analogy with our own causality in accordance with ends’ (CJ 247/AA 5:375) is in tension with my claim that we cannot understand the concept of a natural end at all. So, there seems to be an analogy, which in the end somehow works. However, it is disputed what this kind of analogy is about. In accordance with Breitenbach and Khurana I think the best candidate is the reference to the structure of reason itself, and by this to our moral-practical capacity of reason. However, my claim is that analogies on theoretical grounds do not work. So, even if there is one that works on practical grounds, that would not help in understanding the concept of a natural end on theoretical grounds. On theoretical grounds the possibility of organized 21 22

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those things that are possible only as natural ends and hence as organized beings, is not thinkable and explicable in accordance with any analogy to any physical, i.e., natural capacity that is known to us; indeed, since we ourselves belong to nature in the widest sense, it is not thinkable and explicable even through an exact analogy with human art. (CJ 247/AA 5:375)’ And he continues that ‘[t]he concept of a thing as in itself a natural end is therefore not a constitutive concept of the understanding or of reason, but it can still be a regulative concept for the reflecting power of judgement […]’ (CJ 247/AA 5:375). The reason according to which the concept of a natural end is a regulative concept is its incomprehensibility, which means that it lacks a determinate application.

4 The Conceptual Relation Between the Concept of a Natural End and That of Organisms The last section has shown that the kind of causality by which we judge natural things to be natural ends will remain incomprehensible to us because there is no determinate application. However, there is also a positive result within the field of theoretical philosophy. Teleological judgments are insofar epistemically relevant, as we only conceive of a natural thing as organized and self-organizing by judging it to be a natural end; and to regard a natural thing as organized and self-organizing means, in turn, to regard it as an organism.23 Consequently, we only regard natural things in nature as organisms by applying the concept of a natural end to them. Against the background of the last part of this essay, I think this thesis can be justified in three steps. First, note that it was the starting point of Kant’s argument that certain natural things perform a sort of behaviour that is underdetermined according to mechanical laws of nature alone. With respect to causal-mechanical laws of nature, all natural things are only contingent compositions, i.e. mere aggregates. Thus, we cannot derive the concept of organization from nature. We must rather ground the behaviour, we observe in some natural things, in another kind of lawfulness than mechanism. Second, note that we ground the observed behaviour in purposive causality. This is because the only explanation that is available to us in understanding a natural thing being both cause and effect of itself is giving the whole priority over its parts. Now, purposive causality is the only kind of causality we can conceive, according

beings ‘is not thinkable and explicable in accordance with any analogy to any physical, i.e., natural capacity that is known to us’ (CJ 247/AA 5:375). For a further reading on the analogy to reason, cf. Breitenbach (2009, 81). Khurana (2017, 96). 23  In his article, Cheung shows that the concept of an organism was introduced as a generic denomination for living beings in the eighteenth century. In biology however, it replaced expressions like organized beings only around 1830. Cf. Cheung (2006, 319–339). On this topic, see also Illetterati (2014, 89).

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to which the whole is explanatorily prior. To judge a thing to be purposive, however, means to judge it to be organized. As we saw in the house example, the parts are only the parts of the whole and formed in such a way that they constitute the whole because of their relation to the whole, to the house. The preceding representation of the whole explains the organization of artifacts.24 In the first analogy, we derive this feature of the concept of a natural end, and we then transfer this kind of organizational structure to the natural things in question. In this way we judge this natural thing to have an organized structure common to artifacts. With respect to artifacts however, we know that their organization is grounded in a purpose; with respect to the natural thing in question, we do not know if its behaviour is grounded in a purpose, we just judge it that way, and through this judgment, we think of it as being organized. Third, we should keep in mind that this first analogy is not an adequate analogy because natural things are not artifacts. Rather, we must judge them to be organized due to their being product of their own self-organization. Artifacts miss the property of self-organization that we need if we are to regard natural things as natural ends. The specific cause-and-effect-causality that certain natural things are subject to, must therefore be thought of in such a way that the parts organize themselves into a whole. In contrast to artifacts such as machines, they must be judged to have a ‘formative power’, and not only a ‘motive power’ (CJ 246/AA 5:374). Conceptually, this can neither be captured by artifact teleology nor by analogy to life (in the sense described in 3.2.). Hence, the new element gets introduced without having an adequate correspondence to any analogy to any natural capacity we know, nor to our own capacity of producing artifacts.25 I argued that this is the reason according to which we cannot comprehend the concept of a natural end on a theoretical level. Nevertheless, against the background that Kant defines matter to be essentially inertia, there must be another principle accounting for activity in the sense of self-­ organization. As I argued this principle is a teleologically one, i.e. the principle of inner purposiveness. It is thus only by judging a natural thing as a natural end, that we interpret the character of this natural thing in contrast to disorganized matter and in contrast to organized matter to be self-organized. To understand a natural thing as organized  Accordingly, Ginsborg argues that there are two kinds of mechanical inexplicability in the third Critique. We can neither explain artifacts nor organisms by mechanical laws of nature alone because we cannot explain their ‘composite character’ (Ginsborg 2004, 44). Therefore, the ofteninvoked opposition between organisms and artifacts (or machines), according to which organisms are mechanically inexplicable because they entertain non-machine-like features, turns out to rely on a wrong presupposition. It presupposes that machines are mechanically explicable. However, the opposition between organisms and artifacts is one that falls within the field of teleology itself. Cf. Ginsborg (2004, 33–65). 25  In fact, Kant claims that there is a ‘remote analogy with our own causality in accordance with ends’ (CJ 247/AA 5:375). However, this analogy is not for the sake of our seeking knowledge of nature or the original ground of such natural things, ‘but rather for the sake of the very same practical faculty of reason in us’ (CJ 247/AA 5:375). This analogy has an important practical impact, which exceeds the limits of this essay. I only focus on the theoretical impact here. 24

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and self-organizing, however, means to understand it as an organism in the first place. If this is correct, it follows that to judge a thing to be organized and self-­ organizing is not prior to our judging natural things as natural ends; it is posterior. Consequently, only the application of teleology allows for drawing a distinction between organic and inorganic things.26 Thus, directly addressing the question of the derivation of the concept of an organism, leads to surprising results. For it shows – in contrast to what one might think – that the concept of an organism is not an empirical but an a priori concept without having objective reality. In contrast to this, in merely heuristic readings such as McLaughlin’s, for instance, the concept of an organism is an empirical concept and thus has objective reality.27 According to this reading, we need the concept of a natural end only insofar as we have to think of organisms due to their mechanical inexplicability. My reading, however, suggests that we can only think natural things to be self-organizing, and that is to be organisms, if the concept of a natural end is already invoked. I thus suggest that the concept of a natural end and the concept of an organism have a much closer conceptual relationship than usually thought.

4.1 Two Objections Before I conclude, it is worth dealing with two objections that might arise naturally against the reading suggested here. 4.1.1 The Exegetical Evidence One could object that the exegetical evidence for such a reading is rather missing to the extent that Kant never claims this conceptual dependency between natural ends and organisms in §§ 64,65 with such explicitness. Passages such as ‘[o]rganized beings are thus the only ones in nature which, even if considered in themselves and without a relation to other things, must nevertheless be thought of as possible only as its ends’ (CJ 247/AA 5:375 f.) or ‘[a]n organized product of nature is that in which everything is an end and reciprocally a means’ (CJ 247/AA 5:376) do not make explicit claims about the conceptual dependency between the concepts of ‘organized being’ and ‘natural end’. However, in the Dialectic of the Teleological Power of Judgment he is more explicit about the logical dependency claiming that ‘even the thought of them  Goy also holds that teleology is constitutive for drawing the difference between organic and inorganic things in nature in the first place; Goy (2010, 224, 226). Though, I do not see her giving a concrete argument for this claim. 27  Cf. McLaughlin (1989, 43). Albeit with different approaches, the concept of the organism also appears as an empirical concept according to Kreines’ and Ginsborg’s readings, cf. Kreines (2005), Ginsborg (2015). 26

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[natural things that we judge to be organisms, K.K.] as organized things is impossible without associating the thought of a generation with an intention’ (CJ 269/AA 5:398, emphasis mine), i.e. without invoking the concept of a purpose. Thus, without the concept of a purpose there is no concept of organized natural things. Moreover, in On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy (UTP), published two years before the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant is much clearer about the conceptional conditioning relations. There, he claims that ‘the concept of an organized being already includes that it is some matter in which everything is mutually related to each other as end and means, which can only be thought as a system of final causes’ (UTP 214/AA 8:179, first emphasis mine) and that the concept of an organic being is this: that it is a material being which is possible only through the relation of everything contained in it to each other as end and means […]. Therefore a basic power that is effectuated through an organization has to be thought as a cause effective according to ends, and this in such a manner that these ends have to be presupposed for the possibility of the effect (UTP 215 f./AA 8:181, first emphasis mine).

These passages clearly state that we derive the concept of an organic being, i.e. of an organism, from the concept of a natural end, i.e. from teleological principles. 4.1.2 A Circularity Problem? There is another worry that I cannot discuss at length here, but that at least needs to be addressed: Does my reading presuppose the kind of self-organization I aim to ground in teleological principles? This worry stems from the idea that our judging things purposively is occasioned by a kind of self-organization. However, I argued that we only derive the concept of self-organization through teleological principles. We do not gain the concept of self-organization from nature. It is rather a concept we impose upon nature – in a regulative way. Now, one could wonder if it is possible to think about the behaviour of these natural things without always already implying teleological vocabulary. In this sense, the concepts of generation, growth, and preservation already seem to imply the concept of self-organization and therefore, in my reading, teleology. I think one possible path to go would be invoking the concept of an intuitive understanding as Kant introduces it in §§ 76, 77. This concept is a limiting concept: Its introduction serves the purpose of revealing the limits of our own cognitive capacities to us. In contrast to us, an intuitive understanding would be able to explain the behaviour of these natural things and therefore, the whole-part relation in question without invoking teleology.28 Thus, there is the logical possibility of understanding the kind of whole-part-relation some natural things seem to be subject to in non-teleological way. Obviously, this raises a lot of further important questions that need to be addressed. My aim in this second part of the paper only consisted in showing that there is a conceptual dependency: the concept of self-organization is dependent on the concept of teleology.  On the function of Kant’s introduction of the concept of an intuitive understanding, cf. Förster (2002, 171–180). 28

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5 Concluding Remarks The reading I suggested here exceeds heuristic readings, according to which we need the concept of a natural end only for scientific investigations into organisms. According to this interpretation, the concept of an organism is an empirical one and we apply teleological principles to organisms only to the extent that they must be considered natural ends, which is for scientific purposes. In contrast to that, I make a strong case for teleology. Teleological principles, the concept of a natural end, may well play a heuristic role in investigating natural things but the importance I ascribe to them exceeds this purely heuristic role insofar as we are only able to draw a distinction between organic and inorganic things by application of the concept of a natural end, because we can only think the concept of an organism by already having invoked the concept of a natural end. However, according to Kant, teleological judgments of these things remain subjective and regulative. We can conceive the concept of a natural end, but we cannot make it comprehensible to us. So, I think there are good reasons to attribute the following position to Kant: There are natural things that occasion our judging them purposively in a regulative way. Only by applying teleology, we judge these natural things as organized and self-organizing beings and thus as organisms. The difference between inorganic and organic matter can only be drawn after this application of the concept of a natural end. If this is correct, then we are forced to claim that we have no concept of an organism independently of our judging natural things purposively.

References Breitenbach, Angela. 2006. Mechanical Explanation of Nature and its Limits in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (4): 694–711. ———. 2009. Die Analogie von Vernunft und Natur. Eine Umweltphilosophie nach Kant. Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter. Cheung, Tobias. 2006. From the Organism of a Body to the Body of an Organism: Occurrence and Meaning of the Word ‘Organism’ from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries. The British Journal for the History of Science 39 (3): 319–339. Emundts, Dina. 2001. Das Problem der Organismen in Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft und im Nachlasswerk. In Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung: Akten des IX.  Internationalen Kant-­ Kongresses, ed. Volker Gerhardt, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, and Ralph Schumacher, vol. 4, 503–512. Berlin: de Gruyter. Förster, Eckart. 2002. Die Bedeutung von §§ 76,77 der “Kritik der Urteilskraft” für die Entwicklung der nachkantischen Philosophie [Teil 1]. Zeitschrift für philosophische. Forschung 56: 169–190. Ginsborg, Hannah. 2004. Two Kinds of Mechanical Inexplicability in Kant and Aristotle. Journal of the History of Philosophy 42 (1): 33–65. ———. 2015. The Normativity of Nature. Essays on Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goy, Ina. 2010. Die Teleologie der organischen Natur (§§ 64-68). In Immanuel Kant: Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Otfried Höffe, 223–239. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

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———. 2017. Kants Theorie der Biologie. Ein Kommentar. Eine Lesart. Eine historische Einordnung. Berlin: de Gruyter. Haag, Johannes. 2019. Darstellungen der Zweckmäßigkeit in Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft. In Teleologische Reflexion in Kants Philosophie, ed. Paula Órdenes and Anna Pickhan, 167–190. Wiesbaden: Springer. Illetterati, Luca. 2014. Teleological Judgment: Between Technique and Nature. In Kant’s Theory of Biology, ed. Ina Goy and Eric Watkins, 81–98. Berlin: de Gruyter. Kant, Immanuel. [AA] 1900 passim. Kants gesammelte Schriften (Academy Edition). Edited by the Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin. ———. [CJ] 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer. Trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. [UTP] 2007. On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy. Trans R. B. Louden, G. Zöller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. [CPrR] 2015. Critique of Practical Reason. Trans. M.  Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Khurana, Thomas. 2017. Das Leben der Freiheit. Form und Wirklichkeit der Autonomie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Kreines, James. 2005. The Inexplicability of Kant’s Naturzweck: Kant on Teleology, Explanation and Biology. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 87 (3): 270–311. Lindquist, Daniel. 2018. Hegel’s “Idea of Life” and Internal Purposiveness. HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 8(2): 376–408. McLaughlin, Peter. 1989. Kants Kritik der teleologischen Urteilskraft. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag. ———. 2014. Mechanical Explanation in the “Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment”. In Kant’s theory of biology, ed. Ina Goy and Eric Watkins, 149–165. Berlin: de Gruyter. Pieper, Annemarie. 1996. Kant und die Methode der Analogie. In Kant in der Diskussion der Moderne, ed. Yashushi Kato and Gerhard Schönrich, 92–112. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Watkins, Eric. 2014. Nature in General as a System of Ends. In Kant’s Theory of Biology, ed. Ina Goy and Eric Watkins, 117–130. Berlin: de Gruyter. Zuckert, Rachel. 2007. Kant on Beauty and Biology. An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2017. Organism and System in German Idealism. In The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks, 271–291. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kant and Biological Theory Andrew Cooper

In their provocative paper, ‘The extended evolutionary synthesis’, Laland et  al. (2015, 1) call for a new ‘conceptual framework’ for the biological sciences. Their radical goal is to replace the Modern Synthesis (MS), which privileges population genetics as the fundamental cause in the evolutionary process, with a revised synthesis that includes constructive processes, ecological interactions, and systems dynamics in the evolution of organizational complexity. The accepted view of the MS as a unified theory reflects a historical achievement that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s, which drew the Darwinian principles of variation, inheritance, and natural selection together with Mendelian population genetics. Adopting the MS, the biologist views the evolutionary process as the alteration in gene frequency across a species’ population (Dobzhansky 1937). Natural selection is seen as the most important evolutionary force responsible for alteration, for it determines the differential reproductive success of inheritable traits (Mayr 2004; Sober 2000). Yet Laland et al. contend that by prioritizing the gene as the fundamental unit of study, the MS fragments the evolutionary process into discrete strata and overlooks research programs that consider biological causation at multiple levels, such as evolutionary developmental biology (Evo-Devo), developmental plasticity, inclusive inheritance, and niche construction. In contrast to the MS, which privileges the singular and linear causation of genetic variation in a species’ population, these research programs examine the multilevel and reciprocal causes at work in biological individuals. The question raised by Laland et al. is how research programs concerned with the causal dynamics of biological individuals ought to feature in our best understanding of biological theory. Take niche construction, which considers the process by which an organism alters its own (or another’s) environment. For proponents of

A. Cooper (*) University of Warwick, Coventry, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Corti, J.-G. Schülein (eds.), Life, Organisms, and Human Nature, Studies in German Idealism 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_2

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the EES – call them ‘extenders’1 – niche construction is a causal process whereby ‘the metabolism, activities and choices of organisms modify or stabilize environmental states’ (Laland et al. 2015, 4). It thus affects the selective pressures that act upon them and other species (Müller 2017). For extenders, niche construction does not simply operate alongside natural selection but also assists to explain adaptation (genes are ‘followers’). A biologist who adopts the EES would consider the inheritance of selected traits across a species’ population to ‘share responsibility’ with developmental processes (Laland et al. 2015, 8). However, for those who reject the need for an EES – call them ‘accretionists’2 – the phenomena studied in niche construction can be accounted for within the scope of the MS. Accretionists argue that the MS continues to progress by elaborating the theoretical structures that have been in place since the original synthesis (Sober 2000; Whitfield 2008; Wray et al. 2014; Futuyma 2015; Charlesworth et al. 2017). While this progress involves the integration of current research on organismal dynamics into the MS, accretionists remain committed to the theoretical claim that ‘allele frequency change caused by natural selection is the only credible process underlying the evolution of adaptive organismal traits’ (Charlesworth et al. 2017, 10).3 In the case of niche construction, the organism’s capacity to choose and carve out a niche can be viewed as a fitness differential in a species’ population. This is what Alan Grafen (1991, 6) terms the phenotypic gambit: ‘to examine the evolutionary basis of a character as if the very simplest genetic system controlled it.’ In this chapter I examine the two synthesizing arguments (extension and accretion) by turning to a historical source that has recently caught the attention of philosophers on both sides of the debate: Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. Scholars sympathetic to the MS appeal to Kant’s critique of teleological judgment to identify a tradition of thinking about functions that accounts for the purposiveness of singular organisms in terms of human judgment rather than the constitutive structure of organisms themselves (Kreines 2005; Ginsborg 2006; Quarfood 2006; Breitenbach 2009). Those dissatisfied with the MS find in Kant’s account of the natural purpose an important precursor to contemporary research practices that focus on the activity of singular organisms (Varela 1979, Maturana and Varela 1980, Weber and Varela 2002, Thompson 2007, Mossio et  al. 2009, Moreno and Mossio 2015). The shared interest in Kant, I suggest, indicates a general turn in biological theory toward a second-order level of reflection that acknowledges the role of theory construction in determining the explananda of evolutionary biology. My proposal is that Kant – or at least the recent interest in Kant – offers a  Extenders argue that the EES ‘is not just an extension of the MS but a distinctively different framework for understanding evolution’ (Laland et al. 2015, 3). 2  I borrow this term from Lewens (2019, 708), who describes accretionists as those who claim that new developments in biological research can be integrated into the theoretical structure of the MS in a process of ‘progress by accretion.’ 3  In Walsh’s (2015, 788) characterization of the position, accretionists hold that ‘there is no need to extend to organisms – much less their purposiveness – an explanatory role if sub-organismal causal mechanisms are explanatorily adequate.’ 1

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point of convergence from which we can evaluate the scope and force of synthesizing arguments. With this proposal in view, I argue that both accretionists and extenders pick out a key component of Kant’s critique of teleological judgment, which, according to Kant, must be held together. Those who accept the theoretical stability of the MS take up Kant’s reflective account of teleological judgment while sidelining the transcendental character of his critical philosophy. Those who attribute to developmental processes a causal role in evolution highlight Kant’s analysis of the whole-to-part structure of organic form and yet overlook the regulative status of teleological judgment. By emphasizing one part of Kant’s critique of teleological judgment at the expense of the other, both sides miss the practical nature of his project. Kant does not simply identify the conditions that render it necessary to judge some products of nature teleologically. He also demonstrates the need for second-order analysis to define various domains of inquiry that arise in response to the explanatory demands of nature. The shared turn to Kant, I argue, indicates that synthesizing arguments can be evaluated against their capacity to accommodate ongoing negotiation between the plurality of research aims in practice. I conclude that a deflationary version of the extension argument is best suited to the task.

1 Kant’s Descriptive Metaphysics Before turning to the features of Kant’s critique of teleological judgment that have recently gained attention in biological theory, I want to begin by highlighting the distinctive features of his transcendental conception of nature. My aim is not to present an exhaustive account but rather to provide a sketch that will assist us to see the distance between Kant’s theory construction and the positivist conceptual framework that inspired the architects of the MS. As Vassiliki Smocovitis (1996) demonstrates in her important study of the unification of biology, the MS was initially forged under a belief in the unity of science as laid down by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and 1930s. Following Ernst Mach’s claim that unification must take place via the destruction of metaphysics, the architects of the MS attempted to articulate the unique explanatory demands of biology while maintaining that biological phenomena are dependent on and reducible to the physical stratum. Herein lies a first notable difference between Kant and the architects of the MS. While Kant maintains the unity of science as a regulative ideal for our theory construction, the level on which this unity plays out is not itself theoretical. As Peter Strawson demonstrated in the 1950s, Kant’s critical method differs from positivism to the extent that it defends a descriptive kind of metaphysics. In contrast to traditional metaphysics, which takes the structure of the world to be given independently of our thought, descriptive metaphysics aims to ‘describe the structure of our thought about the world’ (Strawson 1959, 9). For Kant, the nature of a thing is not revealed in bare experience or conceptual analysis but by giving an account of its

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representation. Rejecting the attempt to provide a first-order theory of nature as the total domain of what there is, he begins on the second-order level from which we can reflect on thought’s relation to objects as such.4 From the second-order level, experience does not disclose the properties and structure of nature understood as a pre-constituted domain but the representation of finite beings whose knowledge is epistemically conditioned. The first task of philosophy, then, is to discern the conditions that enable our representation of an object in its most general and abstract form, which Kant terms ‘nature in general’ (B165).5 Following Robert Butts (1986), call this Nature [N]. For Kant, to be an object of our representation is to feature ‘as lawful appearances in space and time’ (B165). In its most abstract form, a law for Kant is a necessary judgment generated by a lawgiver of some kind (Watkins 2019, 2). The sciences concerned with formalizing the laws of Nature [N], and demonstrating how they necessarily apply to material nature, are the ‘pure’ sciences (mathematics and physics). Their laws are not legislated by anything external to thought, such as a divine lawgiver or the properties of empirical objects themselves, but by the synthetic application of the understanding’s form to perceptions as they appear for our intuition (MFNS 4: 469). While Nature [N] requires that to be an object of our representation is to adhere to the laws of the understanding, the arrangement of objects is contingent according to those laws. The totality of appearances that stand under Nature [N] constitutes the manifold of material nature, which Kant terms ‘the sum total of all appearances’ (B164; P 4: 295). Call this nature [n]. The problem with nature [n] is that we cannot, according to the laws of Nature [N], expect to find a systematic arrangement of the laws that govern those appearances. Yet if there are to be sciences of empirical nature (chemistry, geology, biology, etc.), we must do so. To seek laws that govern particular material objects and processes, the natural scientist must assume that those laws cohere within a system, such that every particular law ultimately falls under one of the higher laws of Nature [N] (MFNS 4: 470–71). For instance, when a geologist examines the layers of rock exposed on a mountainside, and compares these layers with other such layers, they do not simply represent the layers as adjacent to one another in time. They also seek particular rules to explain their arrangement (for instance, rules that explain their causal history), without which the arrangement of the layers would remain contingent. Reflecting on the geologist’s research practice, the critical philosopher asks: what is the condition of the geologist’s presupposition that such rules can be found? It cannot be anything captured by Nature [N], which gives rise only to nature [n].6  For an extended account of the levels in Kant’s theory construction, see Cooper (2018, 3111–3116).  References to Critique of Pure Reason follow the standard A/B pagination in Kant (1999). Other references to Kant’s work use the following abbreviations: MFNS for Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Kant 2004a), P for Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Kant 2004b), CJ for Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kant 2000). 6  For an organic example, see Kant’s example of an eye in CJ 20: 240. As Friedman (1991, 89) explains, the natural scientist seeks to ‘arrange more specific empirical concepts and laws into a 4 5

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Because nothing contained in the representation of the layers of rock contains the idea of a systematic arrangement of laws, the critical philosopher concludes that the geologist’s search for a rule – their presupposition that nature is arranged as a system of empirical laws  – is grounded in a ‘principle of purposiveness’, that is, a principle of the ‘lawfulness of the contingent’ (CJ 5: 217). This principle is not applied to nature itself, and nor is it discovered in experience. It is applied to judgment for the reflection on nature, enabling the geologist to examine how the various parts hold together as they do in a machine, where every part has a functional relation to the whole. Call this the examination of nature [a] – nature as art – for it is enabled by a conception of nature as ‘the object of a concept, insofar as the concept is seen as the cause of the object’ (CJ 5: 222). Kant is clear that the principle of purposiveness does not ‘ground any theory’, and nor does it ‘contain cognition of objects and their conditions’ (CJ 20: 205). It simply ‘gives a principle for progress in accordance with laws of experience, whereby the investigation of nature becomes possible.’ This is to say that the systematic order of empirical nature is not given with the representation of an object as law governed. Nature [N] makes it the case that every object of possible experience has a cause, and nature [n] is the aggregate of all appearances (CJ 20: 234–5). It is only by reflecting on nature as a product of a concept – as an ordered system of laws, just like that for which the understanding seeks – that it becomes intelligible to us (CJ 20: 213). The regularities we discover cannot be laws in Kant’s strict sense of the term (they are not necessary judgments generated by a lawgiver). They are empirical rules we take to be laws given the role they play in our systematic modelling of nature [n].7 Nature [a] renders particular appearances intelligible according to a law insofar as they are structurally analogous to products of art. Products of art are constituted by a linear causal relation whereby the parts determine the whole. Natural science for Kant is thus premised on a concept of nature as mechanism (nature [a]), in which emergent levels of complexity can be reduced to the interaction of their component parts. It is vital to maintain, however, that nature [a] is merely a regulative principle that governs our reflection on the manifold of appearances. Kant is aware that there are some products of nature that express a lawfulness that is underdetermined by nature [a]. For instance, some products are judged as products of nature and as producers of themselves; Kant terms such products ‘natural purposes [Naturzwecke]’ (CJ §65). The challenge of grasping Kant’s argument here is to discern how the representation of a natural purpose can be dependent on experience without making any determinate claims about the object of that experience. A natural purpose is not an empirical concept, like the concept tree, mammal, or living being. Empirical objects can be abstracted from experience and then applied to objects by determining judgment. The concept of a thing as a natural purpose is rather ‘an empirically

classificatory and hierarchical system.’ 7  Space does not permit a longer examination of the epistemic and modal status of empirical laws in Kant’s philosophy of science. See Messina (2017) for an overview and Cooper (2023) for my take.

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conditioned concept, i.e., one that is possible only under conditions given in experience’ (CJ 5: 396). The notion of an empirically conditioned concept requires some unpacking. Kant acknowledges that we could consider anything in nature as purposive if we think of it as the means to a purpose that is external to it. Yet the concept of a natural purpose is legitimately applied only if two criteria are met in experience. Call these the design criterion and the self-organization criterion.8 An item fulfils the design criterion if ‘its parts (as far as their existence and their form is concerned) are possible only through their relation to the whole’ (CJ 5: 373). This criterion is met in both artefacts and organized beings: each part of a machine is there only on account of the whole for which it serves a functional role. For an item to qualify as a natural purpose it must meet a further criterion: its parts must be ‘combined into a whole by being reciprocally the cause and effect of their form’ (CJ 5: 373). The self-­ organization criterion separates artefacts from organized beings, for the former are produced by an external cause while the latter cause themselves. This is clear in Kant’s example of a watch: ‘one part is the instrument for the motion of another, but one wheel is not the efficient cause for the production of the other’ (CJ 5: 374). A watch meets the design criterion, for one part exists ‘for the sake of the other’. It does not, however, meet the self-organization criterion, for the parts do not exist ‘because of it [i.e. the whole]’. This is to say that a watch, unlike a natural purpose, ‘cannot by itself replace its parts’, ‘make good defects in its original construction’, or ‘repair itself when it has fallen into disorder’. It manifests merely descending causality, for the purpose is the result of an exterior, efficient cause (the designer). Natural purposes, on the other hand, have ‘descending as well as ascending dependency’, which is to say that they deserve ‘the name of a cause of the same thing of which it is an effect’ (CJ 5: 372). The representation of a thing as capable of maintaining its parts in a state of equilibrium is contingent according to the empirical laws of nature [a], for art entails that the parts cause the whole. The capacity for growth, self-maintenance, and reproduction can only be understood as lawful if one can conceive of a process whereby the whole causes the parts (CJ 5: 365). Yet Kant maintains that the only whole-to-part causality we know is rational causation, either the ordering of a system of knowledge (the representation of the whole determines the parts) or the realization of an idea through practical judgment (the representation of an idea determines the action). Kant thus concludes that our capacity to represent the arrangement of the parts of an organized being as an effect of the whole is made possible by analogy, whereby we transpose the form of purposiveness according to ends into a form of judgment that guides our reflection on an empirically given object (CJ 5: 352–3). The analogy does not exactly fit, for nothing given in experience can adhere to the form of practical reason, in which an action is the conclusion of a syllogism (CJ 5: 374). Nevertheless, it enables us to seek laws that would  Clark Zumbach (1984, 4) describes the two criteria as ‘design-like’ and ‘designer-like’. In the case of a watch we judge it to be design-like but not designer-like. In the case of the bird, however, we examine it through both analogies. 8

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otherwise have remained impervious to us. The key here, as Angela Breitenbach (2009) notes, is that the concept of a natural purpose precedes and enables scientific investigation of organisms, just as nature [a] precedes and enables natural science in general. Neither the concept of a natural purpose nor the concept of nature as mechanism is a discovery made in the natural sciences. By defining the empirically conditioned concept of a natural purpose according to two criteria (design and self-organisation), Kant maintains an analogy and a disanalogy between rational and organic activity. Taken together, the two criteria generate what Hannah Ginsborg (2014) describes as the ‘problem of coherence’: we cannot understand the possibility of organized beings unless we invoke the notion of design, yet we lose the distinctive character of natural purposes when we do. This problem does not occur on the theoretical level, from which one might analyse what an organism is according to its concept. It occurs on the level of practice; it concerns two principles that govern research. The key to Kant’s account of nature is that it describes the conditions that make a domain of inquiry possible. The domain in which the natural scientist investigates the developmental processes of living structure arises because certain objects in nature are such that we can render them intelligible only by introducing a principle derived through an analogy with our own causality as rational agents. Natural purposes tell us nothing about nature [n] or Nature [N], and thus do not warrant an empirical claim that there is either design of self-organization in an item’s etiology. And yet our representation of some items as naturally purposive allows us to seek empirical laws that govern their structure.

2 Accretionists, Extenders, and Kant With this sketch of Kant’s critical philosophy in hand, we are now in a position to discern which of its features have resurfaced in recent debates concerning the theoretical unity of biology. Let us begin with the synthesizing argument put forward by accretionists. Recognizing that processes occurring in the singular organism raise a challenge to the original synthesis of modern biology, several scholars have claimed that the MS meets Kant’s design criterion to the extent that it provides an account of how the biologist examines certain things as if they were purposive (Lewens 2004; Kreines 2005; Ginsborg 2006; Breitenbach 2009; Huneman 2017). Consider Kant’s well-known example of the shape of a bird’s wings (CJ 5: 360). According to nature [a], the arrangement of the parts of a bird is contingent and thus does not call for an examination according to laws. The task of understanding a thing as a natural purpose, however, is to seek the rules that govern its parts as members of the whole. For instance, to inquire into how the parts of a bird are adapted to specific environmental conditions we must ‘conceive of nature as technical through its own capacity’ (CJ 5: 360). Natural purposiveness is thus the idea that some things we encounter, while contingent according to nature [a], are nevertheless lawful. Once we reflect on the structure of the wings as purposive, we can pick out and examine the particular features that realize this purpose (‘the structure of a bird, the hollowness of its

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bones, the placement of its wings for movement and of its tail for steering, etc.,’). Likewise, the MS entails that evolution by natural selection can occur when a set of entities feature variable heritable properties. While the variations of these properties are blind to their possible functionality, the principle of natural selection enables us to attribute to such variations a fitness value. On this reading, Kant’s descriptive metaphysics can explain how the biologist is able to maintain (a) the theoretical assumption that functional parts can be exhaustively explained by liner causes acting on population genetics and (b) a regulative account of purposiveness on the level of the organism. On the theoretical level – the vantage we adopt when interpreting the  data of a particular study  – changes in organic form can be explained according to changes in the frequency of genes across a species’ population. On the practical level  – the standpoint of the researcher – the examination of traits in a biological individual is teleological. Kant therefore assists us to solve the Machian dilemma of accommodating biology’s unique explanatory demands without violating the causal closure of the physical, for he can help us explain why the teleological level (reflection on acquired traits as selected) is practically necessary (without it, the science of evolutionary change would not be possible) and yet theoretically contingent (function ascriptions can be reduced to population dynamics). Scholars who account for the apparent tension between population dynamics and the activity of the singular organism with reference to Kant tend to focus on the similarities between Kant’s critique of teleological judgment and what Daniel Dennett (1995, 1998) describes as the ‘intentional stance’, a non-scientific view of nature in search of reasons. According to Dennett (1995, 213), by adopting the intentional stance ‘we try to figure out what reason, if any, “Mother Nature” – the process of evolution by natural selection itself – “discerned” or “discriminated” for doing things one way rather than another’. The intentional stance opens a method of reverse engineering whereby we attempt to infer selection pressures from observed organismic solutions. Reverse engineering is a method in behavioural ecology that examines functional adaptations as technical solutions to adaptive problems on the assumption that natural selection is a designing force. This view assumes that parts should be studied as solutions to problems raised by environments where the organism is found. The reverse engineer does not claim that organisms are engineered machines. Rather, they follow a regulative principle to examine their properties as parts of a machine. This method is based on the idea that we cannot account for organisms as organisms unless we assume that they are systems designed to cope with environmental demands while remaining fully aware that we cannot empirically prove that they were designed. Reverse engineering thus affirms Kant’s insistence that the design criterion regulates inquiry but does not posit design in an item’s etiology (see CJ 5: 361). Extenders, by contrast, seek to integrate constructive processes, ecological interactions, and systems dynamics into evolutionary theory. A research program concerned with such processes upholds Kant’s second criterion for a natural purpose. One says ‘far too little about nature and its capacity in organized products if one calls this an analogue of art’, Kant states, ‘for in that case one conceives of the artist

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(a rational being) outside of it’ (CJ 5: 374). By rejecting the capacity of the artefact analogy to capture organized products, extenders claim that Kant is closer to Aristotle than he is to the architects of the MS. A natural purpose is moved by an idea intrinsic to itself, manifest in the circular and interdependent causal structure between whole and parts. In contrast to a product of art, a natural purpose is something that ‘is cause and effect of itself’. In such a circular causal structure, ‘each part is conceived as if it exists only through all the others, thus as if existing for the sake of the others and on account of the whole’ (CJ 5: 373). Extenders tend to locate their position in continuity with Kant on the grounds that he provides a theoretical structure for the study of developmental processes. As Gerd Müller (2017, 4) explains, a research practice focused on multilinear and reciprocal causation ‘starts from the premise that the genotype-phenotype relation is not merely a statistical correlation, but that the rules of developmental processes govern phenotypic outcomes while relying on additional inputs not coming from the genome.’ Stuart Kauffman (2013, 5) describes the unit of development as a ‘Kantian whole’ to designate complex structures made up of parts that bear real functions, that is, causal roles that intend to sustain the existence of the whole. Kauffman views Kant as a precursor to Evo-Devo, for the idea of a natural purpose identifies a biological unit that is causally prior to the dynamics of natural selection. Mossio and Bich (2017, 1099) build on Kant to argue that ‘teleology is grounded in a specific kind of circular regime’ they term ‘self-determination’. Self-determination, they suggest, consists of ‘a network of mutually dependent components, each of them exerting a causal influence on the condition of existence of the others, so that the whole network is collectively able to self-maintain.’ On this reading, Kant shows us that biological processes are possible only on the condition of the existence of organisms, that is, complex systems characterized by individuation, agency, and self-regulation. If Kant is right, then organisms play an irreducible causal role in the evolutionary process, for they ‘counter and remove potentially deleterious variations, while preserving useful variations’ (Mossio et al. 2016, 26). Philippe Huneman (2017, 284) claims that the MS and Evo-Devo each fulfil one of Kant’s two criteria that must be satisfied if a thing is to be judged as a natural purpose. The MS fulfils the design criterion, he states, for it ‘explains the design of such a whole by appealing to a designing trend that is realized by natural selection, which maximizes inclusive fitness’. Evo-Devo fulfils the self-organization criterion, for ‘epigenetic self-production of parts by parts is here understood under the presupposition of a viable whole.’ Huneman concludes that ‘an organism in the Kantian sense is the locus of a synthesis between Modern Synthesis and developmental biology.’ This is to say that Kant’s account of the natural purpose is able ‘to support two explanatory projects – one about functions or adaptions, the other about development’ (Huneman 2017, 378). If Kant is right that privileging one standpoint over the other leads to a reductive program that overlooks a necessary feature of organic structure, then the synthesis question can be cut along Kantian lines. For Huneman (2017, 384), the open question is how to understand ‘the relation between the two Kantian criteria in current biology.’

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Huneman is certainly right that Kant’s two criteria uphold multiple projects of research. However, this ‘open question’ is more demanding than he acknowledges, for Kant’s descriptive metaphysics operates on a different level to that on which the synthesis debate is staged. The question might be rephrased as follows. Can we synthesize the two criteria that must be met for a thing to be judged as naturally purposive on the level of biological theory, that is, without Kant’s transcendental framework? Recall that Kant’s account of natural purposes does not describe anything in nature (understood as nature [n]). It describes something in us, i.e., why it is subjectively necessary to hold both criteria together, even though they do not cohere on the theoretical level. This is to say that Kant’s metaphysics denies the existence of nature understood as a totality of objects external to thought and instead seeks to describe how nature is possible for thought. Teleological judgment does not provide causal explanations; it enables us to examine natural products either as mechanically ordered (nature [a]) or as governed by an inner principle of organization (natural purposes). Kant insists that teleological judgment ‘provides no information at all about the origination and the inner possibility of [organic] forms’, but rather guides us to seek laws that govern structures that are already organized (CJ 5: 417). If we were to extrapolate from either the design criterion or the self-­organizing criterion to the entire causal story, we would end up with either an exhaustively mechanical system, which would deny the causal role of development in the evolutionary process, or hylozoism, which violates the a priori laws of Nature [N]. The attempt to develop an ‘original principle of organization’ is ‘inscrutable’, for Kant, for it lies beyond the reach of finite human cognition (CJ 5: 423). Recognizing the distance between Kant’s account of a natural purpose and the explanatory goals of evolutionary biology, what could Kant possibly contribute to the present theoretical juncture?

3 Synthesis in Practice While Kant’s two criteria invalidate the attempt to synthesize adaptation and developmental processes on the theoretical level, it nevertheless opens a possible synthesis on the level of practice. Here it is vital to note the different conceptions of nature assumed by accretionists and extenders. Accretionists share a structural feature with Kant’s epistemology, for they conceive of design through an analogy with intentional agents. This is to say that purposiveness in nature is symptomatic of the way that we understand the natural world; it does not explain the presence of a trait but allows us to examine the role it plays within an existing system. In contrast, extenders claim that self-organization is a causal relation. Extending arguments claim to uphold the ‘distributed causality’ (Oyama 2001) of genetic and non-genetic factors by recognizing multiple factors that contribute to the evolutionary process. In this sense extenders envision a radically different kind of synthesis to that proposed by accretionists. Their argument does not presuppose a fundamental causal level that can be separated from higher levels of complexity without remainder but accepts a

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plurality of causal factors studied by biologists, which operate at multiple levels in the evolutionary process. One danger of overlooking the tension between the design and self-organization criteria is that we overdetermine analogical reasoning in research practice. In the case of artefacts, we discern the function of a part in terms of a finite series of rational decisions made by a designer. On Dennett’s account of the design stance, we can equally consider traits as solutions to engineering problems posed by ecologies.9 Yet reverse engineers face the same problem as Kant: they cannot tell us why we should expect the intentional stance – a vantage made available to us by a subjective principle – to tell us anything about nature. As Paul Griffiths (1996) notes, when we try to infer selection pressures from observed organismic solutions, we underdetermine the adaptive problems that are meant to be solved precisely because of the disanalogy between design and the evolutionary process. Reverse engineers are forced to make what Griffiths (1996, 515) calls ‘functional generalisations’, which state that any organism, faced with the same adaptive problem, will adopt a given solution. Yet functional generalizations are notoriously unreliable, for the external environment is so fine-grained and the idiosyncrasies of the organism so specific that the solutions available to a lineage are utterly singular. The problem here is that the MS does not offer a naturalized account of what designing requires over and above mere causing; the design analogy does all the work. Without such a distinction, every effect of a process could be considered as a designed effect, such that Uluru could be seen to solve the problem of making just such a rock (Fodor 1996). Kant’s account avoids this problem, for it does not connect design with causal history; design simply provides a form of representation by which certain things and processes become salient to us. By prioritizing the design criterion, accretionists bracket out any possible role played by inner constitution in selection. Richard Dawkins (1978) for instance argues that the singular organism is merely an evolutionarily insignificant ‘vehicle’ for bearing genetic information when viewed from the scientific stance. This possibility remains open for extenders, who maintain the disanalogy between artefacts and organized beings captured by Kant’s self-organization criterion (while an artefact is an item that suggests rationally determined organization, a natural purpose must also be considered as ‘both cause and effect of itself’). Richard Lewontin (2001) examines the similarities between developmental processes in the populations of different species in order to discern how developmental, organizational, and other ‘internal’ factors actively contribute to selection. Susan Oyama (2001, 186) describes the relational interactions within an organic unit as ‘a collection of interdependencies’, resulting in what Griffiths and Gray (1994) describe as ‘explanatory parity’ across genetic and non-genetic factors. The theoretical frame of the MS blinkers the biologist from considering the causal role of non-genetic factors in controlling gene frequency, which can only be seen by observing developmental  Consider Dennett’s (1995, 462) phrasing: ‘Mother Nature (natural selection) can be viewed as having intentions, in the limited sense of having retrospectively endorsed features for one reason or another.’ 9

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processes through large data sets and computational models of dynamic systems (Rosen 1972; Kitano 2002). The disanalogy between artefacts and organisms suggests that we cannot account for the appearance of intentionality in nature through an exclusive reference to design, for design presupposes intentionality (Fodor 1996, 252). Neither Dennett nor Kant provides a reason for why we should expect a connection between the intension of natural selection (i.e., its teleological character) and the intention of design. In fact, Dennett removes the possibility of such a reason being given, for he posits a fundamental level of causality on which the higher level of reason giving and receiving supervenes. Thus conceived, the only purposiveness the MS can permit features within the auspices of rational agency. Similarly, by restricting whole-­to-­part causation to human thought and action, Kant denies that it can be directly extended to organisms and thus restricts teleology to reflecting judgment. As John Zammito (2009, 236) notes, Kant’s analogy between purposiveness and rational agency denies the possibility of explaining the original emergence of organization from unorganized matter; that some natural products are self-organizing must be assumed. Zammito draws our attention to the dilemma Kant faced in the 1780s. By acknowledging the emerging research practices concerned with the organizational structure of living beings, Kant was forced either to extend his notion of purposiveness to nature itself, and thus render the entire system contingent on natural processes, or to curb it to a mere subjective necessity. The first move would shift toward a naturalist epistemology in which the human mind features as a part of nature. The second would retain the a priori status of pure natural science while severely limiting the prospects of empirical science in general and the science of living beings in particular. Kant goes for the latter. Biologists adopting a developmentalist framework, in contrast, ‘discern such features empirically’ (Zammito 2009, 241). If such features were not empirical, how could the problem raised by things for which it is necessary to reflect on through analogies with reason have arisen in the first place? Despite their constant reference to Kant’s criterion of self-organization, extenders call for a naturalistic account of organization. For example, Mossio and Bich (2017) examine intrinsic purposiveness as an empirically real form of self-constitution, for they consider organizational closure and differentiation as a causal relation that is instantiated in nature. Their developmental account of the evolutionary process, while building on Kant, transgresses the regulative character of teleological judgment. The issue here is that Kant’s two criteria were not developed through the elaboration of biological theory but through a critique of scientific practice. Indeed, Kant does not offer a theory of biology or a science of the living being. Instead, he offers an account of how the investigation of certain items in nature as organized is possible without rendering the initial starting point of our theory construction impossible (i.e., the human standpoint). The life sciences were developing rapidly in the late-eighteenth century without a unified theory, and Kant aimed to synthesize two opposing research projects: physicotheology, which restricted the examination of living beings to a mechanical, external kind of purposiveness, and vitalism, which posited an organizing power in matter through an analogy with Newton’s gravitational force. Kant saw that the physicotheologians, who bestow the origin of design

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to a cause outside of nature, rightly examine living beings according to the functionality of their parts. However, by construing this analysis as explanatory, they denied that the conditions of Nature [N] hold in every case, removing the imperative to seek the origins of organic structure within nature [n]. Kant also saw that the vitalists rightly examine living beings according to their structure, but once more violate the conditions of Nature [N] by attributing an organizational force to matter. Kant’s charge is that both sides mistake a methodological problem for a problem of theory. He thus transformed the theoretical assumptions of both research projects into methodological criteria that are subjectively necessary for the examination of some natural things, capturing both their functional and structural elements, neither of which capture the things we judge as naturally purposive in their entirety. Kant insists that we can only investigate natural purposes in their functional and structural dimensions without contradiction if we accept that neither project offers an exhaustive theory of biological phenomena.

4 Synthesizing from the Human Standpoint Kant’s notion of a standpoint can assist us to examine the strength of synthesizing arguments, yet it requires that we take seriously the descriptive nature of Kant’s metaphysics, which stands at odds with the positivism on which the MS was forged. A standpoint for Kant is a practical vantage from which we can refer to objects in a given domain while recognizing the situated nature of one’s position. This is famously conveyed by Kant’s idea of ‘the human standpoint’ (CPR A26/B42) from which we acknowledge the epistemic conditions of experience and then seek to describe those conditions via a critique of our representation of natural objects (Nature [N]). From the human standpoint we discern the principles of experience from various levels of abstraction, including nature [n] (the totality of appearances), nature [a] (appearances as natural products), and natural purposes (natural products manifesting a whole-to-part structure). By starting from the human standpoint, the idea of a global domain – nature understood as a pre-constituted object independent of thought – is ruled out from the start. Instead, we ask how a given domain discloses nature. We cannot adjudicate the success of any one domain from the vantage of a global domain, for such would require a departure from the human standpoint. Theory construction for Kant is a modelling activity conducted by finite human knowers whose knowledge is epistemically conditioned. This entails that a research project undertaken from a particular standpoint (genetic drift, Evo-Devo, niche construction, etc.) cannot be assessed from the outside. As a well-worn but easily forgotten slogan: there is no view from nowhere. Since the advent of quantitative evolutionary theory, proponents of the MS have insisted that all models of evolution must ultimately be based at the level of

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genotypes and their dynamics.10 Inheritance is thus genetic and developmental processes are the translation of genotypes into phenotypes. The upshot of this view is that adaptive change is the result of natural selection acting on these expressed phenotypes (Buskell 2020). In contrast, extenders argue that because phenotypic outcomes are underdetermined by genotypes, and because of the plasticity of the organism’s development in response to its environment, genes do not control the adaptive process, and neither can they be separated from the complex range of causal factors at work in evolution. From the human standpoint, a claim about the priority of a particular domain cannot be judged as either true or false (apart from the general claim that to be a natural object is to appear within the conditions of Nature [N]), for there are no conditions of reference outside a given framework. On the level of theory, we reflect on how the various domains disclose discrete regions of experience, we seek contradictions within a particular domain, we compare results with other domains, and we generate new lines of inquiry. The unity of domains for Kant is not itself a theoretical principle but an assumption that makes our theory construction possible. A synthesizing argument, then, would fail if it proposed a theory of evolution as merely a linear causal process. A synthesizing argument can only succeed if it offers a framework for linking together various domains of inquiry, provides practical guidance, and holds together a range of causal factors. While a synthesizing argument made from the human standpoint falls on the side of the extenders, it is deflationary in comparison to the radical EES advanced by Laland et al. (2015) and Müller (2017). A deflationary EES would allow the biologist to accept the explanatory power of the MS, when it comes to examining the role of genetic change in natural selection, and yet also to accommodate organic development when investigating the role of developmental features in selection. As Tim Lewens’ (2019) explains, a deflationary EES would refrain from squabbling over whether a process picked out by a given research practice is fundamental to the evolutionary process and instead ask whether it is important. Various domains of inquiry thus ‘allow us to shed light on phenomena that would otherwise go unseen, or remain unexplained’ (Lewens 2019, 715). For the deflationist extender, shared causal responsibility does not result in a theoretical synthesis that extends the conceptual framework of the MS. The result is a methodological synthesis of the various domains of inquiry and a guide for new research questions concerning the role of structure in the selective process. Once we acknowledge that the processes deemed to be causally salient are conditioned by a domain of inquiry, we begin to clear the ground for a synthesis that reflects the multilevel and reciprocal causal processes studied in current biological practice. Charles Darwin was interested in how form changes, not in ontogenetic origins (Amundson 2005, 104). Natural selection operates on items for which the ontogenetic origins are unknown, meaning that everything from emotions to instinct can be studied despite having no idea how they arise by ontogeny in the individual.

 For a paradigmatic example, see Sober (2000, 121–2). C.f. Smocovitis (1996), Dieckmann & Doebeli (2005). 10

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This is to say that Darwin begins by assuming the existence of an ancestral population. Building within the scope of his inquiry, the MS does not attempt to explain the form of an evolutionary entity but the change in the entity through evolutionary time. Thus extenders (unsurprisingly) argue that the MS ‘lacks a theory of organization that can account for the characteristic features of phenotypic evolution, such as novelty, modularity, homology, homoplasy or the origin of lineage-defining body plans’ (Müller 2017, 4). Indeed, it does not recognize the provision of such as a requisite part of biological theory. As Laland et  al. (2011, 1516) argue, the MS ‘encourages focus on single cause-effect relations within systems rather than on broader trends, feedback cycles, or the tracing of causal influences throughout systems.’ Recognizing a plurality of research practices would not entail that the MS is false, as if there were a ready-made meta-structure in nature to which a biological theory is supposed to cohere. It would simply entail that the MS fails to capture several important evolutionary  processes. A conceptual framework must be epistemically modest and have a practical orientation, for explananda are context-­ specific; they feature within a particular domain of inquiry governed by its own conditions of sense.

5 Conclusion My aim in this chapter was to draw attention to a return to Kant’s account of teleological judgment made by scholars on both sides of the extension debate and thus to identify common ground from which their synthesizing arguments might be assessed. I argued that this common ground lies in a shift in biological theory towards a second-order level of reflection that acknowledges the role of theory in constraining the explananda of evolution, manifest in the shared interest in Kant’s critique of teleological judgment. Kant demonstrates that when we privilege the design criterion over the self-organization criterion, something is overlooked in the investigation of living beings. His account of a natural purpose, which holds the two criteria in tension, serves as a provocation to accommodate the plurality of research practices required to capture functional parts and organizational structure. Müller (2017, 9) is thus right to argue ‘that a different theory structure is necessary to accommodate the new concepts that are in everyday use and have become part of the current toolkit of evolutionary biology.’ Appeals to Kant from across the board suggest that this theory structure must adopt a standpoint that accepts different explananda while maintaining the methodological unity of biology. Adopting this standpoint restricts the synthesis debate from descending into a squabble over explanatory priority. To properly examine synthesizing arguments, we require a theoretical level that does not already stack the chips in favour of the MS but takes seriously the plurality of research practices underway in contemporary biology.

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References Amundson, Ron. 2005. The Changing Role of the Embryo in Evolutionary Thought: Structure and Synthesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Breitenbach, Angela. 2009. Teleology in Biology: A Kantian Perspective. Kant Yearbook 1: 31–56. Buskell, Andrew. 2020. Synthesising Arguments and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 80: 101244. Butts, Robert. 1986. The Methodological Structure of Kant’s Metaphysics of Science. In Kant’s Philosophy of Physical Science, ed. Robert Butts, 163–199. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company. Charlesworth, Deborah, Nicholas Barton, and Brian Charlesworth. 2017. The Sources of Adaptive Variation. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 284: 20162864. Cooper, Andrew. 2018. Two Directions for Teleology: Naturalism and idealism. Synthese 195: 3097–3119. ———. 2023. Hypotheses in Kant’s Philosophy of Science. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 99: 97–105. Dawkins, Richard. 1978. Replicator Selection and the Extended Phenotype. Zeittschrift für Tierpsychologie 47: 61–76. Dennett, Daniel. 1995. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. London: Penguin Books. ———. 1998. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge: MIT Press. Dieckmann, Ulf, and Michael Doebeli. 2005. Pluralism in Evolutionary Theory. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 18: 1209–1213. Dobzhansky, Theodosius. 1937. Genetics and the Origin of Species. New  York: Colombia University Press. Fodor, Jerry. 1996. Deconstructing Dennett’s Darwin. Mind & Language 11 (3): 246–262. Friedman, Michael. 1991. Regulative and Constitutive. The Southern Journal of Philosophy 30: 73–102. Futuyma, Douglas. 2015. Can Modern Evolutionary Theory Explain Macroevolution? In Macroevolution, ed. E. Serelli and N. Gontier, 29–85. Cham: Springer. Ginsborg, Hannah. 2006. Kant’s Biological Teleology and its Philosophical Significance. In A Companion to Kant, ed. G. Bird, 455–469. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2014. Kant’s Aesthetics and Teleology. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/kant-­aesthetics/. Grafen, Alan. 1991. Modelling in Behavioural Ecology. In Behavioural Ecology, ed. J.R. Krebs and N.B. Davies, 3rd ed., 5–31. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications. Griffiths, Paul. 1996. The Historical Turn in the Study of Adaptation. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47: 511–532. Griffiths, Paul, and Russell Gray. 1994. Developmental Systems and Evolutionary Explanations. Journal of Philosophy 91: 277–304. Huneman, Philippe. 2017. Kant’s Concept of Organism Revisited: A Framework for a Possible Synthesis between Developmentalism and Adaptationism? The Monist 100: 373–390. Kant, Immanuel. 1999. Critique of Pure Reason, ed. P. Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. P.  Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004a. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, ed. G. Hatfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004b. Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, ed. M.  Friedman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kitano, Hiroaki. 2002. Computational Systems Biology. Nature 420: 206–210. Kreines, James. 2005. The Inexplicability of Kant’s Naturzweck: Kant on Teleology, Explanation and Biology. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 87: 270–311.

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Laland, Kevin, Kim Sterelny, John Odling-Smee, William Hoppitt, and Tobias Uller. 2011. Cause and Effect in Biology Revisited: Is Mayr's Proximate–Ultimate Dichotomy Still Useful? Science 334 (6062): 1512–1516. Laland, Kevin, Tobias Uller, Marcus Feldman, Kim Sterelny, Gerd Müller, Armin Moczek, Eva Jablonka, and John Odling-Smee. 2015. The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: Its Structure, Assumptions and Predictions. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 282: 20151019. https://doi. org/10.1098/rspb.2015.1019. Lewens, Tim. 2004. Organisms and Artifacts: Design in Nature and Elsewhere. Cambridge: MIT Press. ———. 2019. The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: What is the Debate About, and What Might Success for the Extenders Look Like? Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 127: 707–721. Lewontin, Richard. 2001. Gene, Organism and Environment. In Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution, ed. S.  Oyama, P.  Griffiths, and R.  Gray, 59–66. Cambridge: MIT Press. Maturana, Humberto, and Francisco Varela. 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Boston: Reidel. Mayr, Ernst. 2004. What Makes Biology Unique? Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Messina, James. 2017. Kant’s Necessitation Account of Laws and the Nature of Natures. In Kant and the Laws of Nature, ed. Michaela Massimi and Angela Breitenbach, 131–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moreno, Alvaro, and Matteo Mossio. 2015. Biological Autonomy: A Philosophical and Theoretical Enquiry. Dordrecht: Springer. Mossio, Matteo, Christian Saborido, and Alvaro Moreno. 2009. An Organizational Account of Biological Functions. British Journal of Philosophy of Science 60: 813–841. Mossio, Matteo, and Leonardo Bich. 2017. What Makes Biological Causation Teleological? Synthese 194 (4): 1089–1114. Mossio, Matteo, Maël Montévil, and Giuseppe Longo. 2016. Theoretical Principles for Biology: Organisation. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 122 (1): 24–35. Müller, Gerd. 2017. Why an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis is Necessary. Interface Focus 7: 20170015. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2017.0015. Oyama, Susan. 2001. Terms in Tension: What Do You Do When All the Good Words Are Taken? In Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution, ed. S. Oyama, P. Griffiths, and R. Gray, 177–194. Cambridge: MIT Press. Quarfood, Marcel. 2006. Kant on Biological Teleology: Towards a Two-Level Interpretation. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (4): 735–747. Rosen, Robert. 1972. Some Relational Cell Models: The Metabolism-Repair Systems. In Foundations of Mathematical Biology, vol. 2, 217–235. New York: Academic. Smocovitis, Vassiliki. 1996. Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sober, Elliott. 2000. Philosophy of Biology. Colorado: Westview Press. Strawson, Peter. 1959. Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. New York: Routledge. Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. New Haven: Harvard University Press. Varela, Francisco. 1979. Principles of Biological Autonomy. Boston: Kluwer Academic. Walsh, Denis. 2015. Organisms, Agency, and Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Andreas, and Francisco Verela. 2002. Life after Kant: Natural Purposes and the Autopoietic Foundations of Biological Individuality. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1: 97–125. Whitfield, John. 2008. Biological Theory: Postmodern Evolution? Nature 455: 281–284. Wray, Gregory, Hopi Hoekstra, Douglas Futuyma, Richard Lensky, Trudy Mackay, Dolph Schluter, and Joan Strassmann. 2014. Does Evolutionary Theory Need a Rethink? No, All is Well. Nature 514: 161–164.

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Zammito, John. 2009. Kant’s Notion of Intrinsic Purposiveness in the Critique of Judgment: A Review Essay (and an Inversion) of Zuckert’s Kant on Beauty and Biology. Kant Yearbook 2009: 223–247. Zumbach, Clark. 1984. The Transcendent Science: Kant’s Conception of Biological Methodology. The Hague: Nijhoff.

Rethinking Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature Through a Process Account of Emergence Andrea Gambarotto and Auguste Nahas

If one were to sketch a history of the fate of Classical German philosophy in anglophone scholarship and analytic philosophy, it would probably look like a progressive series of rehabilitations.1 Since the pioneering work of Peter Strawson (1966/2018) and Henry Allison (1983), Kant has become a palatable interlocutor for analytic philosophers concerned with problems in epistemology, and in more recent years, has increasingly been discussed by historians and philosophers of biology (Zammito 2006; Goy and Watkins 2014; Huneman 2017, and many others). The same is true of Hegel, who enjoyed a renaissance in the United States thanks to the work of Pippin (1989), after which he became a presentable figure for analytic philosophers with Neo-Pragmatist inclinations (Pinkard 1994; McDowell 2009; Brandom 2019). While the Hegel renaissance remains predominantly in this Neo-­ Pragmatist phase, a re-evaluation of Hegel’s philosophy of nature has also steadily grown since the mid-2000s (Stone 2005; Rand 2007), and more recent research has started focusing on Hegel’s understanding of life and organisms (Michelini 2012; Michelini et al. 2018; Gambarotto & Illetterati 2020; Ng 2020). Although Schelling’s work has not yet enjoyed its own moment in the limelight, there are signs that it may do so soon. The rediscovery of Schelling’s philosophy of nature which issued from the pioneering work of Iain Hamilton Grant (2006) has recently produced a movement capable of bringing Schelling’s project of a philosophy of nature in dialogue with contemporary questions in epistemology and  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.” 1

A. Gambarotto (*) IAS Research Centre for Life Mind and Society, University of the Basque Country (UPV-­ EHU), Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain A. Nahas University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Corti, J.-G. Schülein (eds.), Life, Organisms, and Human Nature, Studies in German Idealism 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_3

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metaphysics (Woodard 2020; Alderwick 2021). Our aim is to contribute to this dialogue by providing a reading of Schelling’s speculative physics in light of debates concerning the notion of emergence in philosophy of science. We argue that a broadly Schellingian approach to nature is unwittingly being revived by certain scholars promoting a non-mainstream account of emergence based on a process ontology. Such a view takes processes as inherently structured, causally efficacious, and ontologically primary. We contend that while many aspects of Schelling’s theory cannot be straightforwardly mapped onto contemporary science and philosophy, such a process account provides an effective lens to see through the historical contingencies of Schelling’s philosophy of nature to the spirit of his project, which we think has relevance today. The point, as we see it, is to retrieve in Schelling a general philosophical paradigm to ground our theoretical efforts and modelling strategies. In this sense, to find in Schelling a philosophy of nature up to today’s theoretical challenges does not mean reviving the version of philosophy of nature Schelling proposed in the late-­ eighteenth century based on the scientific image of his time, but rather to revive what he did philosophically with that scientific image, and how he turned it into a conception of nature that we can resonate with today. We develop our argument in three steps: Section 1 poses the question of how to understand Schelling’s project of a philosophy of nature, notably in relation to the aforementioned new wave of Schelling scholarship; Section 2 provides a general characterization of the process account of emergence as it has developed over the course of the 2010s; Section 3 turns to the primary sources of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie —notably the Ideas (1797), the Weltseele (1798), the Outline (1799) and On the True Concept of Philosophy of Nature (1801)— to provide textual evidence that they can in fact be understood as providing a process account of emergence which parallels the contemporary account.

1 How Should We Understand Schelling’s Project of a Philosophy of Nature? An important question for anyone intent on productively engaging Schelling’s philosophy of nature is to consider how it might relate to contemporary debates over naturalism. Though naturalism is generally understood to be the dominant ontology of our time, there is admittedly little consensus among its advocates about what the notion of nature refers to, and especially how it relates to distinctively human phenomena such as agency, normativity, intentionality or meaning. This problem was already evident over fifty years ago to one of the founding fathers of contemporary naturalism. In a famous essay that still resonates across major debates today, Wilfrid Sellars (1963) distinguished between the ‘scientific image’ and the ‘manifest image’ of humans-in-the-world. The manifest image refers to how we encounter ourselves in ‘sophisticated common sense’ as ‘persons’ engaged in daily trade with the world. Within such an image, humans show up as

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minded beings who have goals, act for reasons, conform to normative standards, and have intentional stances toward meaning and value-imbued objects. In contrast, Sellars’ scientific image pictures a physical world dominated by mechanical causal relations which has no space for actions, norms, intentions or meaning. The clash between these two images generates what is often dubbed the “placement problem”: the problem of “finding a place for the mind in a world that is fundamentally and essentially physical” (Kim 1998, 4). Confronted with this dilemma, philosophical literature famously polarizes around two theoretical archetypes: the ‘hard’ or ‘scientific’ naturalist, who aims to reduce mindedness to a material, causal-mechanical substrate and the ‘soft’ or ‘liberal’ naturalist, who argues that minded phenomena such as normativity or intentionality cannot currently be explained by natural science but still deserve a central place in our ontology (De Caro and Macarthur 2004, 2010). Roughly speaking, we could say that the hard reductionistic version of naturalism has its roots in Scottish empiricism, as clearly testified by David Lewis’s idea that there is “nothing to reality except the spatio-temporal distribution of local natural properties” (Wheatherson 2014). Lewis famously advocated for Humean Supervenience: “the doctrine that all there is to the world is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact, just one little thing and then another” (Lewis 1986: ix, quoted in Whatherson 2014). The liberal approach is instead fundamentally Kantian in nature, relying on a dualism between ‘concepts of nature’ and ‘concepts of freedom’ as proposed in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. What this liberal approach shares with the reductionist approach is the notion of nature as the realm of blind mechanism; what distinguishes it is the fact that nature, so conceived, is also considered to be fundamentally opposed to the realm of human beings as rational, purposive agents. Another Sellarsian distinction, between the ‘space of causes’ and ‘space of reasons,’ has become the hallmark of this liberal approach to philosophical naturalism, largely though not exclusively represented by the so-called Pittsburgh school (Maher 2012). This dichotomy has evolved into a sort of post-Sellarsian dogma committed to protecting the human from reductive physicalism by opposing the natural, dominated by blind mechanical laws, with the normative human social world, defined by the more-than-natural capacity of articulating reasons. We wish to challenge the widely held belief that the dichotomy between hard and soft naturalism exhausts the available possibilities within the contemporary philosophical landscape. In fact, relying on the pioneering work by Iain Hamilton Grant, a new wave of Schelling scholarship is currently showing how Schelling’s Naturphilosophie can provide an effective roadmap to navigate between the reductionist tendencies of scientific naturalism and the dualist implications of liberal naturalism. At the heart of this Schellingian path to philosophical naturalism, as we see it, is the development of a processual account of emergence according to which life and mind, in all their teleological and normative richness, could have emerged in a world devoid of it. Such a view requires explaining how complex self-maintaining and cognitive systems arise out of the dynamical coupling and progressive

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stabilization of self-organizing processes via the emergence of novel constraints. In doing so, this approach aims to show how the complex components of mind (Geist) are in fact just particular realizations of the self-organizing processes that take place in nature. We submit that such an account is capable of accommodating life and cognition in nature without resorting to either reductionism or dualism, and instead provides a tractable framework for how phenomena such as significance and intentionality can emerge out of the natural order. In attempting to sketch the general features of Schellingian naturalism, as opposed to both hard and liberal naturalism, we wish to put the emphasis on two fundamental aspects: (1) The relation that this framework establishes between science and metaphysics; (2) The position it develops with regard to the natural foundations of agency. The former is important because it gives us a sense of the underlying methodology of the nature-philosophical project, the latter because it helps us understand its overall goal. Firstly, the relation Schelling establishes between science and metaphysics ought to be a particular point of interest within the current philosophical landscape. The aim of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is first and foremost to provide an account of nature as a continuous process of production which gives rise to a nested series of increasingly complex levels of organization. Inherent in this project is the idea that “metaphysics cannot be pursued in isolation from physics” (Grant 2006, x): the philosophical demarcation of our ontology, or the account of “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” (Sellars 1963, 1), cannot be pursued in isolation from the sciences. This approach is particularly relevant with regard to the relation between science and metaphysics today, which seems to be polarized into another false dichotomy between “being either conciliatory or atavistic with regard to science, as is often the case in analytic circles, or hostile and reductive towards science, as is often the case in continental thought” (Woodard 2020, 170). We are inclined to believe that a middle way is possible, not unlike the position recently outlined by Meincke and Dupré (2020, 6-8). As they argue, metaphysics can and should be scientifically informed, but is not identical with science because it asks different kinds of questions: ones with broader scope, at higher levels of abstraction, and with different epistemic interests. From this perspective, philosophical reflections on nature as a whole or emergence are in no way incompatible with scientific practice, but rather play an essential dialectic role with it. The patchwork vision which science gives us is always already grounded in certain metaphysical assumptions about the way the world is, and these assumptions are always open to revision in light of scientific discoveries which suggest different conceptions of nature. These philosophies of nature are the soil from which our theories and models subsequently grow. As Grant has compellingly put it, “Schellingianism is resurgent every time philosophy reaches beyond the Kant-inspired critique of metaphysics, and its subjective-­ epistemological transcendentalism, and its isolation of physics from metaphysics” (Grant 2006, 5). In this respect Schelling’s work should not be understood as the “exhaustion but rather the inception of naturephilosophy” (Ibid, 6). We

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fundamentally agree with this attitude. We also think that if we are to bring this project into the twenty-first century, we cannot do so by merely staying faithful to the letter of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, but instead attempt to work out the spirit of his thought. In other words, if we try to understand the contemporary relevance of that project solely based on the eighteenth-century sources —scientific or otherwise— that were available to Schelling in his own time, our enterprise is at best doomed to limited success. Instead, we should work to develop Schelling’s nature-­ philosophical project in strict dialogue with contemporary science and theory, even if we admittedly run the risk of distorting Schelling’s original intent. The second aspect of Schelling’s naturalism that we wish to emphasize is its overall goal: accounting for the natural foundations of agency. This project should also be understood as a response to the dualism between nature and freedom perpetrated by Kant, which, as we have argued, continues to be relevant today. This aspect is deeply connected to Kant’s understanding of teleology: since nature behaves only mechanically, the peculiar self-organizing features of organisms display a fundamental puzzle. The entire dialectic of teleological judgment is grounded in the opposition between a commitment to mechanism as the method for explaining all natural entities, and the fact that some products of nature defy this maxim by displaying manifestly goal-directed behavior. Kant’s solution to this dilemma, broadly speaking, is to argue that the principle of purposiveness does not concern natural products themselves but only our way of making sense of them. The underlying assumption in this line of argument is that only rational beings can be truly teleological, and that we only ever project our own teleology onto organized beings (Breitenbach 2014). Teleology, in other words, is a feature of human minds which sets them apart from the rest of nature. This is a position Schelling explicitly argues against in his debate with Eschenmeyer, who held a Kantian-­ Fichtean understanding of spontaneity as a distinctive, transcendental feature of human cognition (Berger and Whistler 2020). Schelling’s response to this consists in showing how spontaneity progressively emerges out of the fundamental forces of matter in a process of progressive ‘potentiation.’ It could be argued that this strategy encompasses the very essence of Schelling’s nature-philosophical project as a whole. A key role in this enterprise is played by the notion of organization, which “becomes not an exception to a mechanistic order, but rather the principle of nature itself” (Grant 2006, 10). Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is essentially a “physics of organization” (Ibid, 11) which aims to provide a “naturalistic solution to the antinomy between nature and freedom” (Ibid, 17) by developing an account of how “nature auto-produces its self” (Ibid, 19). This approach can be variously defined as a “philosophy of dynamics” (Ibid, 39), a “philosophy of natural history, or a genetic philosophy of nature” (Ibid, 49). In this view, “bodies are local structures within fields of force or, all beings are field beings” (Grant 2020, 33). Those fields, in which the production of determinate natural objects becomes possible, are in turn the product of the joint action of opposed forces, an original polarity that is at play in all of nature and manifests itself at different levels of organization and complexity. For Schelling, ‘the Absolute’

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consists precisely in this original polarity: one most explicitly manifested in the duplicity of matter and mind, but which is reflected in the different potencies of nature. Such “polarity is always prior because what emerges does so within its parameters” (Ibid, 34). The notion of Potenz, translated with ‘power’ or ‘potency’ is the philosophical tool Schelling uses to account for the progressive emergence of autonomy and agency in nature. Charlotte Alderwick (2016, 2021) has recently attempted to connect this notion to the contemporary metaphysics of natural dispositions, where the notion of power is used to define the inherent capacity of determinate natural entities to produce certain effects. To our knowledge, this project is the first and hitherto sole attempt to consistently put Schelling in dialogue with analytic philosophy. Powers, in this perspective, should be understood as the capacities nature has, at different levels of organization, to perform certain feats. The only potential drawback in Alderwick’s approach is the extent to which Schelling’s understanding of potency can be effectively squared with the Aristotelian notion of power used by analytic metaphysics. As argued by Benjamin Berger and Daniel Whistler, in fact, “the meaning of power, for Schelling, is—in a number of fundamental ways—different from the way power is understood in contemporary anglophone metaphysics” (Berger & Whistler 2020, 105). The difference between the two emerges clearly when taking into account the historical origin of Schelling’s notion of Potenz: a notion he notably draws from Eschenmeyer, who had an explicitly algebraic understanding of potentiation as the process through which an entity, while remaining fundamentally identical to itself, undergoes quantitative augmentation as a result of self-multiplication. Understood in this way, Potenz does not define the “capacity or power for something to perform an action” (Ibid, 106) but rather a “conception of development which arises through self-relation” (Ibid, 107). Potencies identify, in this sense, “fundamental structures or patterns in nature” (Ibid, 108). Such an understanding coheres widely with a number of scholars who have attempted to rethink the problem of emergence in processual terms, one in which patterns of change co-emerge with new organizational configurations. A philosophical appraisal of this tradition might allow us to conciliate the two senses of potency emphasized above: on the one hand, a peculiar morphological and functional configuration allows nature to ‘potentiate’ itself, i.e. to attain a higher level of organization (algebraic sense), yet at the same time, when such a level is attained, nature is thereby enabled to express powers that are not possible at lower levels (dispositional sense): mechanical powers, chemical and field-theoretical powers, organic and cognitive powers.2 The central question is how the leap from one level of organization and complexity to the other takes place: What is the process that makes the ‘self-intensifying’ of

 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). 2

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nature possible? In the next section, we show how contemporary process accounts attempt to provide an answer to this question.3

2 Self-Organization and Constraints: A Contemporary Perspective In this section we provide a general overview of contemporary process accounts of emergence. We first revisit Campbell and Bickhard’s argument in favor of process emergence as a viable alternative to the classic physicalist view (2.1). We then show how this process account meshes with a particular process account of emergence (2.2) developed by Terrence Deacon, among others (2.3), which, as we will argue in Sect. 3, displays striking parallels with Schelling’s view.

2.1 From Physicalism to a ‘Physics of Organization’ The intuitive idea behind emergence is that some composites are more than the sum of their parts: that they exhibit novel properties which the parts do not themselves possess. The classical approach to understanding emergence, first introduced by the British Emergentists, has been characterized on the basis of a fundamental assumption called physicalism: the idea that the world is made of distinct physical entities, and that causal power is resident in these physical entities, or “the view that bits of matter and their aggregates in space-time exhaust the contents of the world” (Kim 2007, 71). From this perspective, the primary challenge for any account of emergence is to specify the mereological relations which would explain what emergence really amounts to. According to Jaegwon Kim, this is a relation called supervenience: the idea that the emergent whole must be a direct product of the parts and their causal powers (Kim 2006). To illustrate, if we were to say that the viscosity of water emerges from, and therefore supervenes on, the molecules which compose it, then we are committed to the view that the viscosity is fundamentally tied in some way to those physical molecular components. The problem with this classic view of emergence, as Kim sees it, is that all the putatively emergent causal powers of the whole can be directly traced back to —and thereby reduced to— the causal power of the parts (2006, 558). Supervenience cannot, therefore, be the way to any form of non-reductive physicalism (Kim 1998, 14), which leaves us with the need to formulate an account of emergence which not only  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. 3

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puts supervenience into question, but seeks a notion of emergence beyond the physicalist assumptions which led to the conception of emergence as supervenience in the first place. Campbell and Bickhard (2011) make substantive contributions on both of these points, arguing not only that supervenience cannot be the entire story of emergence, but also using this conclusion as a launching point for their case that a radical rethinking of physicalism is in order. Because the physicalist view sees the world as composed of fundamental entities imbued with certain causal powers, it is unable to give due credit to the powerful role which organization seems to play in apparent cases of emergence (Ibid, 37). Take the example of an engine: its capacity to provide the motive power of a car is fundamentally tied to the proper organization of its various parts. Furthermore, this power is clearly not contained in its parts, given that a homogenous block containing the same materials has none of these powers. But as Bickhard and Campbell argue, if the physicalist accepts that organization is part of the emergence story, then she seems to admit that supervenience does not capture the whole story, given that organization does not supervene, or is not determined by the parts without their organization (Ibid, 37–38). In other words, the relations between the parts are not contained in the part themselves: they are something added to them, given that the parts themselves do not (fully) determine the ways in which they relate. If we accept that the organization of parts into the whole is that out of which new causal powers might emerge, then it seems that we now have a candidate for emergence which falls outside the supervenient relation between parts and wholes. If we assume that the world is made up of basic physical entities (such as particles), in which causal power is resident, structure cannot play a fundamental causal role; and yet it is precisely structure, relations, or organization which —as Bickhard, Campbell, and other scholars discussed below argue— we need to make sense of emergent causal powers. It is also what we need to prevent causal power from draining all the way down to ultimate basal entities. But on the physicalist view, organization can only be subordinate to the causal powers of such fundamental entities (Ibid, 47). This is why, according to Campbell and Bickhard, Kim was never able to fully capitalize on the insight that causal power emerges from configurations (Ibid, 39). What Kim needs to breach this impasse is to give relation and organization primary ontological status; something which he could not countenance from a physicalist perspective, given that it would be tantamount to giving everything away. The idea of a ‘physics of organization’ is the fundamental aspect of Schelling’s nature-­ philosophical that is re-emerging in recent accounts of emergence based on the notion of constraint. In fact, Bickhard and Campbell suggest the need for a positive alternative to physicalism which gives organization its proper due as the fundamental locus of causality (Ibid, 49–55). By abandoning physicalism, we free ourselves from Kim’s trenchant critiques of classical emergence and find ourselves on fresh, fertile territory to rethink the nature of emergence. According to the process ontology which Bickhard and Campbell propose, the entire world —all the way down to quantum fields— is process. Such processes “are inherently organized; a point process is an

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incoherent notion. If all is process, then all causal power is resident in process organizations. Everything that has causal power is organized and has the causal power that it does by virtue of, among other things, its organization. Organization cannot be delegitimated as a potential locus of causal power without eliminating causality from the world” (Bickhard 2004, 124). In either ‘direction’ there is no bottoming out to a fundamental base-level of entities with inherent causal power; “it is patterns of process all the way down, and all the way up [...] if being configurational makes a property or power epiphenomenal, then everything is an epiphenomenon” (Bickhard and Campbell 2011, 49; see also: Moreno and Mossio 2015, 47).

2.2 Constraints, Processes and Work Though a process ontology may have wide-ranging implications across all scientific disciplines, it has been thought to be particularly pertinent to biology: a field which studies entities in constant flux, and in which stasis usually means death (Nicholson and Dupré 2018). Organisms exist in highly organized, far-from equilibrium conditions: they exist in and through constant change and do so by constantly exchanging matter and energy from their environment. Furthermore, these remarkable capacities are tied to their exquisitely complex organization or structure. If we are to understand the mode of existence of organisms, we must take up an ontology that gives primacy to organization as a primary locus of emergent causal power. That being said, though a process ontology is undoubtedly the right starting point for these questions, it is little more than that. As such, much effort is being put into building more specific theoretical tools to understand biological organization and its emergence. One of the key conceptual tools which has been developed to bridge the concepts of organization and emergent causal powers is the notion of constraint. That constraint could be such a bridge was first popularized by Stuart Kauffman (2000, 98), who exemplifies it with a cannon firing a cannonball. By organizing metal and gunpowder in just the right configuration, the capacity to move a cannonball in a specific direction emerges. In firing the cannon ball, we have done thermodynamic work, meaning that we have channeled the dissipation of matter and energy originating from the ignition of gunpowder in a specific direction, and transferred that energy into cannonball in order to make it fly. In order to see more clearly how this relates to the issue of emergence, it is useful to think of constraint in negative terms, as cyberneticians Claude Shannon and Ross Ashby first suggested: in terms of a restriction in the possible configurations that a given system can be in.4 To illustrate: the task of assembling a car engine from its disparate parts involves imposing strict limitations (i.e., constraints) on the possible  “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). 4

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movements and interactions between the parts. As a result, we can say that the imposition of order is not something added, but rather something removed or inhibited; namely, the possible degrees of freedom which matter and energy have for motion and interaction. By thinking of order this way, we notice that constraints are what it takes for an engine to do thermodynamic work (or, more generally, for something to be an engine rather than a pile of metal). Thermodynamic work, therefore, happens when the spontaneous flow of energy occurs in a constrained context. As such, we notice that new possibilities for change —in the form of work— emerge with constraints. In the words of Terrence Deacon, “fundamental reorganizations of process, at whatever level this occurs, should be associated with a reorganization of causal power as well” (Deacon 2012, 168 see also: Bickhard 2004). As the thermodynamic conception of work makes clear, organization is not enough; it also requires an energy gradient that is channeled by the constraints. Organization, in the form of constraints, can be understood as engendering new dispositions for change. New causal powers emerge or are expressed when energy gradients meet new constraints, thereby allowing novel causal powers to express themselves. This establishes a deep connection between limitation and productivity, and leads Terrence Deacon to suggest a reversal of the idea that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. On the contrary, organized wholes are less than the sum of their parts and all their possible configurations (Deacon 2012, 43). In what follows, we take a closer look at Deacon’s account of emergence and in particular his way of explaining how the intrinsically purposive dynamics we see in life might emerge from a universe devoid of it.

2.3 Deacon on the Emergence of Life and Mind In his book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter (2011), Terrence Deacon presents an account of the emergence of life and mind which we find remarkably similar to Schelling’s view, perhaps due to the influence of Charles Sanders Peirce.5 One of the main parallels which we see between them is the idea of three nested ‘levels’ or emergent transitions, each of which is characterized by a specific processual tendency: (1) Homeodynamics: the dissipation of constraints; (2) Morphodynamics: the localized amplification and regularization of constraints

 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) 5

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(which is typically referred to as ‘self-organization’); (3) Teleodynamics: systems which regenerate and reproduce their own constraints, i.e. living organisms. Homeodynamics describes a universal tendency (also known as the second law of thermodynamics) for order to spontaneously give way to disorder. A system which is on a homeodynamic trajectory is one in which constraints, correlations, and segregation give way to disorganized homogeneity. A typical example of homeodynamics is the diffusion of ink in water. The system moves spontaneously from a heterogenous state of ink in water to a homogenous state of ink and water evenly mixed. In certain conditions such homeodynamic tendencies are locally reversed, and we see the formation of what Deacon calls a morphodynamic tendency: one in which constraints are amplified and regularized. Such is the case for snow crystals and whirlpools, phenomena which are usually called ‘self-organizing’; a term which Deacon deems misleading, in that it implies that there is a ‘self’ localized in or emerging from these processes. In reality, morphodynamics occurs when a system is continuously perturbed and pushed away from equilibrium and tends toward the path of least resistance for the dissipation of this turbulence, i.e., its return towards equilibrium. Order is not imposed from the outside, but rather emerges spontaneously from the dynamic interaction of the components of the system. In whirlpool formation, for example, the spiral forms as molecules and currents impede each other. What we are left with are the paths of least resistance after the others have been eliminated; a process best seen as a case of ‘emergent regularization’ rather than ‘self-organization.’ It is important to note that such processes of emergent regularization speed up the eventual dissolution of the regularized pattern by more efficiently channeling the extrinsically imposed disturbance through the system and into the surrounding environment as heat. Although living systems similarly speed up the total increase of disorder in their environment, they do not do so at the direct expense of their own organization. To explain this difference, we need a further emergent transition beyond morphodynamics, which, in Deacon’s view, occurs when two (or more) morphodynamic systems become coupled in a way which leads to their mutual constraining or interference in particular ways. Such a coupling produces higher order patterns of change, called teleodynamics, which may be diametrically opposed to the self-undermining features of morphodynamics, in the same way that morphodynamics was a reversal of the homeodynamic tendency.6 The teleodynamic tendency toward regeneration, then, is an emergent product of the mutual or synergy between two morphodynamic systems. It is this basic understanding of emergence via synergy that we deem to be at the heart of Deacon’s account, and which we believe has interesting parallels to Schelling’s work. The synergy between the morphodynamic systems is a constraint in the sense that it allows each system to exhibit its usual morphodynamic tendencies for a period of  Deacon exemplifies this using a simple chemical model that he calls the autogen, which he also considers a plausible origins of life model. For more details see Leijnen et  al. (2016) and Deacon (2021). 6

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time, before being prematurely prevented from dissipating the constraints which are produced and regularized by these respective morphodynamic systems (Deacon and Cashman 2013, 14). This prevention of dissipation amounts to an inhibition of the natural morphodynamic tendency of each of these two systems in isolation, which is to speed up their own disintegration. This is a remarkable fact that bears emphasis: teleodynamics emerges not as something added, but through novel forms of limitation or inhibition. In slogan form, what emerges is a new tendency, something ‘more’ (or more precisely, something different) through a reduction of possibilities. And so long as appropriate conditions remain, the teleodynamic whole actively keeps itself in a state of precarious existence. Deacon’s perspective compliments Bickhard and Kauffman’s by giving us a sense of how novel organizational forms and processes emerge in a nested, hierarchically organized way. From here, Deacon envisages the possibility of many further nested levels of teleodynamics which, after billions of years of evolution, might be the basis for the emergence of mind (Deacon 2012, 276). What is particular about the approaches so far discussed in this section, and especially Deacon’s, is the conviction that a proper understanding of the emergence of life, teleology, and mind requires a picture of nature from as a set of nested and hierarchically organized levels generated as a result of novel constraints that subsequently characterizes the dynamics of each level. As we argue in the following section, this is precisely the picture provided in Schelling’s philosophy of nature.

3 Schelling’s Physics of Self-Organization In this section we turn to the primary sources of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and attempt to read it through the lens of the account reconstructed in the previous section. We focus on Schelling’s understanding of self-organization as resulting from the ‘self-limiting’ of nature, and on the way this provides a theoretical groundwork to account for the natural foundations of agency. As mentioned above, our approach is theoretical in nature: it does not aim to portray Schelling as a founding father of modern far-from-equilibrium systems theory, nor to accurately map the continuities and discontinuities between Schelling and contemporary accounts. Obviously enough, there are major discontinuities between the scientific image that was available to Schelling in the 1790s, with Brown and Haller as key references, and our post-Prigoginean understanding of the emergence of far-from-equilibrium systems. Our goal is not to provide a precise reconstruction of Schelling’s philosophical understanding of eighteenth century chemistry and physiology, but rather an account of what it leaves for us philosophically despite the fact that the sources for his philosophy of nature are based on a largely outdated scientific image. Similarly to the account of emergent dynamics explored in the previous section, Schelling proposes a picture of nature in which mechanism and teleology are not two entirely opposed ways of regarding the natural order from without, but rather two different capacities that nature itself displays at different levels of organization.

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On the one hand, such a view leads him to agree with Kant’s assessment that neither mechanism, nor the idea of a ‘life-force’ —which he deemed to be a “completely self-contradictory concept” (Ibid, 37)7— are adequate explanations of an organism’s apparently purposive features. On the other hand, he disagrees with Kant’s conclusion that these two commitments spell doom for the very possibility of providing any scientific explanation of purposive organization. Schelling seeks a third position which is neither reductively mechanistic nor vitalistic: one capable of providing an account of how purposiveness, agency and mind arise out of the mechanical materiality of objective nature. In the Ideas, Schelling argues that “if we unite these two extremes [of mechanism and teleology], the idea arises in us of a purposiveness of the whole; Nature becomes a circle which returns into itself, a self-enclosed system” (Ideas, 40). Similarly, in the World-Soul he submits that “just as soon as our consideration of the idea of nature as a whole arises, the antithesis between mechanism and organism, which has held up the advance of natural science for long enough [...] disappears” (World-Soul, 68). Not unlike the process account reconstructed in the previous section, Schelling recognizes the possibility of overcoming the false dichotomy of mechanism and teleology through a revision of our concept of nature. While this may be a rather superficial parallel, which will not necessarily bear out in the details, Schelling nevertheless arrives at certain ideas which seem closely related to the idea of constraint. In fact, Schelling’s idea of organization is fundamentally connected to what we might call nature’s ‘self-constraint,’ i.e. limitations that emerge spontaneously from within nature. Schelling argues quite explicitly that “organization in general is nothing other than an arrested stream of causes and effects. Only where nature has not inhibited this stream, does it fly forward (in a straight line). Where it inhibits it, it turns back on itself (in a circular line). Therefore, the concept of organism does not rule out all succession of causes and effects [i.e., mechanism]; rather, this concept indicates only a succession that, enclosed within certain limits, flows back on itself” (Ibid, 70). The same idea is expressed in the Outline: “in order for a real activity to come to be out of an infinite (and to that extent ideal) productive activity, that activity must be inhibited, retarded” (Outline, 5). Or again: “in all of these individual actants one and the same original activity of Nature is inhibited” (Ibid, 24). As mentioned previously, the parallel which we see here centers around the similarity between Schelling’s notion of ‘limitation’ and the idea of ‘constraint’ described in sect. 2, specifically in the way that constraints are tied to organization and the “original” activity of nature, which is a tendency for order to give way to disorder. Sure enough, Schelling did not have the concept of entropy nor a theory of far-from-equilibrium systems, and yet, we find a clearly articulated intuition concerning the fact that nature has a primordial tendency towards chaos. In other words, in the absence of an ordering principle, natural entities have an inherent tendency to fall into disorder. The production of order, on the other hand, requires an additional  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) 7

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principle, which we now call work. The question, then, is how nature is independently able to generate the necessary work to produce order. To answer this question, Schelling postulates two fundamental principles responsible for all natural processes: a positive force which tends to produce chaos and a negative force which tends to produce order. The positive force tends to disperse order into disorder by means of mechanical relations. Were we to believe that this was the only causal force of nature, we would be forced back to a Kantian position according to which the production of order must necessarily be the result of a causality according to concepts. Schelling’s proposed solution to Kant’s antinomy of teleological judgment is to find a way to conceptualize the production of order as a natural process through and through. This is where the second, negative force comes into play. The “positive principle is the first force of nature. But an invisible power draws all the world’s phenomena into an endless circuit. We must seek the ultimate ground as to why this is so in a negative force that, in that it continuously limits the effects of the positive principle, conducts motion in general back to its source. This negative principle is the second force of nature” (World-Soul, 73). As we explained, the positive force seems to play a role analogous to entropy, which was an idea first taking shape around Schelling’s time, thanks to the work of Sadi Carnot and Rudolf Clausius, among others. Yet, as mentioned, the point is precisely to account for the fact that nature displays a considerable amount of order. Schelling speculates that this occurs when flows are channeled along certain pathways and turned back on themselves into a circle. The most important aspect about the positive and negative principles is that, as Schelling puts it, they constitute an original duality. There cannot be one without the other: “the negative force is aroused only by the positive. Therefore in all nature, neither of these forces exists without the other.” To put it in more contemporary terms, there cannot be work without dissipation of energy: “in this original antithesis lies the seed of a universal world organization” (Ibid, 92). Through its negative force, nature constrains its inherent tendency to disorder, channeling it towards organization: “these two conflicting forces conceived at the same time in conflict and unity, lead to the idea of an organizing principle, forming the world into a system. Perhaps the ancients wished to intimate this with the world-soul” (Ibid, 74). As we saw in the previous section, under certain conditions, constraints amplify and form temporarily stabilized structures or patterns, such as that of a whirlpool or snowflake. The basic tendency for such patterns to form amid turbulence and resistance explains how the emergence of temporarily stable order is possible in a world of process. Schelling explicitly states this in the Outline: “A stream flows in a straight line forward as long as it encounters no resistance. Where there is resistance —a whirlpool forms [...] the whirlpool is not something immobilized, it is rather something constantly transforming— but reproduced anew at every moment. Thus no product in Nature is fixed, but is reproduced at each instant” (Outline, 18n). These emergent ‘products,’ which have usually been thought of as ‘substances’ that form the ground-floor of metaphysics, are instead the product of the dynamical and ever-changing relation between opposed forces. When this relation breaks, and the positive force prevails on the negative, all temporary

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stability is subsumed back into the universal process. This amounts to a thoroughly processual metaphysical account: “the whole of Nature, not just a part of it, should be equivalent to an ever-­becoming product. Nature as a whole must be conceived in constant formation, and everything must engage in that universal process of formation” (Outline, 28). Thus “the fundamental task of all nature philosophy: TO DERIVE THE DYNAMIC GRADUATED SEQUENCE OF STAGES IN NATURE” (Ibid, 6). This sequence of stages tells the story of the progressive increase of nature’s autonomy, through a progressive process of self-constraint. Since its conceptualization in Kant, the notion of autonomy has been fundamentally connected to the relation between self-determination and self-constraint: being autonomous means to give oneself one’s own law. While Kant considered autonomy to be an exclusive feature of human reason, Schelling argues that autonomy is a product of nature itself. Both in the Ideas and in the Outline Schelling is quite explicit on this: “to philosophize about nature means to heave it out of the dead mechanism to which it seems predisposed, to quicken it with freedom and to set it into its own free development” (Outline, 14). Understood in these terms “philosophy becomes genetic” and “is nothing other than a natural history of our mind” (Ideas, 30). In such a natural history “the ideal must arise out of the real and admit of explanation from it.” For Schelling, “Nature is nothing more than the organ of self-consciousness, and everything in Nature is necessary merely because it is only through the medium of such a Nature that self-consciousness can take place” (Outline, 194). In On the Concept of Philosophy of Nature (1801), Schelling argues that “there is an idealism of nature and an idealism of the I. For me, the former is original, the latter is derived” (True Concept, 48). This piece was written as a response to Eschenmeyer’s Spontaneity  =  World-Soul, where spontaneity and autonomy are denied to nature and ascribed only to the transcendental subject. Conversely, Schelling argues that the task of philosophy of nature is “to let the subjective emerge from the objective” (Ibid, 50). Philosophy of nature considers nature “in its self-­ construction” (Ibid, 57) and thus “nature will no longer be a dead, merely extended whole, but rather a living whole which increasingly reveals the spirit incarnated in it and which, by means of the highest spiritualization, will in the end return into itself and complete itself” (Ibid, 60). The ultimate goal of Nature-philosophy, in other words, is providing a consistent account of how self-consciousness and freedom emerge out of the natural order. The idea of potentiation, which Schelling understands as exponentiation in the mathematical sense, is the philosophical tool through which this is achieved: “the originally infinite series, of which every individual series in mathematics is an imitation, does not arise through aggregation, but through evolution, through evolution of a magnitude already infinite in its point of origination which runs through the entire series” (Outline, 16). This series is composed of three main degrees. Schelling defines those for the first time in the Ideas and such definition will remain more or less coherent in later exposition: The “three potencies of Nature-philosophy” are: (1) the “universal structure of the world” manifested “individually through the series of bodies”; (2)

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the “universal mechanism” which manifests itself “in accordance with all dynamical determinations”; (3) the “organism,” which constitutes the “perfect mirror-­ image of the absolute in Nature and for Nature” (Ideas, 51). In this description, the first potency seems to identify the statics of inert bodies, the second their dynamical connection with one another, the third an ‘organics’ concerned with organized, living bodies. Despite the semantic differences, we would like to stress the proximity of this schema to Deacon’s tripartition of natural processes: homeodynamics, morphodynamics and teleodynamics.8 Based on this general schema, Schelling submits that “mechanism alone is far from being what constitutes Nature. For as soon as we enter the realm of organic nature, all mechanical linkage of cause and effect ceases for us. Every organic product exists for itself; its being is dependent on no other being.” Being defined by this circular form of causality, “every organic product carries the reason of its existence in itself, for it is cause and effect of itself” (Ibid, 31). Moving from the Kantian definition of a natural purpose, but interpreting it in naturalistic rather than heuristic terms, Schelling argues that organisms should be understood as autonomous agents, thus pleading for a strong continuity between life and mind. In the purposive features of organisms we “meet that absolute unification of Nature and Freedom in one and the same being. The living organism is to be a product of Nature: but in this natural product an ordering and coordinating mind is to rule” (Ibid, 36). The organism, in other words, is for Schelling nature’s door to the realm of freedom. The organism “is its own object” and “only insofar as it is at once subject and object for itself can the organism be the most original thing in Nature, for we have determined Nature precisely as a causality that has itself for object” (Outline, 106). Most importantly, the organism mirrors the inexhaustible process of producing organization through self-limitation that characterizers nature as an expression of the absolute. In a state of equilibrium, “all organic activity would dissolve, the organism would cease to be its own object, would lose itself in itself. That equilibrium (the state of indifference) must therefore be continually disturbed, but also continually reproduced” (Outline, 118). With its continuous striving to maintain itself far from equilibrium, the organism embodies the continuous process of creative evolution that characterizes Nature as Natura naturans. This creative evolution is fundamentally characterized by the infinite open-endedness of emergence: “Nature never ceases to be active” (Ibid, 42) and “no individuality in Nature can, as such, maintain itself, unless it begins, just like the absolute organism, to assimilate everything for itself, to encompass everything within its sphere of activity. In order that it not be assimilated, it must assimilate; in order that it not be organized, it must organize” (Ibid, 54). This is fundamentally in line with the understanding of self-organizing and autonomous processes in nature outlined in the previous section. As new forms of organization and processes emerge, new law-like regularities would also emerge alongside these. This means  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. 8

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that, in the course of its creative evolution, the universe is bound to unfold in unprecedented and unpredictable ways. As argued by Alderwick (2021, 108), “the Naturphilosophie presents a system with a fundamentally open future. This is ensured by a number of aspects of Schelling’s account. Firstly, nature is a system of infinite productivity: it continually gives rise to new products and is fundamentally a system in process. This entails that the future of the system is open in the simple respect that it has not happened yet: the future state of the system just does not exist. In addition, the fact that nature is an evolving system whose laws are similarly evolving and are thus unfixed, ensures that the future of the system is not determined by its present state or by its laws.” This idea allows us to insist on a last striking parallel between Schelling’s idea of nature and the tradition we have considered in the previous section: one concerned with the concept of non-ergodicity. As we argued, the determinist, physicalist framework does not aid, and even hinders our understanding of the emergence of life and mind. It is worth elaborating further on why this is the case. In our view, lurking behind the commitment to a physicalist worldview is the idea that all science ought to aspire to the method of physics. But as Longo et al. (2012) argue, the framework which physics has operated under since Newton fails in important ways when applied to the question of biological organization. This framework is one in which systems are mathematically described within the context of a predetermined space of possibilities, and in which the behavior of the system is deterministically entailed by physical laws within this space. But this approach fails when applied to organisms because of the essential context-dependence, both spatially and temporally, of developmental and evolutionary processes. And since developmental and evolutionary processes themselves change the context in which they are occurring, the possibility space itself must constantly change. On this basis, Longo and Montévil argue that we cannot pre-state apriori the trajectories which these processes will follow, in a way analogous to the fact that we cannot pre-state all the possible uses of a screwdriver, or all the musically meaningful symphonies that could ever be written (Montévil 2019; Kauffman 2019). Similarly, we cannot pre-state what the relevant features will be for the developmental and evolutionary novelties which will occur for a single organism or lineage, and even less so for the evolution of the biosphere. These possibilities are so open-­ ended, in fact, that it is certain that most configurations and organizational possibilities will not be explored in the lifetime of the entire universe; what Longo, Montévil and Kauffman call the ‘non-ergodicity’ of the universe (Longo et al. 2012). And yet, despite this evident constraint on all possible emergent forms, the space of possibility remains open to radically novel, unforeseeable emergent possibilities. This is not to claim that biological organization ‘floats free’ from the more fundamental process which physics describes. Even though there is no physical law which entails the constant emergence of these new processes, all of this is nonetheless enabled, or made possible, by the nature of the universe itself. And as Deacon’s work indicates, one of the driving forces behind all this remains the most basic “homeodynamic” tendency which we describe as

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the second law of thermodynamics. It is a tendency from which all things emerge, one which creates new contexts enabling a whole host of further possibilities. This brings us to a radically new vision for the concept of nature; one in which nature is itself a perpetually incomplete process of becoming (Deacon and Cashman 2016).

4 Conclusion In this paper we aimed to provide a novel reading of Schelling’s philosophy of nature fueled by what we have defined as a process account of emergence. We started with a general consideration of the position Schelling currently occupies in the contemporary philosophical landscape. Contrary to Kant and Hegel, who have subsequently enjoyed a heyday in anglophone scholarship and continue to influence theorizing in analytic philosophy, Schelling does not seem to have shared their fortune. We have thus tried to highlight the inherent philosophical potential of a rediscovery of Schelling with respect to the contemporary question of naturalism, currently polarized between reductionist Humeanism and liberal Kantianism. Schelling’s nature-philosophical project, we argued, has the potential to break naturalism out of this false dichotomy, by providing a picture of nature as a series of nested processes where life and mind are generated from within nature. We dwelled on several approaches in contemporary philosophy of science that, criticizing the physicalist assumptions typical of the classical theory of emergence, propose a picture of emergence as strictly connected to the notion of organization, which is in turn closely related to the idea of constraint. In so-called ‘self-­organizing’ systems, constraints channel the dissipation of matter and energy along paths of least resistance, and in doing so form temporary stable patterns of order. Biological systems emerge from this ‘self-constraint of nature’ at a higher level, using the work channeled by constraints in order to reproduce the constraints themselves: they instantiate a work-constraint cycle by realizing a kind of teleodynamic organization. The latter is precisely what characterizes the notion of autonomy in the most general way, and therefore constitutes the natural foundation of agency. The latter constitutes, in a broader sense, the fundamental character of nature as such, in its inherent non-ergodicity. We closed the essay with a foray into the primary sources of Schelling’s philosophy of nature, taking care to show how textual evidence supports such a reading. Although the Schellingian speculative physics comes well before thermodynamics, field theory, cybernetics and self-organization theory, it is possible to find in these texts the clear and philosophically articulated intuition that underlies all these theories: that of nature as essentially processual, self-organizing and infinitely creative.

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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.

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———. 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.

“Inadmissible Application”: Some Notes on Causality and Life in Hegel Thomas Meyer

Just because I want to it don’t mean I will Guru, Gang Starr

In this chapter, I will interpret a short passage from Hegel’s Doctrine of Essence on the relation between causality and life. Since the passage contrasts causality and life, the interpretation of this passage will shed light on Hegel’s understanding of life and its relation to causality. Although I also refer to some parts of the Encyclopedia and The Doctrine of the Concept for my interpretation, I focus on the passage of the Doctrine of Essence. Therefore, my chapter can be understood as a micro-study. Causality is one of the central topics of philosophy. Ever since Plato’s dialogues, there have almost continuously been philosophical contributions aiming to clarify the nature of causality. Since the end of the 1950s, an intensive and by now very detailed landscape of debate has developed around questions of causality.1 These systematic debates have also been accompanied by reconstructions of classical modern positions. Hegel’s theory of causality, however, is not one of them. Insofar as one has an interest in Hegel’s philosophy, also with regard to its actuality, that is, the fact that it has to contribute something enlightening to contemporary debates, a reconstruction of Hegelian theory according to today’s common methodological standards is inevitable. The passage to be examined in this chapter provides a small building block for a better understanding of Hegel’s understanding of life as well as of what causality is from Hegel’s point of view and where possible limits to the explanatory power of  For a very good overview and helpful explicit reconstructions of the different types of theories, I refer to the contributions in Beebee et al. 2009. 1

T. Meyer (*) Humbold-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Corti, J.-G. Schülein (eds.), Life, Organisms, and Human Nature, Studies in German Idealism 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_4

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causal relationships might lie. Therefore, the passage shows that for Hegel causal relations have a restricted function in understanding phenomena of life (in nature as well as in spirit). Particularly in view of the fact that in the (especially analytical) philosophy of the twentieth and the early twenty-first century causal theories of various phenomena have been repeatedly proposed (causal theory of meaning, causal theory of perception, causal theory of action), a better understanding of Hegel’s view on the limits of the explanatory power of causal relations for life would be beneficial. In this respect, the primary goal of this chapter is to contribute to an understanding of Hegel’s theory of life.2 However, there will be clarifications also for Hegel’s theory of causation, since the contrast between life and causality contains illuminating insights for both. I proceed as follows. After some preliminary remarks (1.), I will first present my reading of the chapter on causality in the Doctrine of Essence up to the point where the passage in question starts (2.). Afterwards the passage itself shall be interpreted step-by-step (3.). This interpretative part primarily has the function of clarifying the main claim made by Hegel. This is followed by a critical discussion of the plausibility of Hegel’s claim (4.). Finally, I will use passages from the Encyclopedia and the Logic of the Concept to further clarify the main thesis by contrasting it to Hegel’s concept of life (5.). I close with a summary of the results and some open questions.

1 Methodological Approach to Hegel As I said, I am interested in an improved understanding of causality in Hegel. Moreover, this is part of reconstructing an updated version of Hegel’s theory of causality. This has two consequences for my treatment of Hegel I must mention in advance. First, I will critically consider Hegel’s thesis of the limits of causal relations from the point of view of causal thinking. That means, I will not be satisfied easily with Hegel’s claims regarding what cannot be explained causally. This is contrary to the tendency of Hegel research to neglect ‘deficient forms’ of certain phenomena.3 Even if it is the case that for Hegel life is ultimately more important as a category than causality, this does not mean that causality loses its relevance completely. This

 Especially recently much more has been worked on Hegel’s theory of Life, e.g. Kabeshkin 2021, James 2020, Khurana 2013, 2017, Kreines 2008, Ng 2017, 2020, Rand 2011, 2013, Sandkaulen 2019, Spahn 2007, Westphal 2020. Ng also comments on the passage relevant in this chapter, why I will comment on her reading explicitly. 3  Here, ‘deficient form’ might refer to each second category of triplicity, or to the second book of the Science of Logic and so on. I take everything that is happening in the Science of Logic as well as in the Realphilosophie to be of importance and deficiency to be relative to a given claim. Causality then might be deficient only relative to the claim that everything can be explained by causal relations but not in itself. 2

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is even true for Hegel’s category of finite causality, to which he – as will be shown in a moment – attests bad infinity.4 Second, for the sake of a possible ‘update’ of Hegel’s position, I will ask external questions and raise external objections to Hegel’s text. This is also important for me to note, since I think there is a tendency in Hegel studies to (hastily) reject a consideration of the Hegelian text from today’s perspective by saying that this is external to Hegelian thought or the Hegelian system. To put it somewhat bluntly: Hegel’s text has to put up with external criticism, since the text makes an internal criticism extremely difficult insofar as the latter presupposes a complete understanding of the method, arguments and contents of Hegelian philosophy. Since at best few have this understanding so far – at least I definitely don’t –, the reference that one has to criticize internally seems to me to be more of an immunization than a discursively comprehensible reply. These two remarks are not meant to imply that any individual in particular exhibits these tendencies. I only want to point out that, for these two reasons, I have a methodological approach to Hegel’s text that could be seen as problematic if one has the tendency not to take the ‘deficient’, second, merely finite categories seriously, and to quickly dismiss external criticism of Hegel.

2 Causality as Identity The chapter on causality in The Doctrine of Essence consists of three subchapters (“a. Formal causality”, “b. The determinate relation of causality”, “c. Action and Reaction”). The passage relevant here is to be found in the second subchapter, so I will only give an interpretation of the text until this point.5 According to a hint by Hegel, the chapter on causality can be understood structurally as follows: Being itself, as well as the following determinations (the logical determinations in general, not just those of being), may be looked upon as definitions of the Absolute [...]; more precisely, however, it is always just the first simple determination of a sphere that can be so regarded and again the third, the one which is the return from difference to simple self-­ relation. [...] The second determinations, on the other hand, which constitute a sphere in its difference, are the definition of the finite. (Enc. § 85)

Accordingly, we can understand formal causality as the first simple determination of the Absolute (causality thus can be understood as the causal interpretation of the absolute), whereas the second determinate relation of causality represents the “sphere  Of course, I am aware of the reverse danger of overlooking or not taking seriously enough Hegel’s critique of the ‘deficient’ categories and phenomena themselves. But I believe that Hegel’s justification of the deficiency of one form and the higher dignity of the next can only be fully understood and ultimately strengthened if one doesn’t take for granted but challenges his critique of the deficient forms. 5  In the following, I rely significantly on my interpretation in Meyer 2017. 4

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in its difference”. Reformulated using Hegel’s terminological distinction between bad and true infinity, the latter is infinity realized in finitude: I understand this to mean that the first determination of causality determines causality in its infinity. But, since true infinity is determined as realized in its opposite, the further course of the chapter just has to prove that absolute causality is actually realized in finitude. Less Hegelese, I understand Hegel’s procedure as follows: the first subchapter “a. Formal Causality” provides a semantic analysis of an initially constructed concept, namely the concept of an absolutely causally self-determining substance. The second chapter then consists in checking whether such a notion is realizable, namely by looking for possible instances of fulfillment of the notion constructed in the first subchapter by means of finite determinations. The result then seems to me to be that there are, even though only deficient, realizations of this concept. The characteristics of these deficient realizations then define Hegel’s theory of causality. But the previously constructed concept also requires successful, non-deficient realization – otherwise the project would have to be considered a failure. The last subchapter therefore consists in the proof that there are such successful realizations: In the relation of action and reaction, “the return from difference to simple self-relation” (Enc. § 85) is shown. How does the semantic determination of the constructed concept of absolute causal self-determination look like, which features does this concept contain and how exactly is determinate causality characterized? The immediate predecessor-category of causality is the relation of substantiality, the relation of substance and accidence. The absolute substance must be understood as an absolutely self-determining substance. This self-determination is now to be understood as a causal process. Causality is thus first of all absolute causal self-­ determination of a substance. Formally, this is the concept of a causa sui, i.e. a completely self-causing substance. In the Encyclopedia, Hegel formulates it as follows: “In and for itself therefore the cause is causa sui.” (Enc. § 155 R) This already marks some central features of Hegel’s theory of causality: Causal relata, at least the cause relatum, are substances; the causal relation is an asymmetrical relation of determination, which is, however, essentially characterized by identity – in the case of causa sui, it is precisely the causing and the caused substance that must be identical. Hegel grasps the concept of a self-causing substance through the form-content difference. The form distributes the two roles ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ and makes the latter dependent on the former (asymmetrical determination relation), whereas the content is just what must remain the same, that is, it must be the same content for both roles; the content is identical in the form difference. But at the same time the content must be self-determined. This already true, infinite concept of causality, however, must prove itself as realized in finitude – only this way can the absolute be grasped as true infinity. This leads Hegel to the determinate relation of causality or, as he also says, “the relation of causality in its reality and finitude” (GW 11: 399/SL: 494). This is a relation between finite substances. Finite causality consists in a transfer process, which happens between two finite substances. That which is transferred must remain the same according to the initial determination of the concept of a causa sui:

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If the movement of a body is considered as effect, the cause of this effect is then a propulsive force; but it is the same quantum of movement which is present before and after the propulsion, the same concrete existence which the propulsive body contained and which it communicated to the one propelled; and what it communicated, it lost in equal measure. (GW 11: 299/SL: 495)

The problem of finite causality is that there is both the difference of form and the identity of content, but not in the right way. The identity does exist between cause and effect – and that is what makes this theory of causality an identity theory – but the roles ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ are distributed between two different substances. One might say that the cause ‘loses itself’ in another substance and does not come back to itself. However, one and the same substance can also be cause and effect, but then in each case in different respects, or with respect to different substances. This leads to two infinite chains of causal relations, whereas each represents bad infinity. But, exactly this is not the thing to be proven. Therefore, the question remains how true infinity can be realized in finitude. Only in the relation of “action and reaction” this is achieved. For, this relation shows that a finite substance causally acting on another substance always acts back on itself at the same time, because the substances on which it acts are resistant. The picture for this would be the billiard ball, which rolls against the cushion, is repelled again and rolls back. Conversely, the effect also acts back (it is a counter-effect). The relation of action and reaction then leads to the last absolute relation of the “reciprocity of action” (Wechselwirkung), which then represents the transition into the concept, subjectivity and thus freedom.6 It can be said that finite causality consists in a deficient realization of the concept of a causa sui. The result is a kind of identity or transfer theory of causality, which is defined in terms of a transfer process that occurs between two different finite substances. This realization is deficient because the determination of form and content of the concept of self-causation fall apart. Either, one has the unity of a substance which is both cause and effect, though not cause and effect in the same respect. Or, one has a causal relation in the required sense, but then between two different substances. Hegel now inserts a remark into the text.7 The first paragraph of the somewhat longer note concerns the issue of cause and effect relations between temporally distant substances.8 This is followed by the passage relevant here, which I will interpret in the next section.

 For a reconstruction of the chapter of actuality and the transition of the Doctrine of Essence to the Doctrine of the Concept see Ng 2017. 7  However, this is not marked as such. But that it is a kind of side-remark is shown by the fact that Hegel writes: “It is worth noting […]” (GW 11: 400/Di Giovanni 2010, 496). 8  Cf. Ng 2020, 154. Ng overlooks the fact that Hegel is advocating a variant of aspectual causality when she spins the talent example further, suggesting that into the long chain of causal connections it could also be said “his father was shot on a foggy day, so fog was the cause of his talent” (Ng 2020, 154). For evidence that Hegel allows for aspectual causality, see Meyer 2017. This seems to be accepted by Rand’s identity reading in Rand 2011. 6

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3 The Note on Causality and Life Before I now interpret and critically discuss the passage that is central here, I would like to quote it once in one piece: [1] But it is the inadmissible application of the relation of causality to the relations of physico-organic and spiritual life that must be noted above all. [2] Here that which is called the cause does indeed show itself to be of a different content than the effect, but this is because anything that has an effect on a living thing is independently determined, altered, and transmuted by the latter, for the living thing will not let the cause come to its effect, that is, it sublates it as cause. [3] Thus it is inadmissible to say that nourishment is the cause of blood, or that such and such a dish, or chill and humidity, are the causes of fever or of what have you; it is equally inadmissible to give the Ionic climate as the cause of Homer’s works, or Caesar’s ambition as the cause of the fall of Rome’s republican constitution. [4] In history in general there are indeed spiritual masses and individuals at play and influencing each other; but it is of the nature of spirit, in a much higher sense than it is of the character of living things, that it will not admit another originative principle within itself, or that it will not let a cause continue to work its causality in it undisturbed but will rather interrupt and transmute it. – [5] But these relations belong to the idea, and will come up for discussion then.9 (GW 11: 400)

I am interested in the assertion of the inadmissibility (“unstatthafte Anwendung”) made by Hegel in [1], which he explains and justifies in the following. Somewhat simplified formulated the assertion says: Claim 1  It is inadmissible to apply the relation of causality to circumstances of life. Two questions must be clarified. First, the question arises what exactly he means by ‘application of the relation of causality to relations of life’. The clarification of this question is a prerequisite in order to then clarify the second question of why this ‘application’ is problematic.10 To address these two questions, I would like to begin by discussing two puzzles. The first can arise right at the beginning, if one first assumes that Hegel wants to say something like: one should not understand relations of life causally. Actually, relations of life – so the puzzle goes – should be able to be understood by causality to a much higher degree than, for example, non-living things. Why is this? This puzzle arises when one considers that causality, truly understood, is “causa sui”  – Hegel calls causa sui the “absolute truth of the cause”. To be self-caused means to be independent of external impulses. However, living things, a fortiori in spiritual life, are characterized by being a Gestalt of self-causation. That means, provided that one interprets Hegel benevolently, the remark cannot be meant in the sense of the true concept of causality.

 The numbering is mine and should make it easier to refer to the respective passages.  I take it that Hegel’s use of “unstatthaft” indicates a problem.

9

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The solution of the puzzle consists in the fact that Hegel wants to restrict the remark to the meaning of finite causality.11 What is interesting about this is that Hegel, despite his revisionary terminology (true causality is “causa sui”), acknowledges the ordinary usage of ‘causal’, ‘cause’, etc. This is especially interesting because in various passages in his writings Hegel also repeatedly makes remarks about his philosophical terminology that certainly allow for a revisionist approach.12 To say that causality truly understood means self-causation would be precisely such a revisionist use of terminology. Apparently, however, in this case Hegel deviates from his revisionism and accepts instead the way of speaking of causality that has been transmitted from the philosophical tradition and is common in everyday life.13 For the answer of the two questions this already gives first hints. From the removal of the first puzzle it follows that the inadmissible application of causal relations to relations of the living is to be limited to finite causality. Claim 1*  It is inadmissible to apply the relation of causality in the sense of finite causality to circumstances of life. Also, a first hint for the second question arises from this. As far as finite causality is characterized by features like “being dependent on external impulse” or “losing oneself in others”, these seem to be features which at least cannot completely explain relations of life.14 However, a second puzzle arises. Hegel points out that this remark actually belongs to the Idea in the Doctrine of the Concept ([5]). However, the examples Hegel discusses in the remark are both examples from the realm of the “Realphilosophie”. If one looks up the Idea, however, one reads: “A comment may be in order here to differentiate the logical view of life from any other scientific view of it, though this is not the place to concern ourselves with how life is treated in non-philosophical sciences but only with how to differentiate logical life as idea from natural life as treated in the philosophy of nature, and from life in so far as it is bound to spirit.” (GW 12, 180/SL, 677) What puzzles is that it is not clear why the subject of the remark belongs in the logical Idea, if the examples come from the “Realphilosophie”, but the Logic, in turn, just does not treat the latter. In the worst  This restriction is additionally supported (i) by the fact that the note is found in the part on finite causality and (ii) by the fact that Hegel uses the term ‘Kausalitätsverhältnis’ in the note as well as in the heading, in contrast to, say, the first subchapter, where he speaks of ‘Kausalität’. 12  To quote a central example: “It is the privilege of philosophy to choose such expressions from the language of ordinary life, which is made for the world of imaginary representations, as seem to approximate the determinations of the concept. There is no question of demonstrating for a word chosen from ordinary life that in ordinary life too the same concept is associated with that for which philosophy uses it, for ordinary life has no concepts, only representations of the imagination, and to recognize the concept in what is otherwise mere representation is philosophy itself.” (GW 12: 130/Di Giovanni 2010, 628) 13  As will become clear in a moment, this can only be said with reservations. 14  For the moment, it must remain open whether Hegel is concerned with the complete exclusion of finite causality from the realm of the living or with limiting the scope of finite causal explanations of the living. 11

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case we would now not know at all where we can get further clarification about the remark. Here is a suggestion to remedy this second puzzle. No matter how the logic on the one hand and the philosophy of nature and spirit on the other relate to each other exactly, the following seems to be a plausible assumption: At least some categories of the logic reappear in the “Realphilosophie”, and there at least the conceptual aspects of the logical categories must be preserved. But this means that, for Hegel, there can be no causal explanations of the living in “Realphilosophie” probably because of the features of life already established in the Logic. Moreover, the remark is not about causal explanations of categorical relations, but of the real phenomena. And these, according to the previous understanding of the thesis, should not be able to be explained causally (or so I understand the “inadmissible application”) because of their categorical structure. So far, then, we know that Hegel’s assertion states that relations of life cannot be explained causally. But why exactly is a causal explanation of relations of life inadmissible? The second sentence of the remark gives an answer to this. In the case of the effect on living things, “that which is called the cause is of a different content than the effect” (GW 11: 400/SL: 496). Strictly speaking, Hegel first gives a rather formal reason for Claim 1* and then explains this reason. The argument for the thesis could look as follows: (P1) There is a causal relation (in the sense of finite causality) between two phenomena only if there is an identity relation between cause and effect. (P2) In the case of influence on living things, cause and effect are just different and do not stand in an identity relation to each other. (P3) A causal explanation in the sense of finite causality is admissible only if the explaining phenomenon is actually causally connected to the phenomenon to be explained. (C) Causal explanations in the sense of finite causality of relations of life are inadmissible.15 Hegel claims to have shown the first premise in the chapter on causality. To the second premise Hegel is committed by his argument for Claim 1*, but he also argues for this premise himself in the following – I will come to that in a moment. Finally, the third premise must be added in order to establish a connection between causal relation and causal explanation. To my knowledge, one does not learn anything about this connection in Hegel’s writings. This is certainly due to the fact that in

 This reconstruction finds a counterpart in Rand’s reconstruction, who in reverse to (P2) uses a premise about life, namely: “As subject, the animal distinguishes itself not only from mechanical and chemical objects, but from every other thing in nature. […] But for such an animal to stand in a cause-effect relation with something else would be for it to be qualitatively identical to that thing, and therefore would be for it no longer to be a subject in relation to that thing. Thus, the animal cannot stand in a cause-effect relation to anything.” (Rand 2011, 197). I will come back to this reconstruction. 15

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Hegel’s time one did not yet think about the topic of (scientific) explanation in such detail as it has been done in the philosophy of science of the twentieth century.16 The justification of the second premise consists in Hegel’s pointing out that “that which acts on the living is independently determined, changed, and transformed by it, because the living does not let the cause come to its effect, that is, annuls it as cause” (GW 11: 400/SL: 496). What we see from this at first is that it is at least permissible to speak in such a way that something “acts” on the living. According to Hegel, the acting is “independently determined, changed and transformed” by the living. It is relatively unclear what is meant by all these phrases “independently determined”, “changed”, “transformed”, “not to let cause come to its effect”, “to cancel as cause”.17 After Hegel gives examples for both physical-organic and spiritual life, he adds further formulations. A living thing, but especially a spiritual living thing has the characteristic “that it will not admit another originative principle within itself, or that it will not let a cause continue to work its causality in it undisturbed but will rather interrupt and transmute it.” (GW 11: 400/SL: 496) These phrases are in need of clarification as well. What all phrases have in common, however, is that there is something acting on a living thing, that the living thing would thus stand in a possible causal relation. This allows the conclusion that Hegel at least problematizes these cases. It is true that living things can be acted upon, but this action does not generate a causal relation proper, because the living thing has the ability of changing the characteristics of an effect that are constitutive for pure causal relations. This claim however does not yet exclude that a living being can occupy the place of the explaining cause-relatum. That living things can have an effect on things seems to be obvious. But, if this is granted, one could say that, if living things act on some x, they stand in a causal relation to x. Possibly Hegel does not want to exclude these cases with Claim 1*. This would then mean that relations of life should only not take the explanandum place of causal explanations, provided that causal explanations consist in explaining the explanandum with reference to its cause(s). For this case the thesis would state: Claim 1**  Causal explanations (in the sense of finite causality) of relations of life are inadmissible. That Hegel definitely did not want to exclude living things as explanans in causal explanations can be shown via the second premise. For, in the case of human action it is just the case that between subjective purpose and executed purpose there must be an identity of content. “The cause of an act is the inner intention of the subject  One could of course try to extract from Hegel’s texts such a claim as (P3). Some readers might think of Hegel’s claim of an isomorphy between our representation of the world and the world itself. Even though I take these readings to be adequate, (P3) is much weaker so that it can be asserted for Hegel a fortiori. 17  I will come back to these phrases later. I suppose Rand would say that these phrases express what he calls stimulus-response relations. Unfortunately, Ng 2017 explains the passage by merely repeating those formulations. 16

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who is the agent, and this intention is the same in content and value as the existence which it attains through the action.” (GW 11: 400/SL: 495)18 Action, however, would accordingly fulfill precisely the characteristic from whose absence Hegel concludes Claim 1**. It is still open why, for Hegel, living things are not to be explained causally, and respectively it is still unclear what exactly is meant by the various phrases due to which living things cannot simply be the effects of causal processes. Before I discuss these unclear formulations further, Hegel’s examples shall be explained.19 [3] Thus it is inadmissible to say that nourishment is the cause of blood, or that such and such a dish, or chill and humidity, are the causes of fever or of what have you; it is equally inadmissible to give the Ionic climate as the cause of Homer’s works, or Caesar’s ambition as the cause of the fall of Rome’s republican constitution. [4] In history in general there are indeed spiritual masses and individuals at play and influencing each other […]. (GW 11: 400/SL: 496)

As examples of possible explananda, Hegel mentions “blood” and “fever” for the area of physical-organic life. The blood example is problematic because Hegel’s formulation is ambiguous. For, what should it mean that blood is an effect? The fact that there is blood in an organism? The fact that blood has certain properties? The latter is suggested by the mention of nourishment as a cause. In this case, the explanation would answer the question: how is it that human blood contains certain nutrients? Inasmuch as our food is the external source of these nutrients, one might perhaps be tempted to cite food as the cause of the blood’s nutrient content for that very reason. But, does not this very example satisfy the condition of causation as stated in the first premise? It is the same sugar molecules that were in the food before consumption and that are transported through the blood after consumption. Here, at least, it is not immediately obvious why the condition stated in (P1) should not be fulfilled in this example. What about the other example? Here the explanandum is the fever of an organism. As possible explanatory causes Hegel mentions dish, chill and humidity. In order to see whether the condition stated in (P1) is not fulfilled, it makes sense to refrain from these three candidates for causes and instead to immediately assume that fever is a concomitant of the organism’s defense reactions against, for example, a viral infection. In this case, too, Hegel’s thesis would say that it is inadmissible to name, say, the viral infection as the cause of fever. But, at least we talk this way, asking for the cause or causes of fever in general or even of the fever of this particular individual. However, common explanations such as the one with reference to a defense concomitant already point to something Hegel could have had in mind. The fever itself can be understood as a  I set aside the problematic fact that Hegel seems to be committed to the claim that phenomena of spiritual life can be caused, for, he is talking about the cause of an action and an action surely is a phenomenon of spiritual life. 19  These are supposed to be examples of inadmissible causal explanations of relations of life. It is important to consider that Hegel’s thesis could be maintained even if the examples he chose would not support it. The mistake he would have made then would be first of all only one of the wrong choice of examples. 18

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reaction. But, a reaction is in the sense of Hegel’s theory of causality already part of the third causal figure “action and reaction”. Even then causal talk would be completely comprehensible and many common theories of causality seem to be able to capture this. Thus, insofar as cases of reaction are already to fall out of the realm of relations to be understood causally, Hegel’s justification of his thesis would threaten to become question begging. However, the example of the reaction already helps a little to understand Hegel’s talk of changing the acting. What is not yet comprehensible is the fact that there could also be strict reaction schemes, so that the connection between the acting and the reaction could well be understood as a causal relation. But, it would also be conceivable that the reaction of an organism to external influence does not lead to certain effects with the necessity of natural laws. And this is exactly what, so Hegel's point could be understood, would be assumed in causal explanations.20 Let us still look at the two examples in the area of the spirit. As examples of possible explananda, Hegel mentions for the realm of spiritual life once the Homeric works and once the decline of the Roman Republic. Again, we must first resolve ambiguities. For the case of the Homeric works: what exactly is to be explained? That the Homeric works exist? Why they have been written? How it came to be that they have been written exactly the way they are? Of course, in no case can the Ionian climate be the cause here, no matter which of the questions is meant – climate cannot write epic poems. But could the climate not have been a causal factor? Insofar as the idea of the sum of causal factors that only concomitant produce certain events presupposes a non-discriminatory concept of causality, it could be concluded that Hegel’s theory of causality presupposes precisely a discriminatory concept of causality.21 But even a discriminatory concept of causality would still allow for the writing of the Odyssey as being caused – just not by the climate, but by the intention of the author. Already in an earlier passage, Hegel seems to assert exactly such a thing: “The cause of an act is the inner intention of the subject who is the agent, and this intention is the same in content and value as the existence which it attains through the action.” (GW 11: 399/SL: 495) Again, we encounter the problem that in this case the necessary condition for causal relations stated in (P1) is fulfilled. Hegel even affirms the existence of the identity of content in the quotation about action, and also the context of this quotation suggests that it is meant to be an example of the idea that cause and effect share one and the same content.22

 In my opinion, it is unclear whether regularity plays a role in the causality chapter. Hegel’s formulations sound at least rather singularistic and do not strive for regular connections. 21  I argue for such a discriminatory reading in Meyer 2017, but on different grounds. In this respect, the justification given here can be seen as further evidence for the thesis that Hegel’s theory of causation in his Doctrine of Essence is discriminatory. A causal concept is discriminatory if it discriminates between different types of entity as possible causal relations in the same way, so that, if necessary, there can be only the one cause of an event and not several causes. Cf. Lewis [1973] 1986. 22  This seems to be a very clear counterexample against the reading of the determinate relation of causality as merely about mechanical relations as Ng 2017 and 2020 does. 20

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Hegel’s talk of the living not allowing a cause to come to its effect could be at least somewhat illuminated in relation to climate. Even if one would admit the climate as a causal factor, the author would not have been forced to write the Iliad exactly as he wrote it. What about the decline of the Roman Republic? Can we not perfectly ask what caused the decline? That Caesar’s ambition or perhaps more neutrally Caesar’s provoking of the civil war after his return from Gaul had a causal part in the decline of the Roman Republic could well be made plausible. But in this case we would have again only a causal influence, in such a way that the living thing – in this case the republican constitution of Rome – just does not have to let this influence come to an effect. But it did come to an effect, at least to a certain event, which is called ‘decline of the Roman Republic’. As far as Hegel presupposes a discriminatory causal concept for finite causal relations, Caesar’s ambition would hardly have been the cause, because it can hardly have been sufficient for the decline of the republic. It is still open how the reasoning for (P2) is to be understood. The characteristic of content identity should not be given in case of causal impact on living things. This was not true at least for some of the examples mentioned. But why should this identity of content not hold in the case of action on living things? Well, “because that which acts on the living is independently determined, changed, and transformed by it, because the living does not let the cause come to its effect, that is, it cancels it as a cause”, and because it belongs to the living “rather not to take another original into itself, or not to let a cause continue into it, but to break it off and transform it.” Before I try to further clarify these twists and thus Hegel’s thesis with reference to other passages from the Logic and the Encyclopedia, I would like to first discuss the plausibility of the thesis from today’s point of view in the following.

4 On the Plausibility of Hegel’s Thesis How plausible is Claim 1** that we should not explain relations of the living causally? Now and then I had already referred to cases in which the claim may not hold. In the following, I will show again by means of three groups of examples in what way the claim could be implausible. The three groups are (1) duress and deception, (2) market laws and (3) causation of cancer.

4.1 Duress and Deception In criminal law, there is the defending excuse of duress. This involves cases in which people are made to do or to refrain from doing certain things by force or threat. The exact details can be disregarded here, as can the normative evaluation. What is important for the context is that what a person is coerced to do belongs to the realm of spiritual life. Moreover, the use of force or threat can certainly be

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understood in causal terms, since it is a causal influence on a person’s action or omission, so that this action or omission can be understood as the effect of the coercion. If one accepts these two features, however, one would have just a counterexample against Hegel’s Claim 1**. At least, it would no longer be immediately apparent what is to be problematic about the causal explanation of B’s omission of, say, reporting a crime with reference to A’s coercion. Perhaps, however, with reference to the use of force or a threat, one would no longer like to classify these cases in the full sense in the area of spiritual life. Perhaps something constitutive of the spiritual life is not fulfilled for these cases. Is it possible to react to cases of deception the same way? We can also make each other do certain things without having to use force or threats. If A knows that B tends not to simply let injustice stand, and if A now tells B, with intent to deceive, that C has treated someone unjustly in order to get B to make accusations against C that harm C, then A has certainly had a causal effect on B’s actions and has also brought this effect to fruition, and this in a way that makes no effort to use force or threats. Could we not react again with reference to the fact that these cases are not genuinely spiritual? Here, at least, this idea seems to be more difficult to motivate. Certainly, B has done something that B would not have done in full knowledge of the relevant circumstances. But, is that already sufficient for excluding B’s doing from the realm of spiritual life? If this were to be Hegel’s thesis, it would run the risk of becoming question begging again. Instead of explaining to us what is problematic about causal explanations of relations of spiritual life, it would merely define the notion of spiritual relations in such a way as to exclude causal explanations. I will return to this problem in the next section.

4.2 Market Laws Markets can certainly be understood as phenomena of spiritual life. After all, they are trading spaces in which people interact with each other by offering and demanding goods. The price of a good, in turn, depends on the factors of supply and demand. For example, a constant supply generates an increase in prices as demand increases. Of course, this presupposes that people are willing to spend more on the goods, just as it presupposes that those offering goods will want to raise prices if they can maintain sales at the same time. The stability of this regularity, however, seems to prove that this willingness is quite constant. This, in turn, thus allows the assumption that causal relationships are involved. Again, one could respond by saying that these connections are causal, but that they do not take place mechanically between living things in a genuine sense. Again, this reply would have to reckon with the reproach of question begging.

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4.3 Smoking Causes Lung Cancer An almost classic example of a causal statement is ‘smoking causes lung cancer’. Also in this case it seems to be an example of the application of the relation of causality (‘causes’) to relations of life, this time of physical-organic life (‘lung cancer’). What is meant by this statement is that with a high probability regular tobacco consumption by inhalation causes malignant cancer cells to form in the body. The amount, frequency and length of consumption correlate with the probability of such cell formation. Although this is only a probabilistic and not a strict necessary correlation, it seems appropriate to speak of causality. Hegel’s thesis could of course be meant in a way that probabilistic relations23 are excluded. However, there are no direct indications in the text that Hegel wanted to understand causality (strictly) generalistically. A generalistic account of causality takes it as a relation whose individual instances are instances of lawful relations that can be expressed in universal quantification of a material conditional. But, insofar as the difference “necessarily vs. probably” is not the distinguishing characteristic,24 we are again referred back to (P2) of the above argument. So, is there no identity of the content in the case of lung cancer causation? Interestingly, the causal link is refined in that cancer causation is attributed to certain substances called carcinogens, which are themselves defined by their property of being carcinogenic.25 This is exactly a characteristic of causal relations according to Hegel, which seem at least tautological when understood in this way – Hegel himself even speaks of the “tautology of the relation of causality” (GW 11: 400/SL: 496). Viewed in this way, however, the causation of cancer by smoking fulfills precisely the necessary condition for causal relations mentioned in (P1). So either this example is a counterexample against Claim 1** or Hegel has to make intelligible why lung cancer is just not a relation of physical-organic life. Of course, these three groups of examples are not to be understood here as a refutation of what Hegel asserted. They cannot serve this purpose, if only because I have presupposed an intuitive understanding of causality, which does not necessarily correspond to that of Hegel. But is it not conceivable that these examples more fundamentally miss the point of Hegel? Christopher Yeomans (2012, 189) has pointed out that Hegel’s critique of mechanism (perhaps then also of causality) was in no way intended to judge the empirical adequacy of scientific explanations. Are these examples then due to their empirical character not already excluded as counterexamples against Hegel’s thesis? In this case, however, one wonders why Hegel then gives very clear examples of empirical explanations himself, which are supposed to serve as examples for the inadmissible causal explanations of living things. Moreover, one wonders what Hegel’s critique then consists in. If he is concerned with an  Insofar P(A|B) < 1.  According to Mayr 1961 this difference is a consequence of the difference between the living and the purely physical-mechanical explicable. 25  “A carcinogen [kartsino'geːn] is a substance, organism, or radiation that can cause cancer or promote cancer production.” (Wikipedia, entry: “Carcinogen”) 23 24

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adequate understanding of categorical relations (between causality and life as fundamental categories of thought, for instance), and if the scope of the causal category itself is limited, this limited scope should find its equivalent in empirical examples. In this case, then, the examples chosen by Hegel would have been awkward, but the general point would remain untouched. Before consulting some passages from the Encyclopedia and the Doctrine of the Concept in the next section, I would like to show in what way Hegel could well accept the examples I have given as causal explanations of relations of life without contradicting his Claim 1**. This can be shown by considering that these examples can be captured by the means of a regularity theory of causality. Such a theory is based on a non-discriminatory notion of causality. I have argued for the fact that Hegel also has such a non-discriminatory concept of causality, at least for the domain of right.26 Thus, he himself writes in § 115 of the Outlines: Every individual moment which is shown to have been a condition, ground, or cause of some such circumstance and has thereby contributed its share to it may be regarded as being wholly, or at least partly, responsible for it. In the case of a complex event (such as the French Revolution), the formal understanding can therefore choose which of a countless number of circumstances it wishes to make responsible for the event. (PR: § 115/Nisbet 1991, 143)

Strictly speaking, one would have to say at this point that Hegel does not live up to his own standard, since here he allows of a phenomenon of spiritual life having causes – namely the French Revolution. Read charitably, however, this means that he uses the term ‘cause’ in a broader, precisely non-discriminatory sense here. The fact that Hegel allows for non-authentic use of causal vocabulary can also be seen in the following quotation, which immediately follows the passage in the Logic of Essence discussed here: “This much can still be noted here, namely that in so far as the relation of cause and effect is admitted, albeit in an inappropriate sense, the effect cannot be greater than the cause.” (GW 11: 401/SL: 496) Leaving aside the issue of the magnitude of cause and effect, one can see here that Hegel allows for “inappropriate” use of causal vocabulary. Here, Claim 1** would have to be restricted to the claim that in inappropriate use of causal language one should be aware of this inappropriate sense in which one speaks of causality here. But what does this inappropriate sense consist of? According to my proposal, this corresponds to a regularity theory in the sense of Mackie. According to this theory, causes proper are always bundles of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. Mackie introduced the acronym INUS (“insufficient but necessary/non-redundant element of an unnecessary but sufficient condition” (1974))27 for these bundles.28

 Meyer 2020, Ch. 2.  This idea goes back at least to John Stuart Mill. 28  Richard Wright (Wright 2013) refined the definition by claiming that every single condition is necessary for the whole bundle to be sufficient (necessary for the sufficiency). 26 27

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This observation gives rise to a new picture. In terms of contemporary theories of causality, it seems that Hegel allows for two concepts of causality,29 a narrow, discriminatory causal concept, developed in the Doctrine of Essence, and a broad, non-discriminatory causal concept. Claim 1** would then be restricted to the first narrow concept. This fits quite well with how the relationship between objects of biology and the question of causal explanations is understood today. For instance, Ernst Mayr accepts such an INUS notion of causality in his influential 1961 essay. At the same time, however, he shows that there is no complete determination in the realm of the living, which would speak in favor of Hegel’s assertion that it is part of the living to transform external influences.30 For the narrow, causal concept, however, the validity restriction from Claim 1** would then continue to apply. However, it is still not completely clear how this thesis should be understood with respect to this narrow discriminatory causal concept. Up to now, I assumed that the inadmissibility only excludes that the living being, or events which take place in a living being, appears as explanandum in causal explanations. Maybe Hegel is not concerned with the fact that living things stand in causal relations, but with the fact that they cannot be causally explained as what they are  – namely, living beings? Some passages of the Encyclopedia and the Doctrine of the Concept suggest this. So, in order to investigate Claim 1** further, we need to look at these passages.

5 Causality and Life in the Logic of the Concept: Towards a Solution? A passage concerning the relation of causality and life can be found in the Doctrine of the Concept and there in the section on the Idea: As externality it [the objectivity of the living individual/T.M.] is indeed capable of such relations [as causality/T.M.], but insofar it is not living existence; if the living is taken as a whole consisting of parts, as such, on which mechanical or chemical causes act, as a mechanical or chemical product, be it merely as such or also determined by an external purpose, then the concept is taken as external to it, it is taken as a dead. (GW 12: 183–184/ SL: 680)

For the question about the meaning of Claim 1** this passage already provides some clarification. Hegel distinguishes between living things as mechanically describable and living things as living. Causal explanations of living things are  Understood in this way, the note from the determinate relation of causality provides further evidence for my reading in Meyer 2020, Ch. 2, with the addition that Hegel may also accept the broad non-discriminatory concept of causality for natural philosophy and possibly the whole philosophy of mind. 30  Likewise, Manfred Laubichler points out the following with respect to evolutionary processes: “This historical dimension [evolution/T.M.] also leads to the fact that certain forms of explanation in biology clearly differ from a strict cause-effect scheme.“ Laubichler 2005, 115. 29

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permissible, but only of living things described as mechanical. This means that merely causal explanations of living things as living things are excluded. In other words, causal explanations of phenomena in the realm of the living presuppose that these phenomena are then just not considered in the respect that makes them what they essentially are – living.31 From this the following can be concluded for the two main questions of this essay. To repeat the questions: Q1: What exactly does Hegel mean by ‘application of the relation of causality to relations of life’? Q2: Why is this ‘application’ problematic? The application of the relation of causality to relations of life is inadmissible exactly when and because this application means that living things are to be explained as living things by mere reference to finite causality. The living is not reducible to the causal. This can be shown easily, even though in a circular way: finite causality consists in the effective connection of two finite substances such that one transfers a quantity X to the other (kinetic energy e.g.), so that this quantity X continues from A into B’s movement. Accordingly, the cause “loses” itself in its effect. Living things qua living things, on the other hand, are precisely such that they are an integrated unit of a complex whole, so that this whole cannot be explained in terms of finite causality. It is true that mechanical-causal processes can be identified as partial processes of an organism, which can also be explained as such in causal terms – for example, the pumping of the heart is a mechanical process. And this possibility also explains why the counterexamples I have discussed are certainly examples of causal explanations of living things. However, as Hegel’s thesis must be understood, organisms as wholes, i.e. in the very respect that distinguishes them from inorganic beings, could not be explained in terms of causality. To grasp this, according to Hegel, one needs the conceptual tools of teleological connections; one needs a concept of an ordered whole in which all parts are both means and ends to one another. This means, however, that one also already needs a concept of a substance that causes itself (causa sui), i.e. the concept of true causality.

6 What Do We Learn About Hegel’s Theory of Causality? I started with the remark that I am primarily interested in a deeper understanding of Hegel’s theory of life and its relation to causality. Can anything be learned about this from the discussion here of the note on causality and life? I think that quite a number of conclusions can be drawn. Certainly, what can be said from the whole discussion for the question of the type of theory of causality is that all those contemporary theories of causality that claim to explain living things fall outside the range

 The, or at least one, reason for this explanatory inadequacy consists in the fact that to understand the living qua living one must understand their unity. Cf. DeVries 1988, 11–12. 31

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of those theories to which Hegel’s own can be assigned. Also, we now know that Hegel did not reject causal explanations in the realm of the living altogether, but only with respect to the explanation of the living as the living.32 Here, admittedly, the question still remains open whether this is not question begging or a trivial truth, because it follows analytically from Hegel’s terminological determinations. Finally, some questions that this text gives rise to have to be mentioned. Is Hegel’s Claim1** valid only given a very specific understanding of causality? Or, could his point be generalized to all theories of causality? Why should causality be conceptualized at all in the way Hegel does, rather than, say, in terms of a complex theory of conditions, such as Mackie’s or even Lewis’ counterfactual theory? Is there any need at all for such a theory, of finite, mechanical causality, consisting in a process of transmission? Does Hegel have reasons for conceptualizing it as he does? But, why does he not hold on to his own true conception of causality, and thus allow for causal interpretations of life? Many ways of speaking about the living just fit this: self-movement, self-production, self-reproduction. These questions must be addressed in another article. So far we can hold on to the idea that living qua living and therefore a fortiori phenomena of spirit must not (because they cannot) be explained causally. As Guru said, just because I want to it don’t mean I will.

References Beebee, Helen, Christopher Hitchcock, and Peter Menzies, eds. 2009. The Oxford Handbook of Causation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DeVries, Willem. 1988. Hegel’s Theory of Mental Activity: An Introduction to Theoretical Spirit. New York: Cornell University Press. Hegel, G.  W. F. [GW 11] 1978. Wissenschaft der Logik. Erster Band. Die objective Logik. (1812/13). Gesammelte Werke 11. Hamburg: Meiner. ———. [PR] 1991. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Trans. H.  B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. [SL] 2010a. The Science of Logic. Trans. and Ed. George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. [Enc.] 2010b. Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, Part 1, Science of Logic: Part I: Science of Logic. Trans. K.  Brinkmann and Daniel O.  Dahlstrom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, Daniel. 2020. Social Organisms. Hegel’s Organizational View of Social Functions. In Social Functions in Philosophy. Metaphysical, Normative, and Methodological Perspectives, ed. Rebekka Hufendiek, Daniel James, and Raphael van Riel, 219–245. New York/London: Routledge. ———. 2021. Logical and Natural Life in Hegel. European Journal of Philosophy: 1–19. Khurana, Thomas, ed. 2013. The Freedom of Life: Hegelian Perspectives. Freiheit und Gesetz III. Berlin: August Verlag. ———. 2017. Das Leben der Freiheit: Form und Wirklichkeit der Autonomie. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

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 This is what Rand 2011 also argues for.

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Kreines, James. 2008. The Logic of Life: Hegel’s Philosophical Defence of Teleological Explanation of Living Beings. In The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. F.C. Beiser, 344–377. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laubichler, Manfred D. 2005. Systemtheoretische Organismuskonzeptionen. In: Philosophie der Biologie: Eine Einführung, ed. by U. Krohs, and G. Toepfer, 109–124, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Lewis, David. [1973] 1986. ‘Causation.’ In: Philosophical Papers II. 159–172. New York: Oxford University Press USA Mackie, John Leslie. 1974. The Cement of the Universe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mayr, Ernst. 1961. Cause and Effect in Biology. Science NS 134: 1501–1506. Meyer, Thomas. 2017. Hegels wesenslogisches Kausalitätskapitel als Identitätstheorie der Kausalität. Hegel-Studien 51: 91–119. ———. 2020. Verantwortung und Verursachung. Eine moral- und rechtsphilosophische Studie zu Hegel. Hegel-Studien Beiheft. Vol. 69. Hamburg: Meiner Verlag. Ng, Karen. 2017. From Actuality to Concept in Hegel’s Logic. In The Oxford Handbook of Hegel, ed. Dean Moyar, 269–290. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2020. Hegel’s Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rand, Sebastian. 2011. Stimulus-Response Relations and Organic Unity in Hegel and Schelling. In Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus, ed. Dina Emundts and Sally Sedgwick, vol. 8, 185–206. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. ———. 2013. What’s Wrong with Rex? Hegel on Animal Defect and Individuality. European Journal of Philosophy 23: 68–86. Sandkaulen, Birgit. 2019. Der Begriff des Lebens in der Klassischen Deutschen Philosophie: Eine naturphilosophische oder lebensweltliche Frage? Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 67: 911–929. Spahn, Christian. 2007. Lebendiger Begriff – Begriffenes Leben: Zur Grundlegung der Philosophie des Organischen bei G. W. F. Hegel. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2020. Causality, Natural Systems, and Hegel’s Organicism. In The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, ed. Marina F. Bykova and Kenneth R. Westphal, 219–239. Schweiz: Springer. Wright, Richard. 2013. The NESS Account of Natural Causation: A Response to Criticisms. In Critical Essays on ‘Causation and Responsibility’, ed. Benedikt Kahmen and Markus Stephanians, 13–66. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. Yeomans, Christopher. 2012. Freedom and Reflection: Hegel and the Logic of Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Concepts with Teeth and Claws. On Species, Essences and Purposes in Hegel’s Organic Physics Edgar Maraguat

Philosophy, following Hegel’s understanding, is concerned with developing adequate concepts to account for objects that fit their own concepts. ‘The concept’, in this second objective sense, is ‘the unity of being and essence’, ‘the truth of the substantial relation’ (GW 12: 29). The proper concept of a thing is its intimate essential nature (see GW 21: 15)—also a kind of ideal fulfilled, when things go well. Thus, the conceptual essence of things is, Hegel claims, ‘their determination and purpose’ (EL § 179). It is on account of this objective understanding of concepts that Hegel has been considered, by some contemporary interpreters, an exponent of essentialism (Stern 1990; Hösle 2005; Knappik 2016, 2018, 2019). Now, not everything we see around us is, for Hegel, objectively adequate to its own concept. There is error, mere appearance, deformity, and so on. Everywhere, indeed, and especially, according to Hegel, in nature. Nature is, more than anything else, the realm of externality, of contingent, adventitious determination. In nature we find necessity and contingency, necessity mingled with contingency, necessarily contingency and a necessity itself contingent. Moreover, nature is, according to Hegel, an ‘unresolved contradiction’ (Enc2 § 248 R) between one thing and the other. And, I grant, natural forms are presented in Hegel’s system of philosophy in a sequence in which contingency gradually yields to purpose, externality to self-­ determination, necessity to freedom, causal transient relationships to the durable determination by the concept... But to what extent is this self-improvement consummated within the natural realm? It is doubtful that it is, on Hegel’s account. The truth is that there remains, in ‘Organic Physics’, the final section of his Philosophy of Nature, the second part of his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, a contrast between concepts and the natural order. Nature is declared powerless, ultimately incapable of expressing ‘the concept’. Hegel explicitly claims that

E. Maraguat (*) Department of Philosophy, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Corti, J.-G. Schülein (eds.), Life, Organisms, and Human Nature, Studies in German Idealism 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_5

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it is not capable of retaining or sustaining determinate forms. What is the point, then, of considering him an essentialist in general and, in particular, with regard to organic nature? I would like to show, precisely, that essentialism has been erroneously sought in his doctrine of species as ‘natural kinds’ (explicitly in, e.g., Stern 1990 and Knappik 2016, implicitly in Kreines 2015). I will argue that even if Hegel were to adopt essentialist views on some matters, he would still reject that a species concept can be the adequate determination of the ‘essence’ of a living entity. Therefore, in fact, it is not advisable to speak of essentialism with regard to natural organic forms in his case.

1 Essentialism for Historians, Essentialism for Philosophers When historians of biology (and the preceding life sciences) speak of ‘essentialism’ and argue about what the naturalists of the eighteenth century thought, essentialism involves invariable species concepts of which different sets of living individuals are perfect examples insofar as their members exhibit a list of characteristic properties—practically without exception—as if they were aptly shaped following a model. In fact, the debates on these matters are rather about who believed in unchanging models and who did not. Also, on whether, in general, pre-Darwinian naturalists were essentialists, or not exactly, and on whether the classificatory practices they engaged in were essentialist in themselves, or not really. Notwithstanding these controversies, those who believe that essentialism dominated the biological discourse back then and those who disagree share the same notion of essentialism. The debate about how hegemonic essentialism was three centuries ago is one about Darwin’s and other nineteenth-century evolutionists’ originality, also about how the inherited taxonomy contributed to or rather hindered the evolutionary intellectual breakthrough, but not a debate about essentialism as such. The standard narrative, owing to authors like Ernst Mayr (1968) or David Hull (1965, 1976), presents essentialism as definitional of the pre-Darwinian ‘typological concept’ of species. The ‘type’, in the sense they use this word, is the ‘essence or definition of a class’, in Mayr’s terms (Mayr 2002, 80). However, revisionist historians like Mary Winsor (2001, 2003) or John Wilkins (2009) reply that the ‘types’ under scrutiny were not actual essences, that the logical definition of species has been confused with the naturalist definition, that the typological concept is an invention of the standard narrative and that most Enlightenment naturalists understood biological natural classes as sets of similar living beings that do not share a core of characteristics (after all, it is not necessary to be typologically identical to mate) (see also Amundson 1998). The debate, again, remains open (the revisionists have also received well-documented criticism; see Stamos 2005). Yet, what is important for the argument to follow is that for both, revisionists and those responsible for the ‘received view’, essentialism means fixed and clear-cut biological species.

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Actually, the contemporary usage of the term transcends the history of systematics. Among philosophers of biology, for instance, it is also common (see, e.g., Sober 1980; Dupré 1981; Dennett 2016). Among philosophers of language, such as Saul Kripke or Hilary Putnam, essentialism also came to mean decades ago an invariable constitution, which would fix the reference of a term. This invariable constitution was interpreted paradigmatically as a chemical microstructure, to be analyzed in qualitatively indistinguishable physical forces and particles (obviously, it appears that essentialism, in this sense, explains belonging to a class in terms of belonging to a class, but this is another issue). In the case of presumed biological natural kinds, similarly, a common denominator was taken for granted. The most popular modern candidates, for obvious reasons, have been particular genetic programs (or codes). Essentialists typically argue that an entity needs to have certain specific properties in order to be a full member of a given natural class. Some philosophers assume that living beings of the same species share indeed the property (or properties) of being developed according to the same program or Bauplan (Wilkerson 1988; Devitt 2008; but see Dupré 1989). However, in light of the great variability among living individuals, most philosophers dispute this claim, and have renounced treating biological kinds as essentialist kinds (see, e.g., Ellis 2001; Bird 2007).1 Again, what matters here for my argument is that the debate among philosophers of science, philosophers of language and metaphysicians has not been about the meaning of ‘essentialism’, only about which classes should be considered essentialist classes (whether they are only physical or chemical kinds, or also, for instance, species) and which criteria are relevant for answering this question. Therefore, given the current usage of the term, to say of someone that their philosophy of nature, or at least their philosophy of organisms, is essentialist, amounts to attributing to them the believe in well-differentiated biological models and, hence, a conception of species that is not simply pre-Darwinian, but fully anti-­ Darwinian, namely the outdated ‘typological concept’, in Mayr’s terms. According to Mayr and others, this concept is one of those philosophical notions that ‘retarded’ the advent of a properly evolutionary account of nature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Since Hegel had no such concept, at least as far as biological kinds are concerned, to qualify his philosophy as essentialist is very misleading, to say the least. Certainly, the attribution of essentialism to Hegel has been nuanced in various manners (see, e.g., Knappik 2016, 2019). A tempting move in this respect is to attribute to him a ‘teleological essentialism’.2 A teleological Aristotelian essentialism does not imply a shared, identical chemical composition of the members of a species, but rather the same formal-teleological orientation: goal-directed dispositions or purposes, this is what the biological natural kinds have in common, on such an account.

 Devitt 2008 agrees on this being the common view and gives many examples of its supporters. For an exception, see Okasha 2002. 2  As Walsh 2006 has done with Aristotle. 1

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Essentialism becomes, thus, modally qualified: instances of an essentialist biological kind do not exhibit a set of distinctive qualities, even if a tendency or pattern is discernible; they are just supposed to necessarily have them or, simply, they should have them, independent of this being the case or not. Yet, of course, such a remedy appears worse than the diagnosed disease: the implausibility of invariable essences today is thus replaced by a metaphysics of natural purposes that seems even more implausible. I am going to propose a straightforward escape from this situation, namely, that we stop considering Hegel an essentialist, period. Even if he maintains that as a universal we express the sensible and that the genus is the truth of the subject, and he has a teleological conception of the living, he is not a species essentialist. My argument will show that he took species for indeterminate kinds of plants and animals (2); furthermore, that the true genera of living beings are not, in his account, particular biological species (3); and, thirdly, that his doctrine of teleology does not support the essentialist reading, fundamentally because natural ends are realized immanent purposes and not idealizations, not ideal forms towards which something tends or is driven (4 & 5). I admit, however, that on the latter, this third point, I will not be as conclusive as on the former ones, and consequently, some exegetical issues will remain open. But the whole should convince the reader that Hegel’s view of the form and purpose of living organisms was not typically anti-­ evolutionary, as the accusation of essentialism implies (6).

2 The Lack of a Clear-Cut Definition of Species Which concepts are ‘realized’ in living nature? What differentiations does ‘the concept’, that is, a true philosophical understanding, invite? It is natural to think, I admit, that they are concepts of specific forms, say, of roses and dogs and parrots, species or proximate genera of species (Stern 1990, 60; Knappik 2016, 763; 2019, 9 & 12), that are natural kinds which we have to appeal to for the explanation of individuals. There are apparently many tokens of these particular kinds in nature, although exhibiting particularities that are subject to contingencies (to ‘externality’ or external determination). Individuals represent diverse ways, among many others conceivable, of being of a certain kind, according to one’s own specific essence. But do the texts sustain this reading of Hegel? Well, I don’t think so. Certainly, Hegel assumes that life sciences aim at establishing real differences (see Enc2 § 370 R).3 Success in this task is meant to depend on whether it is possible to explain why plants and animals are the way they are and behave as they do. If the functions of their parts and of their behaviors are what explain their existence and the functions are attributed by means of species-related judgments, then the job of

 Knappik claims (2016, 763) that Hegel takes sides with Linné on this, and not Buffon, but Buffon’s position is controversial. Knappik follows Mayr 1982 on this account. 3

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science is to determine which the ‘good species’ are, i.e., the true particular (natural) kinds of living beings. This has recently become a common understanding (Stern 1990, 2007; Kreines 2015, 94 ff.; Knappik 2019, 12–13). The task is, admittedly, not easy to accomplish, but nevertheless. Yet, the truth is that Hegel is categorical about empirical species, genera, and the like: the impotence of nature affects the genera themselves, such things are not well differentiated. The animal world in particular does not obey, or even to a lesser extent than other spheres of nature, a rational organization. It cannot, therefore, cling to the forms determined by ‘the concept’ and preserve them from mixing, etc. In this sense, the divisions of taxonomy cannot be sharp. Hegel expressly points out that this does not affect only individuals, which in their contingency could be thought to be essentially unclassifiable, but also genera (Enc2 § 370 R). It does not simply happen that there are intermediate exceptional entities, unclassifiable as such because of their defects or because they are the offspring of heterogeneous mates, and do not end up being either one kind or another. Rather, there are no well-distinguishable genera to which the different individuals should be ascribed. And it is not simply that they are hidden from empirical observation, but that, and Hegel is very emphatic in this, it is impossible to distinguish them in a sound way. Hegel does not claim that a powerless concept (i.e., our most precious intellectual faculty) cannot comprehend the limits and essential differences of some entities, rather that a powerless nature confuses, does not properly differentiate, the denizens of the organic world (so, for example, he would write: ‘The plant is unable to maintain its power over its members [Die Pflanze ist so die Ohnmacht, ihre Gliederung nicht in ihrer Macht zu erhalten]’, Enc2 § 337 Z). As a consequence, botanical and zoological definitions are neither definite nor definitively established. There are at best better or worse division grounds, criteria for taxonomy more or less in accordance with the concept—with the concept of what is there to divide to begin with (I will come back to this later)—and not sufficiently firm for the smooth accomplishment of this task (GW 12: 219). Against these very pronounced warnings, it might initially be argued that in one of those passages, specifically in the introduction to the Philosophy of Nature, reminiscent of Aristotle’s Physics, Hegel points out that the existence of deformities, monsters and hybrids that we ascribe to a genus despite the lack of some determinations presupposes an ‘invariable prototype’ (Enc2 § 250 R). But, this statement does not contradict the previous ones at all. For one, Hegel asserts that this is a necessary presupposition, not a matter of fact, arguably a useful working-hypothesis for the naturalist. For another, most importantly, a model does not necessarily mean a specific ideal form, of which the individuals would be merely partial approximations.4 In fact, several naturalist speculations in the eighteenth century brandish the idea of a prototype that is completely general. According to Peter Reill, this notion was ‘in the air’ around 1750 (Reill 1986, 144). Diderot spoke literally in 1753, in his Pensées sur l’interpretation de la nature, of a prototype of all animals (see Zammito

 As Buffon seems to believe, even if this is, as I said, debatable (see Zammito 2018, 176).

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2018, 104). So did Jean Robinet in 1768 in his Vue philosophique de la gradation naturelle des formes de l’etre (see again Reill 1986, 145). Also Herder, whose work Hegel was well acquainted with, contemplated in 1784 a general epigenesis of natural beings by means of forces that organize matter, and affirmed the existence of ‘eine Hauptform’ of earthly living beings, also some prototypes of different organs, and explicitly that genera and species were infinite variations of a common form (Herder 1784, 88–89; see Zammito 2018, 183–84). Later, Kant referred to the idea of a ‘common prototype’ too, even if it was to describe the adventurous hypothesis he rejected (Kant 1790/2001, § 80; AA 5: 418–19). Analogously, Goethe, who arguably exerted an important influence on Hegel in these matters, described plants as variations of one single original type, as well as animals as variations of one archetypal Urtier (Goethe 1817, 23; see Lenoir 1984; Pfau 2010, 19; Zammito 2018, 292–94). Therefore, it is not implausible that the models or prototypes Hegel mentions in the introduction to his Philosophy of Nature are idealizations of the common nature of plants or animals, and not of concrete species. I actually think that it is very likely that Hegel meant such supra-specific prototypes in that paragraph, since his Philosophy of Nature discusses precisely, in very general terms, plants and animals. The last two chapters of ‘Organic Physics’ could be described, indeed, as the analysis of the plant prototype and the animal prototype. Furthermore, these encompassing types are among his examples of genera and universals in both his Logic and his lessons, as we will see. The claim that there are models (or they are presupposed) does certainly not imply that there are specific essences; rather it suggests that species with imprecise boundaries, even shifting ones, occur naturally. Thus, I suggest that talking about ‘prototypes’ or exemplary models implies more than anything else anti-essentialism, in the sense of the term clarified in the previous section.

3 The Non-specific Genus of Living Beings Of course, I do not pretend to base my reading merely on the ambiguity of the word ‘prototype’. Nor only on generalities about the impotence of nature, the scope of which is far from precise in the introduction to the Philosophy of Nature in the Encyclopaedia. Rather, I will base my case on a discussion of the arguments of the species-essentialist interpretation. The essentialist reading is inspired by the presentation of the realist goals of philosophy in the works of Hegel. In one well-known passage, characterizing the theoretical account of nature as directed to the ‘universal’ that is ‘determined in itself’, Hegel speaks of forces, laws and genera, whose ‘content ... is distributed through orders and classes … as an organic whole’ (Enc2 § 246; cf. EL § 227; cf. GW 11: 22). Then, in ‘Organic Physics’, the genus is considered the concrete substance of the singularity of the subject (Enc2 § 367; in the abstract, the Logic says previously: ‘All things are a genus’, EL § 179, that is, everything belongs essentially to one genus or another). Genera, then, are not purely abstract categories. They are

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not proper nouns of sets of things that are similar in some respect or that coincide in some notes. Genera are, rather, what Hegel calls ‘concrete universals’ (Enc2 § 366; cf. GW 12: 36; EL § 227; GW 12: 212), precisely because the universal determination is the proper or immanent character of what truly belongs to a conceptually determined member of a kind. What distinguishes the concrete universal from the abstract universal (an abstraction or ‘mere representation’), according to Robert Stern (2007, 126), is a particular relationship between the universal, the particular and the singular in the first case that does not obtain in the second. Specifically, two requirements must be met: that the concrete universal is an essential property of the individual (so that, according to Stern, it supports nomological generalizations and normative judgments) and that the individual possesses a set of particular properties as an individual of such a kind (that is, its particular properties, in Stern’s terms, ‘are seen as different manifestations of a shared substance universal’ or they are predicated of the individual insofar as it is essentially of a certain kind; see Stern 2007, 129 and EL § 175 Z). Thus, not only is the universality of the genus essential to the particularity of the individual, but also, inversely, the particularity to the universal. The concrete universal is, hence, the universal that is not indifferent to its particular expression. From the idea that particular properties are considered manifestations of the essence of the individual, the essentialist reading then infers that the relationship between particular species and the genera that comprehend them cannot be arbitrary, as if the characteristics of a species were simply added to those common for tokens of a proximate genus. A corroboration of this point seems provided by the section on ‘Subjectivity’ in the Logic, specifically the subsection on the categorical judgment, in which Hegel explains that ‘The genus essentially divides or repels itself into species; it is genus only in so far as it comprehends the species under it; the species is a species only in so far as, on the one side, it exists in singulars, and, on the other side, it possesses in the genus a higher universality’ (GW 12: 77–78; cf. 12: 215). The same doctrine, apparently, is in fact repeated in, precisely, the Philosophy of Nature: ‘The genus is particularized… in species’ (Enc2 § 370*).5 This is interpreted by the essentialist reading as textual proof that Hegel is committed to a hierarchical organization according to natural kinds of the objects of philosophy, including the philosophy of nature, as a requirement of the concept. But the truth is that the Science of Logic expressly distinguishes the genus in the abstract sense (and its corresponding abstract species) from the ‘empirical species’ (GW 12: 81). And indeed, when push comes to shove, in line with the general remarks about the impotence of nature we are already acquainted with, Hegel never cites biological species as examples of concrete universals. The passages that are usually quoted to support the attribution to him of a species essentialism with regard to living beings fail in fact to provide such examples. To my knowledge, in the texts,

 This line does not appear in Petry’s edition (so, I translated it myself). It was added to the 1830 Encyclopaedia. 5

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a botanical or zoological species is never recognized as the ‘genus’, nature or essence of an individual organism. Let’s consider briefly the two examples that Stern invokes: the rose and the dog. Aside from the fact that ‘rose’ is for botanics not the name of a species, rather of a genus divided in many species, the passages (one from the body of the Science of Logic, another from the additions to the Encyclopaedia paragraphs), do not, at any point, claim that ‘This flower is a rose’, for example, is a categorical judgment, a judgment ‘of necessity’ in which an objective universality, the essence or essential nature of the subject, is enunciated (cf. GW 12: 78). Note: ... what is necessary in it is the substantial identity of subject and predicate, in view of which the distinguishing mark of each is only an unessential positedness or even only a name; in its predicate, the subject is reflected into its being-in-and-for-itself. Such a predicate ought not to be classed with the predicates of the preceding judgments. For example, to throw together into one class these judgments: The rose is red, The rose is a plant, or This ring is yellow, It is gold, and thus to take such an external property as the color of a flower as a predicate equal to its vegetable nature, is to overlook a difference which the dullest mind would not miss.

As we can see, what Hegel claims is rather that a certain singular flower called ‘rose’ is ‘a plant’ (or ‘is of a vegetal nature’). Hence, not that ‘The plant is a rose’, but, verbally, somehow the opposite (i.e., ‘The rose is a plant’). The same occurs in the addition in which Hegel speaks of the genus of the dog. The genus of a particular dog is not, according to Hegel, ‘dog’ (Canis, nor for that matter Canis familiaris). The genus of a dog (the dog in the sense of this dog) is, according to Hegel, ‘animal’ or ‘animal nature’. Animality or animal organicity is, according to Hegel, the essential nature of the dog, its essential determination and, in a sense yet to be determined, its purpose. Moreover, given that animality is, according to the Philosophy of Nature, the full form of animated life, of which the vegetal nature is an insufficiently differentiated form (I will return to this later), the genus of the dog is, in short, life, namely, natural life. Thus, the addition to EL § 24 reads: An example closer at hand is that, in speaking of a definite animal, we say that it is [an] “animal.” “Animal as such” cannot be pointed out; only a definite animal can ever be pointed at. “The animal” does not exist; on the contrary, this expression refers to the universal nature of single animals, and each existing animal is something that is much more concretely determinate, something particularized. But “to be animal,” the kind considered as the universal, pertains to the determinate animal and constitutes its determinate essentiality. If we were to deprive a dog of its animality we could not say what it is. Things as such have a persisting, inner nature, and an external thereness. They live and die, come to be and pass away; their essentiality, their universality, is the kind [Gattung], and this cannot be interpreted merely as something held in common.

A particular case is perhaps represented by humanity (or ‘man’, GW 12: 73, 76), mentioned besides ‘animality’ there and in other passages, as the substance of a singularity (of, e.g., ‘Gaius’, a concrete man). Certainly, ‘man’ as a genus might be understood as having the extension of a species. But the essential mark of the human

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being is, for Hegel, thought or thinking, not a biological constitution. Humanity characterized by thought, in Hegel’s system, is not, it seems to me, a biological species, in which a higher genus—what could that be?—is differentiated or particularized. That this is so is intimated by another of the few passages in which Hegel gives explicit examples of concrete universals, in the Introduction to ‘The Doctrine of the Concept’, in which he refers to ‘life, self, spirit and the absolute concept’ as concrete universals (GW 12: 36). Man is, surely, spirit. The I is, according to the Encyclopaedia, thinking as subject (EL § 20 R). In turn, the animal is, in this regard, life, no doubt. The examples of the rose and the dog, then, rather agree with those on that page of the Logic. Hegel’s concrete universals, the only essential natures that he recognizes, are what Franz Knappik calls, treating them as very special cases, essences alien to a hierarchy (2016, 763). As far as I can see, those purportedly special cases are, when we speak of organic nature, the only ones conceptually well established in Hegel’s work. All of this is consistent with the explanations on animality—richer than those provided on vegetal nature—in the Philosophy of Nature. The animal, Hegel argues, is a universal in itself, and not a mere abstraction. Nor is ‘animal’ a higher genus, the genus of certain species. Animal nature itself is a ‘subjective universality’ (Enc2 §§ 347, 350) or ‘living universality’ (Enc2 § 352). As living universality, this concept is given existence in the animal organism. In the relationship between the organic individual and animality, then, we find an ‘intimacy’ between the individual and its genus—i.e. between the individual and its own animal substance or nature— a unity without the mediation of a species. This enables to make sense of something else that Hegel says introductorily, namely that in nature the concept is, on the one hand, merely internal and, on the other, ‘exists only as a living individual’ (Enc2 § 249). In my alternative reading, therefore, the conceptual particularization of the genus is not the relationship between the genus and some species, it is rather the relationship between the organism and its parts (organs, systems) and configuration (which is a process) and, likewise, between its natural life in general and all its constitutive vital activities (fundamentally, assimilation and regeneration). The organism, as an end in itself (Selbstzweck), is, through particularization of itself, an objective ‘judgment’ or division. Hence, describing its relation to external objectivity in the process of assimilation, Hegel may claim that ‘... as the being-for-self of the living Notion, it [the organism] is to an equal extent a disjunctive activity which rids itself of this process, separates itself from the one-sided subjectivity of its hostility towards the object, and so becomes explicitly what it is implicitly’ (Enc2 § 365 R). In this common respect, the different animals are equally based on ‘the universal type of the animal determined by the Notion’ (Enc2 § 370*). This type or model is indeed, it seems to me, a Goethean ‘prototype’. Hegel explains that the model is displayed in nature ‘in the various stages of its development’, from the simplest to the most perfect, but this does not imply that there are specific necessary stages, whose existence would be predetermined by the concept. There are only classifications more or less based on the concept of animal or plant. The multiplicity of species is thus a rather abstract implication.

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Does this lead to an extravagant doctrine of individuals taken for universals because they have many parts or properties (because they are one-and-many)?6 Not at all, I believe. Rather, this is the fairly Aristotelian doctrine that the character of the organized being, and paradigmatically of the animal, is a certain form, although not a specific form, namely animality in any animal form whatsoever. Animals are forms and processes, this is clear, and, specifically, a process of processes (EL § 217). They are only in becoming what they are: ‘only as this that reproduces itself, not as a being, the living being is and is conserved’ (Enc2 § 352).

4 The Immanent Purpose of Organisms The first case for Hegel’s species essentialism is, thus, based on the assumption that nature, as the externalization of the Idea, shows a hierarchical arrangement of orders and classes, and, therefore, of empirical genera particularized in empirical species. However, this inference collides with Hegel’s actual examples of genera and concrete universals in the Science of Logic and the Encyclopaedia, as we have seen. Yet, a different argument, implicit in Knappik’s recent work, may be built on a plausible understanding of Hegel’s approach to natural teleology. The ‘genus’ is, as we have already seen, the determination and purpose of the individual. The purpose is then seen as determined for the individual according to the species it belongs to. So, Hegel’s account of natural teleology is read as implying, again, that botanical and zoological ‘genera’ are species and, as a consequence, species are supposed to be the natural essence of individual organisms. A further implication of this view is that Hegel’s alleged species essentialism is not committed to the presumption of properties shared without exception by conspecifics. Knappik claims explicitly, as I said in Sect. 1, that members of a species are characterized by goal-directed dispositions, not by an invariable material or composition. The question is not so much if they have certain properties, but if they should have them—a view which turns Hegel into a teleological essentialist. However, whether species have a crucial role in Hegel’s doctrine of natural teleology is a controversial matter, as I will argue in this and the following section. The centrality, in this doctrine, of the concept of inner purposiveness, a concept that Hegel adopts from Kant and, inspired by Aristotle, then purifies of all intentional connotations, is generally acknowledged (by, for instance, Knappik and James Kreines). Natural ends are immanent, inner ends. Purposive natural beings are seen, accordingly, as cause and effect of themselves. Yet, how should we individuate a natural self-realizing system? And more particularly, do species have an actual significant role in such an individuation?  See Stern 2007, 116–22, where the attribution of a confusion of this sort to some British idealists, namely Francis H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet, is discussed, but Hegel is declared innocent of this confusion, since he had merely adopted the hardly controversial position that particulars are examples of universals. 6

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Building the setting for the ensuing debate, Kant explains self-causation in nature by means of a notorious triple illustration: a tree (that is, a vegetal), a typical organized being, arguably causes itself, somehow, in three distinct ways. According to the species, it causes itself by producing other (very similar) trees. Besides, through interaction with its environment, it causes itself through regeneration. And, additionally, in virtue of its internal organization, it causes itself in so far as its parts cause each other reciprocally. Thus, Kant’s example makes the ambiguity of natural self-causation rather explicit: is the individual an end for itself, or is it rather the species of the individual? And, if the second holds true, should we then say that the persistence of a species is the purpose of the efforts and activities of the individual organism? After Kant, Hegel does indeed elevate these three very different, allegedly self-­ producing loops to abstract concepts in which life in general must be analyzed. Thus, he grants them a place in his Logic. However, following Buffon’s Histoire naturelle (1749), he reverses the order in which Kant presents them, speaking first of the configuration process, then of the assimilation process, and finally of the process of the genus (sexual differentiation, relationship with other individuals, mating, etc.). Actually, the term ‘reproduction’ has fundamentally the sense of dynamic self-preservation or self-maintenance based on regular regeneration. Regeneration was the ordinary meaning of the word ‘reproduction’ in Hegel’s time, the one it had for, precisely, Buffon. Hegel imports the term, in this sense, in § 218 and § 366 of the Encyclopaedia. So, it cannot come as a surprise that Hegel defends, both in the Science of Logic and in the Philosophy of Nature, that the living being, the individual animal in particular, is an end in itself (Selbstzweck), that is, it has its purpose in its own life. Hegel places telling emphasis on the fact that the internal life of the singular organism must be understood in terms of inner purposiveness (Enc2 § 360), as the form of the organism, its concrete animality, being the cause of its existence, becomes its purpose, or, more precisely, is already its realized purpose. It is not that some species are for themselves an end and realize themselves in some way, along time, through a succession of generations at the expense of individuals—even if in individuals. So, to begin with, reference to empirical species is in fact absent in Hegel’s argument on purposiveness. Functionality is considered an internal or immanent property of organisms because of their organization, and this organization does not need to be that of a specific kind of plant or animal. Furthermore, functionality does not depend on what was produced in the past, in another organism, by a similar or very similar organization. The parts—organs or rather systems of organs—of an organism have a purpose because of how concretely they contribute to the life, to the preservation, of the organism, and not because of what similar organs of ancestors did or did not do. This is not simply assumed or presupposed by Hegel, as Kreines claims (2015, 100), since the organism really produces itself. On account of this, we can functionally judge, by reference to the organism, as to an internal norm, what happens in it and what it does. Or can’t we? Well, I think we can. An organ can have a role within an organism, in fact, that other organs did not have in the past and, nevertheless, it can cease to

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have it, at some point, if it degenerates, atrophies or is harmed. A change of this kind in the organ may have a significant effect on the life of the organism—sometimes a fatal effect, sometimes less—in which case, for good reasons, we say that it has stopped fulfilling the function it had or at least that it malfunctions. Of course, to say that it no longer performs the function it previously performed is the same as saying that it does not fulfill the function that we rightly expect it to fulfill, and, arguably, the same as saying that it does not fulfill the function that it has. If an organ can have a function because its ancestor organs had it, as many philosophers of biology believe, then an organ that has degenerated (or the like) can have a function because it once exerted it. Emphasizing the difference between having it and exerting it (Neander 1991, 465), by the way, would be to relapse into the natural, yet unwarranted, tendency to consider that a function is not something that can be acquired by coming to perform it. Function acquisition is a rather familiar phenomenon, to which Hegel, with his idea of a fluidity of functions (GW 8: 81; cf. Stern 1990, 101–102), apparently found an intraorganic sense. The idea, instead, in Kreines, that functionality exclusively derives from generation of offspring only makes sense of inherited functionality, inherited ex hypothesi from what has not always had it. Actually, this downplays the current process of self-production in the individual undeservedly. And, in doing so, we are left clueless with regard to where functionality originally comes from.7 The difference between one explanation and another of the origin of functionality may certainly seem purely superficial, since in both cases the function is generated by a process of reproduction (cf. McLaughlin 2001, 168 ff.). But ‘reproduction’ has very different meanings in both, as we have seen. Championing the meaning of self-preservation or self-maintenance (and self-organization) through assimilation, as Hegel does, has two important consequences. The first is that the organism appears, in itself, as an accomplished end and not as having a purpose outside itself. The second, which is the reverse of the first, is that empirical species cease to appear as goals and, thus, it no longer makes sense to speak of their self-production and self-realization. It is true that Hegel sometimes deals with the process of the genus (or generic process) as a process to which the individual organism is driven (or determined), as if the relationship with other individuals and reproduction in the sense of descent were a goal of its life. The idea, of course, that something that is an end for itself can, at the same time, serve an ulterior end is not per se absurd. But, nevertheless, it is not the same to have an end in oneself than to serve an external end (to be an end for oneself than to be a means for another), on logical grounds. And, on the other

 I do not imply that a compelling understanding of natural functionality and purposiveness is only available to an organizational account of biological organisms (however, see Maraguat 2020 for a defense of a Hegelian organizational account of biological functionality). Mine is here an exegetical point about theoretical resources in Hegel’s philosophy of natural life. For interesting up-todate reflections on the context-specific value of different causal accounts of organisms and natural purposiveness, see Andrew Cooper’s contribution to this volume in Chapter “Rethinking Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature Through a Process Account of Emergence”. 7

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hand, how is the realization of, say, animality supposed to happen? It is difficult to admit that Hegel makes sense of a realization that never stops, that can never stop, becoming realized, let alone of a realization that consists in gradual, partly random transformation (by, let’s say, Lamarckian adaptations to an environment that changes for no reason). His account of teleology as an effect of self-production cannot grant a process of variation or drift in the realization of the purpose of an organism an essential role, it seems to me (see again Enc2 § 352). Besides, ‘the animal’ as such does not exist, as can be read in § 24 Z. In the process of the genus it never comes into being qua genus, as Hegel insistently stresses. Therefore, the process of the genus does not describe the realization of a genus. The only genus that exists as such or for itself, Hegel claims, is spirit, not the animal or the plant. He attributes to spirit being a genus for itself thanks to the unique element, de facto unavailable to plants and other animals, in which it gives actuality to itself, namely the universal as such (GW 12: 191).

5 Concrete Animality as a Normative Standard A correct interpretation of Hegel’s views on teleology decides the fate of species essentialism in Hegel’s system of philosophical sciences. This is unanimously admitted by Knappik, Kreines and many others, including myself. According to my understanding of those views, an organism is subject to the particular norm or concept that it, as an organism, realizes. Paradigmatically, the animal—the full-formed organism—causes itself, keeps itself alive, differs actively from external objectivity, including other organisms, fighting for its life tooth and nail or, as Hegel puts it, with teeth and claws (GW 12: 219). As a consequence, the particular concept or inner form of its life becomes a standard for judging whether there are glitches, that is, whether something degenerates, decays, dies. This does not mean feigning hidden essences or a supernatural design. However, Kreines and Knappik (also Stern, apparently) believe that only species constitute a suitable normative standard for the judgment and understanding of living entities. Against their common approach, Sebastian Rand argues that the individual cannot be what it is ‘without failing to correspond to its species’ (2013, 80). He claims that individuals participate in the process of the genus ‘distinguishing themselves from the species’. The living being, thus, ‘corresponds with itself qua individual’, merely qua individual. And the normative assessment of it makes no sense, since, accordingly, natural organisms are not ‘individualized versions of their species’. Hence, Rand believes, if I understand him correctly, that postulating a process of realization of an abstract species is committing a mystification.8 And I agree with  Cf. Rand 2013, 70, on which he claims that the species produces itself through its individual members and, coherently, sexual reproduction, a sub-process of the generic process, is said to be an activity of reciprocal production and differentiation of the species and its members. I reckon that this is not a language entirely alien to Hegel (see for example Enc2 § 371). 8

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him. Yet, he disregards the possibility that a particular non-specific form of animality functions as an internal normative standard. So, he misses, however, I daresay, Hegel’s main point on these matters. What both Rand and those who read Hegel as a species essentialist have in common, in spite of their consequential disagreements, is that they interpret Hegel’s doctrine of natural ends in light of the generic process. On Kreines’ account this process entails that a teleological judgment by reference to species can be made that supports normative assessments in a ‘full’ sense. In the alleged legitimacy of those judgments Knappik then sees a diagnostic character of species essentialism. Kreines and Knappik see confirmation for the common ground of their reading in the fact that Hegel seemingly suggests, in the subsection on ‘The genus’ in the chapter on ‘Life’, that what was presupposed, namely that the individual organism ‘brings itself forth out of actuality’ (GW 12: 189), comes to be realized precisely ‘now’, that is, through the process of the genus. In turn, Rand finds support for his skeptical alternative reading in the fact that of judgments ‘of the concept’, in ‘Subjectivity’, Hegel provides only spiritual examples, such as artefacts and actions, never organisms or other purely natural forms, processes or elements. In my opinion, nonetheless, they all grant a conceptual significance to Hegel’s third process of life that it does not have in the texts. First, the concept of end in itself or final cause is supposed to be vindicated in the argument of ‘Teleology’, not in the argument of ‘Life’—let alone, in particular, in the examination of the process of the genus. Accordingly, the abstract concept, once established at the end of ‘Teleology’, can be used to judge everything that comes after as according to the concept or not. In fact, as I have already said, the concept of inner purpose is explicitly considered essential to understand the life of the individual, particularly the process of assimilation (also called the ‘vital process’)—and neither exclusively nor explicitly the process of the genus. Therefore, it is only coherent that Hegel understands reproduction as regeneration. Second, in light of that concept of inner purpose, the generic process appears to be rather a failure. If it represents an accomplishment, it is merely in the minimal sense that Rand accounts for (namely, inasmuch as the individual ‘corresponds to itself’). At the end of the day, it is a process wide open to the influence of external contingencies (for example, the finding of a functionally equivalent mate in the case of animals) and which in fact appears as producing not the same (i.e., perfect clones of the same individual), but the slightly different (i.e., non-identical descendants). Third, the fact that non-spiritual examples are actually missing in Hegel’s discussion of the ‘judgment of the concept’ does not prove anything per se. Conveniently, Knappik rightly replies to Rand that they are not omitted elsewhere, when Hegel refers to degenerations and monsters in the Philosophy of Nature (Knappik 2016, 783, n. 92). But, on the other hand, the passage on the presupposed becoming ‘posited’ at the beginning of ‘The genus’ (GW 12: 189–90) that Kreines and Knappik appeal to (Kreines 2015, 100; 2019, 13) does not prove either that the purpose in the life processes of configuration and assimilation was simply presupposed, as an unwarranted assumption. If this were the case, let me insist, the purpose of those processes would merely be an external one. Yet, as I said, Hegel is actually very

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explicit about the internally purposive nature of the assimilation process. Moreover, in the three sections of ‘Life’ he is indeed only explicit about this application of the concept of immanent, inner end. Fourth, as indicated in the previous section, the support for the teleological judgment of the generic process within Hegel’s account is far from obvious. If a major source of spontaneous variation co-determining this process is admitted, as Hegel advocates, then there is no true re-production by means of sexual breeding. From the naturalized perspective that the concept of inner purposiveness introduces, what matters is whether an organization or concept or form is the explanation of its own existence. Immanent ends are, in Hegel’s account, already realized ends. Inasmuch as a concept is perpetuated, as by regeneration, it is already accomplished, i.e., it is an actual form. And, to the extent that it is not perpetuated, due to the influence of the environment or the hybridization that sex entails, the concept that once existed is not realized anymore at all. By contrast, it is simply uncertain in what sense the open-ended process of the genus can contribute to the realization of a concept. Therefore, the teleological credentials of the process of the genus are rather unwarranted (I agree with Rand on this point). If it has a purposive orientation, it is based on unknown grounds, independent of self-production (strictly speaking)—hence, not as a concept that is the purpose of its own actuality.

6 Prototypes, Defects and Reproductive Communities Given the meaning that essentialism has for both historians of natural history and many philosophers, it is advisable to say that Hegel’s philosophy of organisms is not essentialist. He thought that classifications should be guided by a more or less abstract conceptual analysis of the life of organisms, to which he believed having contributed in his Logic and philosophy of ‘Organic Physics’, but that all classifications have an insufficient rational ground. The ground of this insufficiency is found in nature’s inability to isolate its products from powerful sources of change, accident, variation, and death effectively. He, therefore, considered all divisions blurred, even that empirical genera (species and so on) were categories themselves blurred or ill-defined. In this sense, his could be considered what historians designate a ‘cluster view’: the members of a ‘species’ are similar, but they do not have anything ‘in common’ (cf. EL § 24 Z). Or put another way: in biological matters, he was a Wittgensteinian anti-essentialist avant la lettre, since the presumed members of a botanical or zoological genus are recognizable by their family resemblance, not by a core identity. The only prototypes that Hegel admits in this context, in my opinion, are, as I have indicated, Goethean prototypes: the plant and the animal, one for each of the organic kingdoms (in the usual conception of the time, viz. of Linné), of which the supposed species themselves are idealized variations. Otherwise, this approach does not lead to a reformulated essentialism of natural kingdoms, rather than of species, for two main reasons. In the first place, because the divisions between the kingdoms are also not sharp, that is, not typically

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essentialist. Accordingly, the main difference between the plant and the animal, if I understand Hegel correctly, is an insufficient differentiation between regeneration (configuration and assimilation) and procreation in the plant, as I mentioned before. In this sense, I think it can be said that for Hegel the plant is an insufficiently differentiated animated organism and that the animal is, in a particular manner, a fully differentiated form of the existence of the characteristic processes also of the plant. In fact, Hegel’s Organic Physics is the culmination of a philosophy of the scala naturae (or ‘series of stages’, Enc2 § 251; cf. § 249) in which the sense of continuity stands out vividly, so that the main concepts of his Philosophy of Nature, those that conceptualize the main natural processes, occur at different levels at different degrees and in different ways, and there appear to be conceptual hybrids in almost all important transitions, that is, one hybrid for each categorical distinction. I cannot expand on this subject here, unfortunately, but the very concepts of self-movement, freedom and subjectivity that constitute the central nerve of the Philosophy of Nature are declined in various ways in Mechanics, Physics and Organics (‘Organic Physics’), so that the overall impression is mostly of continuity and relativity. On the other hand, if my interpretation of the topic of teleology in the Philosophy of Nature is correct and my views of what Hegel says in the Logic about the genus as the truth of the subject are sound, then the concept (to wit, animality) is an always particularized immanent purpose, not an ideal type that exerts a real yet hidden attraction upon the individual natural entities. Therefore, to say that the life of the animal, for example, can be analyzed in three distinct processes—configuration, assimilation, genus—does not mean that necessarily a certain individual has certain essential specific properties, nor even that the said individual actually tends to exhibit those certain properties. Rather, it means that if (and only if) an individual exists because of such processes, then it is appropriate to say that it has the cause of itself in itself, and it has it indeed. Only as a consequence of this view, does it make sense to claim, when the time comes, namely, after some sort of diminution of life due to natural decay or external influences, that the individual is not as it should be, that it is defective, that something in it has been wasted or is now missing. But this modal qualification or normative assessment (as well as the underlying norm or Sollen) is grounded through and through, clearly, on an actual ‘being’, namely on an actual process of regeneration, and, therefore, does not have the metaphysical ring that friends of essentialism characteristically suppose. Hence, Hegel’s account of natural immanent purposiveness is as such non-essentialist, and the systematic importance of the distinction between non-living nature, plants and animals, i.e., the different kingdoms, in the Encyclopaedia is hardly able to make a dent in this feature. Finally, with regard to Mayr’s distinction between a typological concept of species and a genuinely biological one, denoting populations that interbreed (i.e., reproductive communities), in light of the foregoing reasoning I would attribute to Hegel, if I had to choose, a concept of the second kind. Certainly, his account is not sufficient to make of him a proto-Darwinian philosopher of life, of course. But at least it is reason enough not to impute to him a completely anti-Darwinian philosophy of organisms and species—rather a pre-Darwinian one (see Wolff 1992,

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134–36).9 The idea that particular plants and animals are, in fact, variations of a general kind, which Hegel seems to take from Goethe, Herder and others, belongs rather to the facilitating climate in which evolutionary thought, as is known today, was gestated. Whether his ideas about inner purposiveness and mechanical explanation were also part of that climate, I can only comment on at another occasion.10

References Amundson, Ron. 1998. Typology Reconsidered: Two Doctrines on the History of Evolutionary Biology. Biology and Philosophy 103: 153–177. Bird, Alexander. 2007. Nature’s Metaphysics. Laws and Properties. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dennett, Daniel C. 2016. Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism. In How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism, ed. David Livingston Smith, 9–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Devitt, Michael. 2008. Resurrecting Biological Essentialism. Philosophy of Science 75: 344–382. Dupré, John. 1981. Natural Kinds and Biological Taxa. Philosophical Review 90: 66–90. ———. 1989. Wilkerson on Natural Kinds. Philosophy 64 (248): 248–251. Ellis, Brian. 2001. Scientific Essentialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goethe, Johann W. 1817. ‘Zur Morphologie (Ersten Bandes erstes Heft)’. In Gesamtausgabe der Werke und Schriften in zweiundzwanzig Bänden II (19), 13–104. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta. Hegel, G.  W. F. [GW] 1968  ff. Gesammelte Werke. Ed. The Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Hamburg: Meiner (abbreviation GW, indicating first the volume number). ———. [Enc2] 1970. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. Ed. Michael J. Petry, 3 vols. London: Allen & Unwin (abbreviation: Enc2; after the paragraph number R means ‘Remark’, and Z means Zusatz, i.e., ‘Addition’). ———. [EL] 1991. The Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusätze). Ed. Théodore F. Geraets, Wallis A. Suchting, and Henry. S. Harris. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett (abbreviation: EL; after the paragraph number R means ‘Remark’, and Z means Zusatz, i.e., ‘Addition’). ———. 2010. The Science of Logic. Trans. George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (throughout the chapter I refer to the GW edition of Hegel's Science of Logic, but I use this translation). Herder, Johann G. 1784. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Erster Theil. Riga & Leipzig: Hartknoch. Hösle, Vittorio. 2005. Was kann man von Hegels objektiv-idealistischer Theorie des Begriffs noch lernen, das über Sellars’, McDowells und Brandoms Anknüpfungen hinausgeht? Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 30 (2): 139–158. Hull, David L. 1965. The Effect of Essentialism on Taxonomy—Two Thousand Years of Stasis (I). The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science XV (60): 314–326.  While working on the final draft of this contribution, Luca Corti drew my attention to Martin Krahn’s paper on ‘The Species Problem in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature’ (2019). Unfortunately, my argument had already advanced to such an extent, that I could not incorporate his insights into it. As a matter of fact, Krahn has built an independent case for the pre-Darwinian character of Hegel’s views on species. 10  Work on this chapter has been funded by the Spanish Research Agency (Research Project PGC2018-093363-B-I00). I would like to thank audiences in Bochum and Valencia, as well as the editors of this volume and an anonym reviewer, for numerous suggestions that have improved a previous draft. 9

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———. 1976. Are Species Really Individuals? Systematic Zoology 25: 174–191. Kant, Immanuel. 1790/2001. In Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Heiner F. Klemme. Hamburg: Meiner. Knappik, Franz. 2016. Hegel’s Essentialism. Natural Kinds and the Metaphysics of Explanation in Hegel’s Theory of ‘the Concept’. European Journal of Philosophy 24 (4): 760–787. ———. 2018. Hegel and Arguments for Natural Kind Essentialism. Hegel Bulletin 42 (3):1–27. Accessed November 15, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1017/hgl.2017.29. ———. 2019. Gêneros objetivos e teleologia em Hegel: da natureza à sociedade. Revista Eletrônica Estudos Hegelianos 16 (27): 1–40. Krahn, Martin. 2019. The Species Problem in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. The Owl of Minerva 50 (1–2): 47–68. Kreines, James. 2015. Reason in the World. Hegel’s Metaphysics and its Philosophical Appeal. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lenoir, Timothy. 1984. The Eternal Laws of Form: Morphotypes and the Conditions of Existence in Goethe’s Biological Thought. Journal of Social and Biological Structures 7: 317–324. Maraguat, Edgar. 2020. Hegel’s Organizational Account of Biological Functions. Hegel Bulletin 41 (3): 407–425. Mayr, Ernst. 1968. Theory of Biological Classification. Nature 220: 545–548. ———. 1982. The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance. Cambridge, MA/London: Belknap. ———. 2002. What Evolution Is. London: Phoenix. McLaughlin, Peter. 2001. What Functions Explain: Functional Explanation and Self-Reproducing Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Neander, Karen. 1991. The Teleological Notion of ‘Function’. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 69 (4): 454–468. Okasha, Samir. 2002. Darwinian Metaphysics: Species and the Question of Essentialism. Synthese 131: 191–213. Pfau, Thomas. 2010. “All is Leaf”: Difference, Metamorphosis, and Goethe’s Phenomenology of Knowledge. Studies in Romanticism 49 (1): 3–41. Rand, Sebastian. 2013. What’s Wrong with Rex? Hegel on Animal Defect and Individuality. European Journal of Philosophy 21 (1): 68–86. Reill, Peter H. 1986. Bildung, Urtyp and Polarity: Goethe and Eighteenth-Century Physiology. Goethe Yearbook 3: 139–148. Sober, Elliott. 1980. Evolution, Population Thinking, and Essentialism. Philosophy of Science 47: 350–383. Stamos, David N. 2005. Pre-Darwinian Taxonomy and Essentialism—A Reply to Mary Winsor. Biology and Philosophy 20: 79–96. Stern, Robert. 1990. Hegel, Kant and the Structure of the Object. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 2007. Hegel, British Idealism, and the Curious Case of the Concrete Universal. British Journal of the History of Philosophy 15 (1): 115–153. Walsh, Denis. 2006. Evolutionary Essentialism. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57: 425–448. Wilkerson, T.E. 1988. Natural Kinds. Philosophy 63 (243): 29–42. Wilkins, John S. 2009. Species: A History of the Idea. Berkeley: University of California Press. Winsor, Mary P. 2001. Cain on Linnaeus; The Scientist-Historian as Unanalysed Entity. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 32 (2): 239–254. ———. 2003. Non-Essentialist Methods in Pre-Darwinian Taxonomy. Philosophy and Biology 18: 387–400. Wolff, Michael. 1992. Das Körper-Seele-Problem. Kommentar zu Hegel, Enzyklopädie (1830), §389. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann. Zammito, John H. 2018. The Gestation of German Biology: Philosophy and Physiology from Stahl to Schelling. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.

Hegel’s Theory of Space-Time (No, Not That Space-Time) Ralph Kaufmann and Christopher Yeomans

In der Vorstellung ist Raum und Zeit weit auseinander, da haben wir Raum und dann auch Zeit; dieses “Auch” bekämpft die Philosophie. Enc2 § 257 Z

Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature begins with the categories of space and time, and all of the categories and phenomena that follow in the text are spatio-temporal phenomena. But the actual content of Hegel’s theory of space and time has remained obscure despite two centuries of interpretation, and obscure for at least three reasons. First, it is unclear how Hegel’s theory relates to those of his immediate predecessors (Newton, Leibniz, Kant) as well as other theories in the history of philosophy; it has thus been difficult to individuate Hegel’s theory of space and time against competitor views. Second, the driving question to be answered, or the theoretical function to be played, by this theory of space and time has remained unclear; it has thus been difficult to say just what it means for the subsequent phenomena to be spatio-temporal. In this paper, we clarify the first issue by interpreting Hegel’s theory as a theory of space-time, and we clarify the second issue by interpreting that theory as securing the theoretical possibility of motion. It is easy to take motion for granted, but both Zeno’s paradox and the doubts about gravitational action at a distance show that it is not obvious why and how bodies can move in space. Gravitation and the analysis of motion are beyond the bounds of this paper, but our reconstruction of Hegel’s theory is aimed at an account of space-time that is the key for Hegel’s further analyses of gravitation and motion. Third, how Hegel’s view compares with the development of physics in the last two centuries remains obscure. Here, we argue that in comparison with twenty-first

R. Kaufmann · C. Yeomans (*) Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Corti, J.-G. Schülein (eds.), Life, Organisms, and Human Nature, Studies in German Idealism 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_6

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century physical theories of space-time, Hegel’s account is neither directly in the lineage of their development nor is it dramatically at odds with contemporary understanding. We argue this in most detail in the final section, but throughout the paper we make use of mathematical developments since Hegel’s time to show points of contact between his thoughts on space and time and that mathematical development. Although the primary focus here is on the immediate application of this theory to mechanics and physics, we would like to point out that in the Heglian development of the Philosophy of Nature the initial development of the theory of space and time also underpins all the later stages of his theory and as such has relevance all the way up to his theory of biology. In our conclusion, we will briefly suggest that Hegel uses his understanding of animal embodiment and locomotion to accomplish the relevant synthesis of space and time. Textually, our interpretive approach to Hegel on space and time takes its bearing from his lecture remark that serves as our epigram—we take the suggestion seriously and interpret that theory as a theory of space-time as opposed to a theory of space and time. Of course, it will not be the same theory of space-time as the one that proceeds from modern relativistic physics; but designating Hegel’s theory as a theory of space-time helps to mark it out from its most prominent predecessors. It also helps to make sense of some of its most distinctive features—particularly Hegel’s insistence that time has three dimensions just as space does. This latter feature—the three-dimensionality of time—serves to distinguish Hegel’s view both from the classical mechanics of Newton and Kant (in which time does not interact with the spatial directions) and from contemporary relativistic physics (in which there is such interaction but time is only a single dimension added to the spatial dimensions).1 In Hegelian space-time, threedimensional time is the flip side of three-dimensional space—it is this conception of a 3 + 3D space-time theory that makes Hegel’s view so distinctive and which we try to lay out in what follows. And it is not only that time is the flip side of space; the dimensions in particular are complementary in nature—the temporal dimensions complement the spatial dimensions—but in Hegelian fashion they combine to a unit under his dialectic because of the way in which the temporal dimensions are necessary for the spatial dimensions. This dialectic is what allows Hegel to explain how space can support motion. By using a reverse dialectic which breaks space into its space-like and time-like aspects he can resynthesize them through motion, which would not be possible in a fundamental manner if they were entirely separate entities.

 In contrast with most of the literature on Hegel’s theory of space and time, we will have almost nothing to say about the status of space and time as subjective, objective, or both. Our reconstruction focuses on the structure and function of Hegelian space-time. For a good review and original contribution to the former debate, as well as a detailed analysis of the subjective side of space and time, see de Vries (2016). 1

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1 Ways of Combining Space and Time To set a context for the interpretation of Hegel’s theory, we first discuss some different ways that philosophers and physicists have combined space and time—generally, through the techniques for the analysis of motion. This presentation is orthogonal to the usual ways of understanding the history of theories of space and time because it focuses less on the status of space and time (e.g., are they absolute or relative, containers or relations) and more on their interrelation (which is brought into relief by motion). As a result, we will be lumping together many views that a prioritization of the first concern (status) would keep separate. In particular, this leads us to split Kant’s view and Newton’s view, which are often held to be the same in essential respects. The first conception of space and time is the most natural, and the most common to philosophical views that are otherwise dramatically different (e.g., Plato and Kant). Here space is simply the space that surrounds us, and time is what passes and thus allows for change. In this way, one has space and also time. In Kant’s doctrine of space and time as forms of intuition, for example, space is the form of outer intuition and time of inner intuition. The two are connected only indirectly, via the status of outer representations as representations, and thus as also inner (Kant 1999 A33–34/B49–51). But there is nothing in the very nature of time that implicates space, nor vice versa; and it is only the psychological status of space that implicates time, rather than anything about the way or form in which something is represented as spatial. The problem with such views is that in physical motion, space and time seem more directly tied to each other, and without an account of those ties the theory is open to Zeno’s paradoxes. Thus, it is not surprising that the developing physical accounts in the eighteenth century which pioneered analysis (calculus) as a mathematical description of motion developed a second conception in which space and time are more closely tied to each other. This was part of a development of mathematics from geometry in the Greek mode to modern analysis and differential or algebraic geometry. Kant’s adoration of Euclid clearly ties him to this earlier Greek mode of thinking. The second conception of space and time underlies analysis (calculus). This conception ties them together via a function from one to the other, i.e., a function by means of which the motion of a body is described by giving its position at any given time. This view we get with Newton, and it fundamentally designates the role of time to be that of a parameter and allows for the usual differential calculus. Turning this into mathematical physics, the motion of a body is given by specifying its position in three-space as a function of time.2 Here time acts as one-dimensional continuous variable, merely a parameter for the motion.

 Technically this is a vector function f that assigns to each time t a position f(t) in three-space. In coordinates, this would be f(t) = (x(t),y(t),z(t)) where the three entries are the three spatial dimensions and the variable t is the one-dimensional parameter. 2

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The geometric, purely spatial, aspect that one got from the independent space of the first conception (e.g., in Kant) is contained in the so-called trace or image of this function, which is the curve3 that is traced out in space as time goes by (e.g., the red, elliptic line in Fig. 1): An analogous example for this is handwriting. Here the finished product is a script, but one cannot be sure about how exactly it was traced.4 A discretized version of this is given by a stroboscopic picture of the trajectory of a ball. This is also what the long-time observer of planetary movement would chart. However, even knowing the continuous trace, i.e., the total of all positions, is not enough to figure out the exact motion, i.e., which position is occupied at which point in time. The information is not even sufficient to establish the direction in which the trajectory was followed—a point taken up by Hegel in his description of planetary motion. The full motion is given by the parametrized curve, a synonym for the vector function. Its geometric shadow—the trace—is not enough to fully recover the motion. Thus, the first conception of the relation of space and time really depends on the second, rather than vice versa, and Kant’s attempts to go from the first to something like the second in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science are doomed to failure. A third version of the relation between space and time can be generated by replacing the function by a graph, this is the blue helix curve in Fig. 1.5 The graph, which is sometimes referred to as a world-line, is a subset of the product of time and space. This synthesizes space and time into one entity, space-time. This is an important theoretical shift because now space-time is the “container” for any motion, not just space alone—an important step for special and general relativity.6 While the world-line encapsulates the full motion, the geometry of the trace is only the spatial aspect; it is a shadow (projection), but lacks the temporal aspect needed for motion. This deficiency is what Hegel grasps and conceptualizes in his version of space-­ time. His space-time is not a product as above, but is a dynamic model of

 Mathematically, if the motion is reasonably well behaved, this is indeed a curve, i.e., a locally one-dimensional continuous or even smooth subspace in three-dimensional space. It may have self-intersections like a figure 8. 4  Another good visual image are the light paintings, e.g. “Walker Street” by Eric Staller. 5  This is a general concept: a graph of any function f from a set X to a set Y is given by the pairs (x,y) in the Cartesian product of X and Y, that is x in X and y in Y, for which y = f(x). Hence formalizing the motion as a function f from time T to space S, the world-line or graph will be the points (t,p) where p = f(t), i.e., those time-position pairs (t,p) the where p is the position at time t. This is again a one-dimensional subspace, but now for the four-dimensional product of time and space. One gets back the curve C by the projection onto the space part, which maps (t,p) to p. The image of the world-line is the set of all the f(t), which is precisely C. Hegel’s insight is that the trace of C as a geometric object, as in the statement that the obits of planets are ellipses, is not sufficient to capture motion. 6  For special relativity there is an additional step to a third conception of the relation between space and time precisely by saying that there is more to the relation of space and time than the Cartesian product. In special relativity, for example, the Lorentz boosts with the contraction of length and the dilatation of time are a way of adding this additional character to the relation. This surprising relation means that there is a possible interaction of space and time directions and dimensions. 3

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Fig. 1  An elliptical helix as a spatio-temporal rendition of an elliptical motion. This constitutes a 2 + 1D world line. Time is in the z-direction and its projection to the spatial motion, given by the red ellipse. is given by projection to the x-y plane. The ellipse is a geometric object; without a parametrization it is a mere spatial entity. The world line allows to read off the motion or parameterization. The formula for the depicted example, r(t) = (2cos(t), sin(t),t), makes the time parameter t apparent. The world line contains the relationship between space and time. Notice, for instance, that reversing time changes the handedness of the helix but does not change the image of the projection

oscillations between spatial and temporal aspects—this is what we try to reconstruct in the bulk of this chapter. To remain merely schematic for the moment, in Hegel’s dynamical view, points are promoted to places and motion results from the dynamics of the space-time itself. Geometric (i.e., spatial) points do not move, but Hegel’s space-time has a germ-like quality: each spatial point has a striving (Streben) to enter into the time directions (Enc2 § 262R). Matter then realizes this full interaction (though that is beyond the bounds of this chapter). To remain within the theory of space and time, there are two points of contact with the development of relativistic physics in the twentieth century. The first is that the background for motion is not simply (geometric) space, but space-time. The second is that there is a fundamental ratio-like relationship between space and time. In relativity, an all-important feature is that a precise ratio of time and space, the speed of light, is preserved. The additional step to relativistic physics is, of course, outside of Hegel’s context. However, the fact that time and space are more intimately connected than in the second conception of space and time above is contained in Hegel, as is the recognition of a need to advance to a more sophisticated conception of the relation between space and time. In the following, we describe Hegel’s unique version of a third conception of the space-time relation that is nonetheless quite different from relativistic versions,

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precisely because of the difference in the conception of that more sophisticated relation between space and time, i.e., the difference in the understanding of this mixing of spatial and temporal dimensionality. Nonetheless, following this line makes it possible to put Hegel’s apparently idiosyncratic view into perspective and show that it is not a cul-de-sac, but rather provides a fundamental insight into the metaphysical foundations of combining space and time into one concept (as in special relativity), and, going further, combining geometry with matter (as in general relativity).

2 On the Notion of a Dimension Now a second preliminary to establish context—this time conceptual context— before getting into the details of Hegel’s account. Since we want to distinguish Hegel’s view in part by the number of dimensions of time involved, a lot turns on the nature and individuation of dimensions as such, but Hegel himself never thematizes the concept of a dimension. To give structure to the interpretation of Hegel, we distinguish the following conceptions of that concept, starting with elements from the OED: 1. A measurable extent of some kind, such as length, breadth, depth, or height.

1.1. A mode of linear extension of which there are three in space and two on a flat surface, which corresponds to one of a set of coordinates specifying the position of a point. 1.2. Physics. An expression for a derived physical quantity in terms of fundamental quantities such as mass, length, or time, raised to the appropriate power (acceleration, for example, having the dimension of length/time2). 2. An aspect or feature of a situation, problem, or thing. To the OED entry, we can then add a more technical version of 2 2.1 A degree of freedom in a physical system, that is a parameter that has a free choice. (This may be continuous or discrete.) and a more sophisticated mathematical version of 27 2.2 The length of an appropriate chain of inclusions (such as the Krull dimension). We reconstruct Hegel’s argument as working through several of these definitions from the most basic to ones with increasing adequacy for capturing the  Of course, the mathematical versions of dimension all coincide for nice examples like the ones we are discussing here. For the mathematician: the dimension here is the dimension n of the affine space An which is the linear or vector space dimension of Rn. This coincides with the covering dimension of Rn in the standard topology and the algebraic Krull dimension of the ring R[x1,…,xn] which is an inclusion definition. We mention this to illustrate that these different concepts lead to conceptually different definitions of dimensions mathematically formalizing the particular aspect. 7

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dimensionality of space and time. In what follows, we will try to pay particular attention to the geometrical structure that is added as one moves from one definition to the next, and the insufficiencies with one definition that motivate moving to another and thus adding the structure. Most of our discussion will concern senses 1.1 and 2.2. For ease of exposition, we will refer to 1.1 as the linear definition and 2.2 as the inclusion definition. But Hegel’s begins with 1 (the homogeneous definition), so we take that up here before moving on to linearity and inclusion in the following section. For time, it will turn out that definition 2.1 is most relevant—time is dimensional on a freedom definition. We will argue that this degree of freedom is the key to connecting the linear and inclusion dimensions of space, and to understanding how the three dimensions of time connect with those of space (Enc2 § 259), and furthermore that this is the sense in which time resolves the self-­ contradictory nature of space (Enc2 § 260). Definition 1 (homogeneity): A measurable extent of some kind, such as length, breadth, depth, or height. This definition we take to be expressed in Hegel’s introduction of space as “the abstract universality of [nature’s] self-externality—this unmediated indifference […] continuous as such, because this externality is still completely abstract and has no determinate difference within it” (Enc2 § 254). This definition is intuitive but wears a problem on its sleeve that Hegel identifies: “Thus one cannot say how height, length, and width differ from each other, because they merely should be different, but are yet no differences” (Enc2 § 255R). In itself, this definition of ‘dimension’ offers no resources for differentiating between dimensions and thus no resources for counting a multiplicity of dimensions. This Hegelian recognition that dimensionality cannot be fixed by the fact of homogeneity anticipates one of the most important results of later nineteenth-century mathematics. It is one of Cantor’s great achievements to show that there are equally many points in the line, the plane, three-space, or any other higher dimensional real space,8 and thus homogeneity alone does not fix the dimension. Hegel also realizes that mathematics, in particular geometry, cannot fix the dimension: “To deduce the necessity that space has exactly three dimensions is not to be demanded of geometry, insofar as it is not a philosophical science and it may presuppose its object, namely space with its general determinations” (Enc2 § 255R). As an example of this point, there are equally valid (gleichgültig) geometries of the Euclidean plane and Euclidean space.9

 For the sake or full disclosure, real n-dimensional space is the set of n-tuples of real numbers Rn. This has the same cardinality (size) as affine n-space An. And furthermore, the cardinality is the ℵ0 same for any n greater than 1. This cardinality is the cardinality of the continuum which is 2 . This type of algebra of sets is taken up by Hegel in his discussion of mathematics, see Kaufmann and Yeomans (2017). Here he moves beyond the logical/mathematical setting to a physical one, that of nature. Consequentially he utilizes a more sophisticated notion of dimensionality which is more that the granular, set-theoretic being-next-to-each-other (Nebeneinander). 9  Note that we use the term here in the modern mathematical sense (as entailing a space with an orientation and a metric), rather than in the philosopher’s sense of a space in which the parallel postulate holds. 8

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On the one hand, this is not so surprising, since in philosophy normally our intuitive conceptions of any concept are insufficiently rigorous to possess the requisite explanatory power. But on the other hand, in this case the insufficiency points to a distinctive feature of space that is acknowledged mathematically and sets the trajectory for Hegel’s argument. That feature is this: there always needs to be a type-­ qualification if one talks about a space, e.g., one talks about a linear space, an affine space, a Euclidean space, a metric space, a topological space, a ringed space, and so on. Without this extra condition, one is reduced to talking about a set rather than talking about space as such. In Hegel’s terms, one is reduced to talking about (logical) quantitative magnitude rather than the (natural) extendedness of space, its self-­ externality. And a set is something essentially discrete, whereas in its initial introduction (Enc2 § 254), Hegel emphasizes the continuity of space (Hegel has to add structure to the initial conception of space to capture its discreteness). Moreover, the abstract, logical conception is devoid of any of the usual intuitions about space. This is summed up by Hilbert’s somewhat apocryphal quote “One must be able at all times to replace reference to ‘points, lines, planes’ by references to ‘tables, chairs, beer mugs’,” which expresses that in the modern set-based conception of geometry as a structure on a set, the set is given by its elements, and purely as elements, points are no different in this particular role as the elements of any other set. There is no mathematical articulation of their distinctively spatial character. This point is made in Hegel’s text in an addition appended to the very first section on space, Enc2 § 254: “the here is not yet place [Das Hier ist noch nicht Ort], but just the possibility of place; the heres [die Hier] are completely the same, and this abstract multiplicity—without true interruption and borders—is nonetheless the externality [ist eben die Äußerlichkeit]” (Enc2 § 254 Z). ‘Hier’ is a point that is simply an element of a set. All other elements (die Hier) are on the same level and interchangeable—“the completely ideal being-next-to-each-other [das ganz ideelle Nebeneinander]” (Enc2 § 254). Thus, simply as the Hier, we are at the level of sets in the modern mathematical understanding, or just logical quantitative magnitude in Hegel’s understanding. In either understanding, we are essentially at a pre-stage before anything distinctively spatial and/or temporal has been introduced, and thus before any sense of dimensionality that would be constitutive of space or time. Then how do we get dimensions? For dimensions, we must add structure and move on to the linearity and inclusion definitions.

3 On the Dimensionality of Space The linearity definition (1.1 above) first allows us to add the characterization of space as having three dimensions, and the inclusion definition (2.2) comes next as a supplement. (Here ‘linearity’ does not refer to the formal concept of linear space used today, but the less technical sense of three linear dimensions given to specify the extent of an object.) The use of the linearity definition to generate three dimensions happens in Enc2 § 255, and then immediately the inclusion definition is involved in the development of the geometrical figures (point-line-plane-enclosing

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surface) (in Enc2 § 256). Many commentators have noted that the connection between these discussions is obscure, and is perhaps best explained merely as a historical echo of Euclid’s steps without much argumentative force of its own (e.g., Jenkins (2010)). But on our account, there is an important methodological connection that also ties these discussions to time, namely a transcendental argument for the conditions of possibility of the three-dimensionality of space. As we reconstruct the argument, (a) Hegel first shows that the linearity of space alone is a necessary but not sufficient condition for that three-dimensionality, as it cannot provide the requisite qualitative distinction between the dimensions. (b) Hegel then shows that the inclusion relations between points, lines, and planes could provide the requisite qualitative distinctions. But then we are left with two different and potentially rival conceptions of a dimension, unconnected to each other. (c) Finally, Hegel argues that time itself provides the model for connecting the two senses of dimension in virtue of its conception of a dimension as a degree of freedom, and thus shows how inclusion relations could be used to model the three dimensionality of space in such a way as to make it linear as well. We reconstruct steps (a) and (b) in this § 3, and then (c) in § 4. Together, these provide the resources to answer the question: what is it about the three-dimensionality of space that requires the three-dimensionality of time? And the way that they answer that question allows them also to answer the question: why is there space-­ time rather than space and also time? Finally, in § 5 we turn to Hegel’s analysis of motion as the dynamic form of the relation between space and time, which will allow us to set out Hegel’s distinctive conception of space-time against the background we sketched out in § 1. (a) The insufficiency of affine space (Enc2 § 254–55) Starting with homogeneity, Hegel characterizes space as “the abstract universality of [nature’s] self-externality—this unmediated indifference […] continuous as such, because this externality is still completely abstract and has no determinate difference within it” (Enc2 § 254). In contemporary mathematical language, this continuous indifference (literally, ‘equal validity [Gleichgültigkeit]’) would be expressed by the concept of homogeneity. A usual contemporary way to express the homogeneity of space is to specify that three-dimensional space means a threedimensional affine space, which implies that the space is homogeneous in a particular way. Namely, given any two points P and Q, there is a unique translation of the whole space which moves the point P to Q.10 The main point is that these translations can be added, performed one after the other, and undone (translated ­backwards) (Fig. 2). With these translations, we get the first schema of linear dimensionality, because these translations start to give us a conception of linear extent.

 We use the name ‘translation’ without a proper definition, which would make things a bit too formal. 10

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Fig. 2  The translation v defined by the points P and Q is depicted as an arrow or a vector which translates or moves P to Q. Having fixed y, any other point A will also be translated by the same vector v to a specific point, say B. If the translation which moves Q to R is w then the combined translation is v + w which in total moves P to R. The inverse translation -v would move from Q to P (not pictured)

We can see more clearly how the linearity is extended by adding one more element for this affine space: given a translation and also a multiplication factor, one can scale the translation by the factor (e.g., translate only half the way, or twice as much). On this characterization of a dimension, the statement that space is three dimensional (Enc2 § 255) then becomes the statement that space is a three-­ dimensional affine space. This expresses in precise terms that there are three linearly extended dimensions, but there is no preferred origin or coordinate system (this latter absence is a part of Hegel’s claim that these dimensions are “merely different, [but] completely indeterminate” (Enc2 § 255)). Importantly, this merely affine linearity is not sufficient to establish the three-dimensionality of space. This is why Hegel requires a different source for the multiplicity of dimensions (namely, the three aspects of the concept (Enc2 § 255R)). But by Hegel’s own admission, the mere threefold nature of the concept doesn’t yet give us any clue to how to distinguish between the three dimensions, or to say how they are related: “As in itself concept, space has its differences in itself, [and furthermore] (a) immediately in its indifference as the merely differentiated, completely indeterminate three dimensions” (Enc2 § 255). Until we have some reasons to attribute different multiplication factors to different dimensions, we still don’t have any way to distinguish them, and so no way to say which is which. At this point in Hegel’s text, there is a sudden shift from the basic discussion of space to the discussion of geometrical elements: points, lines, planes, and enclosing surfaces (Enc2 § 256). Here we offer a reconstruction of this move as turning on the need to articulate the qualitative differences between dimensions required to make good on the dimensionality of space (cf. Wandschneider (2010, 89)). That conception of a dimension can be given by the relations between points, lines and planes, but this is the hardest point to grasp and interpret in all of Hegel’s discussion of space. The insufficiency of the mere concept of affine space to fix dimensionality motivates Hegel’s turn to seeing the geometrical elements (points, line, planes,

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surfaces) as providing the intrinsic geometry of space. We interpret this move as an attempt to use an inclusion definition for this purpose, which will establish the multiplicity of spatial dimensions in such a way as to tie it to the threefold nature of the concept itself. (b) The sufficiency of inclusion chains (Enc2 § 255–56) To make sense of this, we first need to say more about the inclusion sense of a dimension and show how that is represented in the move to the geometrical elements (point-line-plane-enclosing surface). Here is the relevant definition of ‘dimension’ from the list above (2.2): The length of an appropriate chain of inclusions (such as the Krull dimension).11 In the case of space, the inclusion chain would be:

point ⊂ line ⊂ plane ⊂ space

In natural language: the point is included in the line which is included in the plane which is included in space. This is the origin of Hilbert’s synthetic approach to geometry. The important consequence is that one counts dimensions not by the elements but by the inclusions: the line’s inclusion of the point is the first dimension, the plane’s inclusion of the line is the second dimension, etc. Put more formally in the mathematician’s terms, the dimension is obtained by counting the number steps in a maximal inclusion chain, whose elements can neither be reduced to nor substituted for each other. One of the most important things to note about this definition is that it is, in a sense, algebraic which ties it closely to counting and degrees. Both in the discreteness of the point and in the qualitative differences between points, lines, planes, and enclosing surfaces, once sees this algebraic or irreducible nature represented spatially. (A parallel notion in arithmetic is the irreducibility of prime numbers, which expresses that they cannot be factored, i.e. reduced to smaller factors.) A point, a line and a plane are irreducible to each other in the same way—a line cannot be reduced to a set of points without losing precisely its linearity—and Hegel expresses this idea when he claims that the line is not composed of points and the plane is not composed of lines (Enc2 § 256). Through this irreducibility, we begin to get back some of the discreteness that went missing in the homogeneity conception of space, and also the promise of a more determinate set of relations between the dimensions (inclusion rather than mere difference).

 We note here in passing the correspondence with the Zariski topology of inclusion dimensions, since there is no space in the text to take it up. That correspondence is that there is a marked difference between the point and a line helps elucidate Hegel’s somewhat puzzling statement “That the line doesn’t consist of points, the plane doesn’t consist of lines [nicht aus Linien besteht], emerges from their concept” (Enc2 § 256R). Although one commonly represents the line as composed of points, this does not capture its one-dimensionality, which comes from the progression point-line. In terms of Krull dimension, the ideal (x,y) plays a different role than (x,y,z) and so on. The correct principle in algebraic geometry is that of specialization, in particular of the generic point to generic points of surfaces to generic points of curves to a geometric aka closed point. 11

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Textually speaking, Hegel’s presentation for the steps in this chain are given in terms of negation in the main paragraph of Enc2 § 256: However the [conceptual] difference [of space] is essentially determinate and qualitative. As such it is (1) first the negation of space itself, because this is the immediate undifferentiated self-externality—the point. (2) The negation is however the negation of space, i.e., it is itself spatial; the point as essentially this relation, that is as self-superseding, is the line, the first otherness or spatial being of the point. (3) However, the truth of otherness is the negation of the negation. The line then passes over into the plane [Fläche]; the plane is on the one hand a determinacy opposed to line and point and thus the plane in general, but is on the other hand the superseded negation of space, and thus the reestablishment of spatial totality, which now has the negative moment within it, and so enclosing surface [umschließende Oberfläche] which segregates an individual whole space.

The first crucial thing to see is that (1) and (2) describe the same negation, and the spatiality of this negation is represented in (2) by a particular relational quality, namely the way that the line is the self-superseding of space. We interpret this self-­ superseding as an inclusion relation, and the one-dimensionality of the line as constituted by the one step in that inclusion chain. The “passing over” of the negation of the negation is similarly interpreted, and now as representing two steps and thus the two-dimensionality of the plane. But then Hegel says that one could also count differently by counting (1) and (2) as different negations (so that the negation of space and the negation of the point count as two steps), and thus get to a slightly different conception of the plane, namely one that would be three-dimensional (an enclosing surface of a whole space). This would then be a space that included points and lines and the “plane in general,” and so the inclusion chain given formally above. A second important thing to note about inclusion definitions is that one starts at dimension 0. That is, the dimension three is the number of steps in 0-1-2-3 which has four entries.12 This is exactly why Hegel starts with the point, which is not extended—it is not itself a measurable extent in any direction—and in that sense it is the negation of linear space. But then our first step brings us to the line, which is one-dimensional, then our second step to a plane, which is two-dimensional, and finally an enclosing surface which segregates a three-dimensional space (i.e., a local space).13 Hegel’s argument for the reverse inclusion is somewhat simpler. It starts with space as a positive (global space), negates to plane and double negates to line (Enc2 § 256R). Then there is again a third move: the two negations are put into relation to produce the point. We always need one more element than we have steps and thus one more element than we have dimensions, because we count dimensions not by the elements but by the inclusions, and so a step is always a step from one ­element to another. Because of the abstract nature of these steps and the conception

 This is the four in the development of nature afforded by the doubling of the particular as discussed in Kaufmann et al. (2021). 13  In Kaufmann et al. (2021), these progressions were tied to Hegel’s logical argument where the first progression corresponded to the level of progressing to four, made possible by two particulars as available in nature. For the enclosing surface a second distinction is necessary which allows one more step, that culminates in the ultimate sophistication of five in Hegel’s count. 12

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of a dimension that they articulate, such dimensions are like a pre-number which can manifest either spatially (geometrically) or temporally (arithmetically).14 This feature of inclusion relations helps to explain why the four geometrical elements can model three dimensions, namely because the dimensions lie in the steps that move from one to the other. Of course, the notion of an inclusion dimension is modern terminology. However, it models a much older form of mathematical reasoning with which Hegel was quite familiar, namely that of Pythagorean tetractys. In fact, in his lectures on the history of philosophy Hegel positively evaluates precisely the Pythagorean construction of space via steps laid out in the tetractys: To show how the Pythagoreans constructed out of numbers the system of the world, Sextus instances (adv. Math. X. 277–283) space relations, and undoubtedly we have in them to do with such ideal principles, for numbers are, in fact, perfect determinations of abstract space. That is to say, if we begin with the point, the first negation of vacuity, “the point corresponds to unity; it is indivisible and the principle of lines, as the unity is that of numbers. While the point exists as the monad or One, the line expresses the duad or Two, for both become comprehensible through transition; the line is the pure relationship of two points and is without breadth. Surface results from the threefold; but the solid figure or body belongs to the fourfold, and in it there are three dimensions present…”…We must here remark that the progression from the point to actual space also has the signification of occupation of space, for “according to their fundamental tenets and teaching,” says Aristotle (Metaph. I. 8), “they speak of sensuously perceptible bodies in nowise differently from those which are mathematical” (GW 30,1: 273/Haldane translation: Hegel (1995, 225)).

Hegel goes on in that discussion to say, with Aristotle, that such construction only begins to break down when we come to specific physical forms (“water, earth, etc.”).15 We would add that Hegel’s own use of the geometrical elements in inclusion relations does a better job than Pythagorean numbers in establishing the “sensuously perceptible” extent and continuity of space (to speak in Aristotelian terms). In lieu of a discreteness of numbers, the qualitative difference of the linear dimensions is secured by the irreducibility of the elements in the inclusion relations (which irreducibility those geometrical elements have in common with numbers). Finally, we should note that it is a technical fact about this version of a dimension that there is a freedom in the particular choice of point, line through it and plane containing it. Any choice will do, and they are all equivalent. The main feature is that there are four elements and hence three steps. Additionally, it is clear that the whole space will be the last element in any ascending chain, so that the last step is in a sense formal.16 This freedom of choice extends to the direction of the chain as well: the ascending chain point-line-plane-enclosing surface can also be read backwards as enclosing surface-plane-line-point (as we just reconstructed above).

 Cf. Carnap’s disctinction between logical, intuitive, and physical space in Carnap (1922).  Inwood is certainly right to note that Greek philosophers are much more influential for Hegel’s theory of space and time than is Kant (Inwood (1987, 49)). 16  In terms of the ideals, it is clear that the zero ideal is always an ideal and lies below any other ideal. 14 15

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4 On the Dimensionality of Time: How Freedom Dimensions Integrate Linearity and Inclusion Dimensions In this section, we offer our reconstruction of step (c) in the argument above: (c) Finally, Hegel argues that time itself provides the model for connecting the two senses of dimension in virtue of its freedom conception of a dimension, and thus shows how inclusion relations could be used to model the three-dimensionality of space in such a way as to make it linear as well. On the one hand, the move to time is of the same basic nature as the move from homogenous dimensions to inclusion chains of geometrical elements: it is a move to understanding the qualitative difference implicit in an earlier characterization by making it explicit. This is what Hegel means by a lecture remark appended by Michelet to Enc2 § 257: Negation in space is negation in another; the negative doesn’t yet come into its own in space [kommt so im Raume noch nicht zu seinem Rechte]. In space, the surface is certainly the negation of the negation; but in its truth it is different from space.

And this is connected to Hegel’s claim that points are not yet something positive— they aren’t posited negativity (Enc2 § 254R). This is our paraphrase of Hegel’s claim that time is the negation of space in a parallel way that the point is the negation of space. In filling out this claim, we reconstruct Hegel’s argument that time must be three-dimensional in order to play the requisite functional role in securing the three-dimensional character of space. Schematically, we can say that Hegel’s count of dimensions for time is that it is 1. Linear 2. Oriented/ordered 3. Has a special point 0 We have already seen linearity with respect to space. But there are new kinds of dimensions for time as well: the orientation distinguishes between past and future, and the special point (origin) defines the present (Enc2 § 259). Thus, on Hegel’s view, the dimensionality of time is structured differently than that of space. However, it is hard to see this difference at first both because the first dimension of space and time are the same (linearity), and because the counting of temporal dimensions also proceeds according to inclusion (i.e., via steps of negation). That the counting proceeds in the same way is crucial—it secures the commensurability of the spatial and temporal dimensions—but for that very reason it gives time the semblance of a onedimensional parameter that is merely added to space. Hegel, however, shows that there is added structure masked by this semblance, which structure comes out in the second and third dimensions, because both the orientation and the origin are free choices. In those dimensions we get the freedom conception of a dimension: A degree of freedom in a physical system, that is a parameter that has a free choice.

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For space the second and third dimensions are dimensional in the same sense as the first (on both the linear and inclusion conceptions—in fact they are nested within the first on the inclusion conception). But for time, the second and third dimensions are dimensional in a different sense than the first dimension. Space has three linear dimensions (definition 1.1). Time has one linear dimension (definition 1.1) and two features with a degree of freedom—the origin and orientation (definition 2.1). This is our interpretation of the way negation comes into its own in time, namely as for itself: “The negativity, which as point relates to space and in it develops its determination as line and surface, is nonetheless in the sphere of self-­ externality just as much for itself…As so posited for itself, it is time” (Enc2 § 257). The very way that points unfold into lines which unfold into space is made into an object—it is for itself—and this is time. On our interpretation, this means that the dimensionality of the way in which the geometrical elements unfold into linear space is the dimensionality of time. Since Hegel (like Kant) associates space with geometry and time with arithmetic—and both are related to the logical conception of quantity—it may be valuable also to explain the relation between space and time in terms of the relation between geometry, arithmetic and quantity. As we have argued in other work, Hegel’s concept of quantity is the concept of that abstract structure that 30 years later will come to be known as the real numbers (Kaufmann & Yeomans 2017). Both time and one-­ dimensional space can be modeled by lines or by the real numbers if one chooses units, say seconds and meters. But there are other aspects of motion not yet captured by this model. The time-line essentially has features of the real numbers, an origin and an order or direction. It also has arithmetic due to these features.17 The space-­ line is geometric and does not intrinsically possess these features. There is no distinguished point or a distinguished direction. This is the realm of geometry. The full-fledged identification of time with the real numbers is given by the choices of an orientation and an origin. These are the second and third dimension of time, which add something to its first-dimensional linearity: the choice of a direction, that is future and past, and then fixing the boundary as the now —the origin. For space the three dimensions are three continuous dimensions. But now we return to the problem for which the dimensions of time are the solution, namely the problem of how to connect the two different conceptions of spatial dimensionality. This is a problem both theoretically (because Hegel then has two different apparently incompatible conceptions of the dimensionality of space sitting side by side on the theoretical workbench) and intuitively (precisely because the inclusion dimensionality is algebraic or stepwise, it doesn’t obviously seem to model our linear or continuous perception of spatiality). Our most radical claim is  The arithmetic starts with the “dead one [tote Eins]” (Enc2 § 295) obtained by paralyzing the principle of time. This one can be repeated hence added or multiplied but cannot not enter configurations as it does not have externality as space does. There can be three minutes or three intervals of time, but unlike three points which may define a triangle, they do not give a configuration. On the other hand, three times the same point is not a notion of Euclidean geometry. This type of multiplicity does appear in tangency conditions, which are implicit in Hegel’s unfolding of space. 17

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anticipatory and cannot be fully established here but deserves stating because it sets out the goal of Hegel’s discussion of space and time: the addition of free choice (2.1) to inclusion (2.2) allow Hegel to recoup both linearity (1.1) and homogeneity (1) in local contexts via motion and eventually the movement of animal bodies. The addition of time then gives you the dimensionality of space in the intuitive sense, but only in the local contexts and perceiving animals in which intuition is at home.18 How can this be? To begin with, note that the way we construct the three linear dimensions via inclusion relation is due to free choice: we could start with height and then do breadth, or height; or start with breadth, etc.. In mathematics, an example of making a free choice the right-hand rule—we start with height (the thumb) and then breadth (index finger) and then depth (middle finger)—but that is obviously arbitrary, i.e., a free choice. Nothing mathematically or physically important would fail to work if we adopted a left-hand rule instead. But there is something even more radical here, and it concerns motion. On Hegel’s view, rather than homogeneous space being a global or absolute container in which motion takes place, it is rather free motions (in Hegel’s sense, not Newton’s) that generate locally homogeneous spaces, and they do so in virtue of inclusion relations (at least on the side of space—time is also required).19 This locality is signaled by Hegel in the way that motion (Bewegung) is tied to place (Ort) rather than merely space (Raum) (Enc2 § 261). Motion is the way that, at a place, space and time generate each other. The specificity of local space is then given its own category, matter, and the entire Physics section of the Philosophy of Nature is then an investigation into the various ways that local spaces can be distinctive (i.e., into the various qualifications of matter). However, for the argument as we have laid it out in (a–c) above, the crucial conclusion is the way that time generates space, so we focus on that here. Only the dimensionality of time—that it is linear but also has an order and an origin—allows for motion. The pure homogeneity of space cannot allow for motion, because there is no way to describe the differences between locations. Homogeneous just means that all points are the same, and without any qualitative difference between them there is no sense to be made of the notion of moving from one point to another. Even the one-dimensional linearity of time does not allow for motion without the free choices of origin and order. But once we have the second two dimensions of time— the order and origin—we break the symmetry of the homogeneous space and now we can describe motion between different locations (places). And once we have motion, we can use it to get back the linearity and homogeneity of space, at least locally.  Actually, the progression continues into spirit, where we first get the actual experience of the past and the future, but that is too long a story for this paper. For the outlines, see Yeomans (2022). 19  There are Aristotelian resonances here that we cannot explore in the current context. In any event, Hegel’s view ends up closer to Aristotle’s view than either Leibniz’s relational view or Newton’s container view. But we take this sophisticated story of dimensionality to be the way in which Hegel avoids the potential circularity of Aristotle’s view, on which it looks like spatial objects define the space that surrounds them. Cf. Zigliogi (2015). 18

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5 Conclusion Hegelian Space-Time and the Life of the Animal Though it is well beyond the bounds of this paper to discuss in detail, there is a larger transcendental argument covering the whole of the Philosophy of Nature, in which is embedded the particular transcendental argument concerning space-time reconstructed above. In this larger argument, the specific values for the multipliers, origins, and orders required to distinguish the different dimensions of space-time are shown to depend on the specific way in which animals are embodied. The argument we have traced here shows the necessity for such multipliers, origins, and orders for distinguishing the dimensions, but the actual dimensions of natural space-­ time are only realized and thus distinguished with animal embodiment. The formation of the animal body with its three kinds of internal processes—sensibility, irritability, and reproduction—distinguishes the inner from the outer of the animal, and the different forms of the species process (e.g., mating), practical assimilation (e.g., eating) and theoretical assimilation (e.g., perception) distinguish three external dimensions. All of this follows on Hegel’s identification of the animal as the paradigmatic moving thing as well as the paradigmatic place (Enc2 § 351). Animal embodiment at the end of the Philosophy of Nature finally gives some positive content to Hegel’s puzzling claims at the beginning that space and time are forms of Anschauung but not in the Kantian sense of that term (Enc2 §§ 254R & 258R). We suggest that one can capture this difference in English by suggesting that they are forms of perspective rather than intuition, and that animal bodies are the paradigmatic natural phenomenon in which 3  +  3D perspective is realized in the world. Again, it is far too much to address in detail, but a full interpretation of the Philosophy of Nature along the lines suggested by our interpretation of space-time would have to show how this embedding works and trace motion through the argument as the thread that holds it together. How Hegelian Space-Time Is Different from Relativistic Space-Time Our preceding analysis allows us to position Hegel’s theory in the history of mathematical understanding of space-time. The “obvious” concept of space as the container can be coordinatized as three-dimensional space. The most familiar form here is linear three-dimensional space with three coordinates, x, y and z. This bears the problem, which Hegel rightly points out, that there remains an arbitrary choice of origin and coordinate system. To remove this problem, one can talk about affine space, as we have introduced above. But Hegel chooses the different route of “unfolding” in a sequence of irreducible steps; this appears in mathematics in algebraic geometry. This field goes back at least to the projective geometry of Desargues and had a great development the second half of the nineteenth century with the Italian school starting with Cremona. At this point it is useful to mention that there are different concepts of geometry: the synthetic, whose ramifications include the algebraic and transformation group approach of the Erlangen program; and a more analytic approach which leads to the

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more familiar differentiable or analytic descriptions. These two approaches are, in the end, commensurable (they lead to the same phenomenology for three-­ dimensional affine or linear space) but are different in their foundational choices. Hegel’s arguments draw from both worlds. Thinking along with Hegel, the synthetic approach is more space-like while the analytic directly involves time-like aspects. Hegel’s first realization in this arena is that there is a need to go deeper than the coordinatized version, even the rudimentary version of length, width and height, and discuss the various choices of origin and coordinate system. In homogeneity one can see a transformational approach—one can think of changes of frame of reference—which is used in the later part on physics. In the description of three-­ dimensionality he is further following the synthetic, algebraic approach. There is one particularly interesting trace in Hegel of a concept that came into mathematics through Gauss and only came to full fruition through the works Riemann. This is the locality of space, which led to the concept of a manifold that is central to the formulation of relativity. In Hegel this is the enclosed space (umschließende Oberfläche), which is fundamentally again space itself. This means that necessarily there is a local space within space that is homologous (actually homeomorphic) to the whole space, but with the added characteristic of being local and enclosed. The relationship with the whole space gives it a local dimensionality in correspondence with the global one. This relieves the tension between the purely linear, which would extend to infinity, and the local bounded versions. However, the description in terms of points, triangles and tetrahedra20 is a truncated local version that does not yet explain the fundamentally parallel relationship between local and global space. Also, although global space is homogeneous, a local space may have a distinguished point, an origin, and later, also an orientation. The local origin as a point is still a free choice, but once chosen it becomes an origin: “The point is here, as it is in truth, namely as a universal; the point is thus as the whole space, as totality of dimensions [Der Punkt ist hier, wie er in Wahrheit ist, nämlich als ein Allgemeines; der Punkt ist eben darum als ganzer Raum, als Totalität der Dimensionen]” (Enc2 § 260Z). For Hegel the mathematical steps are not taken as abstract but go hand-in-hand with a concretization and realization, i.e., a new qualification. In order to get more structure or concretization in Hegel, as in the physical and mathematical formulations, one needs new argumentative steps. For Hegel, the next step involves time, and indeed modern physics is phrased as an analytic theory using time derivatives. In purely mathematical terms, time is a parameter, just as introduced above. One can then take derivatives of trajectories to arrive at the notion of tangent vectors and tangent space. It is these spaces that carry the actual linear structure. This construction is a modern way of recovering the full linear structure locally. The result is what  Hegel himself discusses the relationship of the two-dimensionality of the plane and theorems about Euclidean triangles in Enc2 § 265Z. One upshot of these consideration is that the dimension of the local space appears through a power count, as in the Pythagorean theorem, and coincides with the unfolding dimension of the global space. The tetrahedra, although not directly in Hegel, are part of the Pythagorean tetractys philosophy. 20

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is called the tangent bundle, which is twice the dimension of the manifold itself, that is 3 + 3D for three-dimensional space. The fact that in this way one can completely drop the reference to an embedding space—as in the usual picture of a surface embedded into space—is the modern development of a manifold. Things only have to look three- (or n-) dimensional locally (although not arbitrarily, but in a coherent fashion). One way to view Hegel’s notion of space-time is to see it as a philosophical description of this technique of adding a differential structure but phrased as the oscillation between time and space. To have a place (Ort) one needs a here and now (Hier und Jetzt), which are the space and time origins. This type of space-time may not resemble the notions of space-time used in classical mechanics and relativity directly, but there is a deeper level, whose metaphysical implication Hegel captures, and a logical level, which is predicated on this. The metaphysical level derives from the fact that when formulating the theory with a time-parameter to obtain derivatives and hence tangents, one is using the source (time) and the target (space) of the parameterization in different capacities. The important thing about the target (space) is that it lends the basic dimensionality. The important thing about the source (time) is that the three time-dimensions of Hegel are what make the definition of derivatives, directions and scaling work. There is one more facet to this and that is that time and space are not separate here but linked through the parameterizing function. It couples the local dimensions to the dimension of the tangent space and without such couplings one cannot even arrive at the differentiable structure, mathematically speaking, and hence not at equations of motion, physically speaking. In this sense Hegel is right. There is no differential geometry without time; without an extra structure one can only have a synthetic geometry of relative positions (Figurationen), i.e., the geometry Hegel associates with space. As a coupled entity, viewed in this fashion this is indeed space-time.21 In this setting, a point is a “here” as a point and a “now” as the zero vector in the linear tangent space providing its origin (see Fig. 3, below). Regarding this zero of time as a choice of a particular value for a variable, we can see the emergent space-time oscillations that lead to movement in Hegel. Freezing the time parameter t in a movement localizes the motion to a point in space but also dynamically gives a tangent direction as an unfolding of time. Fixing the space point as origin then frees up the tangent space parameters, which contain the aspects of time, such as units and orientation and indeed carry the arithmetic of adding and scaling. Letting the parameter run, one is moving through space and the tangent-­ space time aspects are blocked out in this consideration. The going back and forth between time and space are mathematically formulated as the differentiation and integration of curves and their tangent fields of velocities. One should stress that this  There are actually two standard approaches to classical mechanics, the Euler-Lagrange version which uses coordinates and their time derivatives and the Hamiltonian, which uses positions and momenta as conjugate variables. Mathematically one then looks at a 2n dimensional manifold, with n space-like dimensions, with special features that is called a symplectic manifold which means woven together, that is the space and conjugate momentum (time). 21

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Fig. 3  An ellipse with tangent vectors corresponding to a parameterization. Without the tangent vectors, it is simply a subset. The full set of tangent vectors allows for the reconstruction of the parameterization and vice-versa

is a modern account intended to highlight the fundamental insight into the logical ontology which is closer to what Hegel is developing that one would expect prima vista. Of course, Hegel could not have anticipated in detail this mathematical progress, which he was highly doubtful could even be achieved by mathematics (e.g., Enc2 § 259 Z). The foundational aspect, whose germ is detected by Hegel, comes in through the notion of a manifold. It is this modern concept that is used in special and general relativity which deal with the metrics on space-time. Einstein’s equation is an equation for the metric. Here space-time is now taken to be a locally four-dimensional space and differential geometry done on that space using the methods discussed above. While special relativity is basically global and linear (affine), general relativity takes the step to local structure, which presupposes the step to tangent space. The astonishing thing is that this puts the linear space and time dimensions on equal footing.22 Some final comments on Hegel’s space-time. As explained, he also puts space and time into the same realm, but not quite on equal footing. Time is the counterpart of space, which manifests itself in the different aspects of dimensionality. The fact that it is a counterpart also is important for the relations of space and time which appear later in mechanics, in which, time has the role of a unit.23 It is in the second position of the relation, analogous to its general introduction. The further comparison of specific local spaces (i.e., places) defined by qualified matter can only count as a realization of the concept of space if that concept already contains the structure that will then be given specific quantifiable and qualifiable form by that qualified matter. This connects to the algebraic version of space and Hegel’s view of calculus. What is important in such a relation are the powers. For the derivation of calculus,  Strictly speaking, there is a difference in space and time directions for special relativity which is expressed by a sign in the metric, and in general relativity which is expressed through a signature. In technical terms space-time is a pseudo-Riemannian manifold, not a Riemannian one, like space alone. Nevertheless, the possible transformations are allowed to mix space and time directions, just like rotations in time mix the coordinates or length, width and height. 23  In particular, speed is in m/s and indeed there is no naturally occurring phenomenon which has a physical unit of s/m. Although of course one can mathematically construct them, they do not fit into a logical exposition of nature like the one Hegel is undertaking. 22

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these powers are indeed the exponents and as such numbers (two is two). In this way, Hegel avoids infinitesimals and makes calculus algebraic, not unlike modern algebraic geometry. This now translates in nature to the algebraic dimension count given by irreducibles and sets the stage for a power relationship between space and time needed for mechanics. In conclusion: Hegel does realize the importance of local space, he connects local to global space to get the dimensionality, which is geometric and algebraic in nature. In terms of time, he pursues a non-infinitesimal way, just like for his calculus, and gives another option though aspects of dimensionality and a dynamic oscillation of space and time. On a meta-physical level this accomplishes the modern way of introducing physics through the differential formalism, which involves derivatives—with respect to a time parameter—and geometrically tangent spaces.

References Carnap, Rudolph. 1922. Der Raum: ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftslehre. Kant-Studien Ergänzungshefte 56. Berlin: Reuther & Reichard. De Vries, Willem A. 2016. Hegel’s Account of the Presence of Space and Time in Sensation, Intuition and the World: A Sellarsian View. In Hegel’s Philosophical Psychology, ed. Susanne Hermann-Sinai and Lucia Ziglioli, 214–227. London: Routledge. Hegel, G. W. F. [Enc2] 1970. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. Ed. Michael J. Petry, 3 vols. London: Allen & Unwin (abbreviation: EPN; after the paragraph number R means ‘Remark’, and Z means Zusatz, i.e. ‘Addition’). Hegel, G.W.F. 1995. Lectures on the History of Philosophy Vol. I. Tran. E.S. Haldane. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. [GW 30,1] 2016. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie I. Klaus Grotsch. Hamburg: Meiner. Inwood, Michael. 1987. Kant and Hegel on Space and Time. In Hegel’s Critique of Kant, ed. Stephen Priest. Oxford: Clarendon. Jenkins, Scott. 2010. Hegel on Space: A Critique of Kant's Transcendental Philosophy. Inquiry 53 (4): 326–355. Kant, Immanuel. [A for the A-Version, B for the B-Version] 1999. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. P. Guyer & A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaufmann, Ralph, and Christopher Yeomans. 2017. Math by Pure Thinking: R First and the Divergence of Measures in Hegel’s Philosophy of Mathematics. European Journal of Philosophy 25 (4): 985–1020. Kaufmann, Ralph, Ansgar Lyssy, and Christopher Yeomans. 2021. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: The Expansion of Particularity as the Filling of Space and Time. In Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the philosophical Sciences: A Critical Guide, ed. Sebastian Stein and Joshua Wretzel, 109–126. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wandschneider, Dieter. 2010. The Philosophy of Nature in Kant, Schelling and Hegel. In The Routledge Companion to 19th Century Philosophy, ed. Dean Moyar, 64–103. London: Routledge. Yeomans, Christopher. 2022. Temporal Strata of Historical Experience in Hegel’s Encyclopedia. In The Enduring Relevance of Hegel’s Encyclopedia, ed. Sebastian Stein and Joshua Wretzel, 98–115. London: Routledge. Ziglioli, Lucia. 2015. The Time of the Idea: An Inquiry into Hegel’s Notion of Time. Hegel-­ Jahrbuch 2015: 405–410.

Part II

Understanding the Human Life-Form Between Nature, Spirit, and Society

‘All is Act, Movement, and Life’: Fichte’s Idealism as Immortalism G. Anthony Bruno

One thing does not exist: Oblivion. God saves the metal and he saves the dross, And his prophetic memory guards from loss The moons to come, and those of evenings gone. Everything is: the shadows in the glass Which, in between the day’s two twilights, you Have scattered by the thousands, or shall strew Henceforth in the mirrors that you pass. And everything is part of that diverse Crystalline memory, the universe; Whoever through its endless mazes wanders Hears door on door click shut behind his stride, And only from the sunset’s farther side Shall view at last the Archetypes and the Splendors. (Borges 1996, 149)

In a supplement to 1787’s David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism: A Dialogue, Jacobi criticizes Kant for the apparent inconsistency of positing the existence of a thing in itself or ‘transcendental object’ on the grounds that, according to transcendental idealism, such an object cannot appear in possible experience. He advises that Kant reject the concept of a transcendental object for the sake of consistency and have ‘the courage, therefore, to assert the strongest idealism that was ever professed, and not be afraid of the objection of speculative egoism’. Jacobi’s advice is satirical, however, for he holds that the cost of consistent idealism is the loss of true, i.e., transcendental, reality: ‘we must mean by “object” a thing that would be present outside us in a transcendental sense’ (Jacobi 1994, 338). It is therefore no surprise that, after Fichte follows precisely this advice while developing the Wissenschaftslehre in Jena in the 1790s, Jacobi accuses him in G. A. Bruno (*) Royal Holloway University of London, London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Corti, J.-G. Schülein (eds.), Life, Organisms, and Human Nature, Studies in German Idealism 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_7

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1799’s ‘Open Letter’ of ‘nihilism’. Jacobi coins this term to denote philosophy’s denial of the reality and, in particular, the freedom of individuals through their reduction to modes of substance, as in Spinozism, or, as in Fichte’s ‘inverted Spinozism’, their reduction to modes of ‘pure and empty consciousness’, i.e., of reason or the I (Jacobi 1994, 502, 519). By abandoning the ‘true’ that must exist outside the I ‘in a transcendental sense’ for the ‘truth’ of the system of consciousness that the I derives from itself, Fichte transforms reality ‘into nothing’ through ‘a chemical process’ of ‘philosophizing’ (Jacobi 1994, 505–7). Hence, Jacobi chides him for ‘dissolving all being into knowledge, a progressive annihilation through ever more universal concepts leading up to science’ (Jacobi 1994, 509). Jacobi is clear that the consequence of Fichte’s ‘naked logical enthusiasm’ is the loss of transcendental reality. He argues that if the I is ‘the solvent medium of all objects of cognition’, outside which there is nothing, such objects are not even appearances of something, viz., appearances of a thing in itself, but rather are only ‘phantoms-in-themselves or appearances of nothing’ (Jacobi 1994, 505, 514).1 This is why Jacobi is ‘pleased with Kant that he preferred to sin against the system’ of transcendental idealism by positing the thing in itself, instead of sinning ‘against the majesty’ of transcendental reality. Fichte sins against this majesty by rejecting the concept of a thing in itself and grounding the intelligibility of objects of cognition on the I, thereby ‘changing the real thing […] into nothing’. The real sin is to ‘annihilate’ the objectivity of real, free individuals through one’s commitment to the speculatively egoistic and hence nihilistic principle that ‘[n]othing must remain’ in the object ‘which is not our activity’ (Jacobi 1994, 499, 508). In David Hume, Jacobi clarifies the freedom of individuals with a pair of remarks. He says that although every being is ‘connected with an infinite multitude of other singular beings’, ‘[a]ll truly actual things are individuals or singular things, and, as such, they are living beings (principia perceptiva et activa) that are external to one another’ (Jacobi 1994, 317–8). In other words, true individuals are not exhaustively explained by external relations to other individuals, for they are principles that explain the unity of their perceptions and actions and, in this sense, are ‘living’. Earlier he describes the pre-philosophical conception of ‘a living, self-manifesting, freely acting, personal power’ and says that ‘without the living experience of such a power in us […] we should not have the slightest idea of cause and effect’ (Jacobi 1994, 291). Not only, then, do we experience ‘actual things’ as individuals and thus as intrinsically living powers that are only derivatively causally related; we do so

 According to Jacobi, a secondary error of Fichte’s philosophy is the atheism with which he is charged in Jena. Jacobi’s assessment of this error is complicated. Although he holds that the charge of atheism will ‘always be made against any philosophy, whichever form it may assume, that invites man to rise above nature in spirit and above himself inasmuch as he is nature’ and that he may be ‘obliged to call [Fichte’s] doctrine atheist’, he does not consider Fichte ‘personally’ an atheist and at most regards Fichte’s ‘sin’ to ‘only be a matter of thought, a bungling of the artist, in words and in concepts, the fault of the brooder, not of the man’ (Jacobi 1994, 520, 522). 1

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only because we initially experience ourselves as intrinsically living powers.2 The nihilistic denial of the reality of individuals accordingly amounts to a denial of life. Jacobi avoids nihilism by espousing a ‘non-philosophy’ that consists in the ‘non-­ knowledge’ of, i.e., the ‘faith’ in, the self-activity that defines real individuals (Jacobi 1994, 501).3 Nevertheless, his remarks might be taken to imply that avoiding the nihilistic denial of life requires the insight that self-activity is essential to and, indeed, primary for a philosophical account of the intelligibility of objects. This is the  insight that  informs several passages from Fichte’s 1800 Vocation of Man, which is written as an indirect response to Jacobi’s ‘Open Letter’: I will not gain entry into the supernatural world only after I have been severed from connection with the earthly one. I already am and live in it now, far more truly than in the earthly. Already now it is my only firm standpoint, and eternal life, which I have already long since taken possession of, is the only reason why I still care to carry on my life on earth. Heaven, as it is called, does not lie beyond the grave. It already surrounds us here and its light is kindled in every pure heart. (Fichte 1987, 94–5) I am immortal, imperishable, eternal as soon as I decide to obey the law of reason. I must not first become so. The supersensible world is no future world: it is present. (Fichte 1987, 99) Only reason is; infinite reason in itself […] will annihilate our present life with what we call death and introduce us into a new life. […] All our life is its life. We are in its hand and remain there, and no one can tear us out of it. We are eternal because it is. (Fichte 1987, 111) All death in nature is birth, and precisely in dying does the augmentation of life visibly appear. There is no killing principle in nature, for nature is throughout nothing but life. It is not death which kills, but rather a more living life which, hidden behind the old life, begins and develops. Death and birth are only the struggle of life with itself in order to present itself ever more purely and more like itself. And how could my death be anything else? For I am not a mere representation and image of life, but bear within me the original life which alone is true and essential […unlike] nature […] which itself lives merely for my sake. (Fichte 1987, 122) The appearance of death is the guide by which my spiritual eye is led to my new life and my new nature. Each one who like me leaves the earthly association […] still exists, and is entitled to a new place. […] So I live and so I am, and so I am unchangeable, firm and complete for all eternity. For this is no being assumed from without. It is my own, my only true and essential being. (Fichte 1987, 124)

These striking passages jointly claim that life is eternal, rational, our true being, and the final cause of nature in general and of death in particular. How can we make sense of this claim? The Vocation4 is composed of public lectures that Fichte gives in Berlin after his 1798 ‘On the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World’ ignites the  Cf. Jacobi’s claim that we are not ‘beings who were only capable of intuition and judgment’, since ‘we can also act!’ (Jacobi 1994, 290). 3  Cf. Jacobi 1994, 230–1. 4  On the vocational tradition in the German enlightenment, see Zöller 2013, 24–8. 2

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atheism dispute, which provokes Jacobi’s ‘Open Letter’ and forces him to resign from the University of Jena. The lectures often employ the moving words of a sermon. Can we philosophically translate this sermon’s conception of life? We can if we trace this conception to the major Jena texts.5 I will argue that the public lectures are a popular expression of Fichte’s pre-existing commitment to what I call immortalism, the view that life is the unconditioned condition of the intelligibility of objects.6 It contrasts with what I call mortalism, the view that death is the unconditioned condition of the intelligibility of objects.7 The debate about the plausibility of immortalism helps to shape the trajectory of post-Kantian philosophy from German idealism to phenomenology. Since this debate begins with a confrontation between Fichte and Jacobi regarding how to preserve the reality of living powers and avoid nihilism, I will focus on the Wissenschaftslehre as the first instance of post-Kantian immortalism. Immortalism inherits two edicts—that the philosophical life alone is worth living and that philosophy is a preparation for death—in that it holds that a philosophical account of the intelligibility of objects both is necessary and must include an account of what it means to die, an account whose first principle or unconditioned condition must be a living power. Post-Kantian immortalism provides such an account from the first-person standpoint, Fichte’s names for which are ‘reason’ and ‘the I’. Jacobi must regard immortalist philosophy as oxymoronic, given his view that the nihilistic denial of life is the unavoidable consequence of any consistent philosophy, whether Spinozistic or Fichtean. And yet the self-activity of life undeniably occupies a central position in German idealism in general and in the Wissenschaftslehre in particular.8 In 1794–95’s Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte says: The source of all reality is the I. […] But the I is because it posits itself; and it posits itself because it is. Self-positing and being are therefore one and the same. But the concepts of self-positing and activity as such are also one and the same. All reality is therefore active, and everything that is active is reality. Activity is positive reality (in contrast with merely relative reality). (Fichte SW I, 134)

This passage identifies reality with activity insofar as reality’s ‘source’, i.e., its first principle or unconditioned condition, is the activity of the I.  Fichte implies that, insofar as the I’s activity is ‘positive’ rather than ‘relative’, it is not active in virtue of something else, but rather is self-active and is, in this sense, living. This implicit immortalist appeal to life is made explicit in 1800’s ‘From A Private Letter’, written amid the atheism dispute and published just prior to the Vocation: ‘something stable, at rest, and dead can by no means enter the domain of what I call philosophy,  I draw the Vocation’s continuity with the Jena texts slightly earlier than Zöller 2013, 23.  See 1806’s The Way Towards the Blessed Life or the Doctrine of Religion: “we, who explain death by life, the body by the soul—and not the reverse as the moderns do—are the true followers of the ancients; only that we see clearly what remained dark to them” (Fichte SW V: 424). 7  For an account of Schelling’s commitment to mortalism, see Bruno 2016; cf. the account of Heidegger’s conception of death in Bruno 2014. 8  On points of contact between Jacobi and Fichte, see Ahlers 2003 and di Giovanni 1989. 5 6

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within which all is act, movement, and life. […O]ne of the distinctive features of my philosophy is the fact that it deals only with what is living and by no means with what is dead’ (Fichte  SW V, 381–2). According to this passage, reality is active because ‘all is act, movement, and life’, i.e., because all is ultimately intelligible in terms of the I qua living power. Indeed, Fichte’s rebuttal of the atheism charge in this text doubles as a rebuttal of the nihilism charge. Just as he does in ‘Divine Governance’,9 he claims here that the belief in God is ‘never anything other than’ the belief in a moral order that transforms ‘the order of nature’, i.e., the belief in the moral perfectibility of nature. From this claim, he infers that ‘every belief that wishes to introduce an amoral chaos, a lawless arbitrariness on the part of a super-­ powerful being, mediated through senseless, magical means’, is ‘a reprehensible superstition and is aimed at the total destruction of human beings’ (Fichte SW V, 394–5). As I will show, for Fichte, refuting the annihilation of human beings requires positing life as the unconditioned condition of intelligibility, i.e., refuting nihilism requires endorsing immortalism. In §1, I explain the context of Jacobi’s use of ‘caput mortuum’ as a term for the thing in itself. In §§2–3, I reconstruct two immortalist arguments from Fichte’s Jena period. The first is that the I’s self-activity rules out the existence of the thing in itself and thereby vanquishes ‘death’s head’. The second is that, insofar as the I charges us with the moral perfection of nature, it is the final cause of our entire life, including its end. This is to say that the I puts our every moment into question, even our last. In §4, I use these immortalist arguments to interpret the joint claim from the Vocation that life is eternal, rational, our true being, and the final cause of nature and of death.

1.  Caput Mortuum In the 1785 first edition of Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn, Jacobi recalls having ‘certain remarkable “visions”’ at ‘eight or nine years old’ (Jacobi 1994, 183). In the 1789 second edition, he elaborates this memory in response to A.W. Rehberg’s review of the first edition: That extraordinary thing was a representation of endless duration, quite independent of any religious concept. At the said age, while I was pondering on eternity a parte ante, it suddenly came over me with such clarity, and seized me with such violence, that I gave out a loud cry and fell into a kind of swoon. A movement in me, quite natural, forced me to revive the same representation as soon as I came to myself, and the result was a state of unspeakable despair. The thought of annihilation, which had always been dreadful to me, now became even more dreadful, nor could I bear the vision of an eternal forward duration any better. […] I gradually managed to not be afflicted by this trial so often, and finally managed to free myself from it altogether…And this had been my situation between roughly the ages of seventeen and twenty-one, when all at once the old appearance came upon me  See Fichte: ‘This living and efficaciously acting moral order is itself God. We require no other God, nor can we grasp any other’ (Fichte SW V, 186). 9

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again. I recognized its characteristic dreadful shape, but was steadfast enough to hold it in sight for a second look, and now I knew that it was! It was, and had enough objective being to afflict every human soul in which it materialized just as much as mine. This representation has often seized me again since then, despite the care that I constantly take to avoid it. I have reason to suspect that I can arbitrarily evoke it in me any time I want; and I believe that it is in my power, were I to do so repeatedly a few times, to take my life within minutes by this means. (Jacobi 1994, 362)10

Jacobi’s ‘dreadful’ vision is of, on the one hand, an ‘endless’ series ‘a parte ante’ and moving ‘forward’ and, on the other hand, a series ending arbitrarily with ‘annihilation’. This vision is unbearable because it rules out the existence of individuals, which we saw are not exhausted by external relations, such as they would bear in an endless causal series or would suffer with arbitrary annihilation, but rather are intrinsically living powers, i.e., powers that determine themselves. Hence the epigraph to the first edition of the Letters: ‘Give me a place to stand’ (Jacobi 1994, 173).11 The dreadful vision, in other words, is the nihilistic image of nature as devoid of individuals and hence of life. This vision ‘afflict[s] every human soul’, moreover, because it threatens our faith in ourselves as living powers, without which we have no ‘idea of cause and effect’, as Jacobi says in David Hume, a claim that he reiterates in the second edition of the Letters: ‘we do not have the slightest intimation of causality, except immediately, through the consciousness of our own causality, i.e., our life-principle’ (Jacobi 1994, 377). But in what sense is the dreadful vision ‘independent of any religious concept’? Which religious concept does it lack? An answer is provided shortly after Jacobi’s elaboration. He claims that human consciousness ‘is composed of two original representations, that of the conditional, and that of the unconditional’. We represent the conditional when, in ordinary experience and scientific research, we seek to discover ‘what mediates the existence of things’, i.e., the ‘mechanism’ of their external conditions (Jacobi 1994, 375). The nihilistic image emerges from restricting nature mechanistically to the totality of conditioned things, i.e., things that are exclusively mediated, and thus explicable, by external relations. The ordinary and scientific motivations for this image perhaps explain why Jacobi finds it ‘quite natural’ to evoke a vision that causes him ‘unspeakable despair’. Nevertheless, he observes that if we seek to ‘reduce’ nature to a mechanism, we thereby seek to ‘discover the conditions of the unconditioned’, which is  Compare Jacobi’s memory with the May 1903 suicide note that had been carved into a tree at the top of Kegon Falls by Misao Fujimura, a seventeen-year-old student of English literature: ‘How immense the universe / How eternal history / I wanted to measure immensity with this small fivefoot body / What authority has Horatio’s philosophy? / The truth of all creation is captured in a word / That is—“unfathomable” / Troubled with this regret, I finally determined to die / As I stand atop the precipice / I have no anxiety in my heart / I understand for the first time / Great pessimism is equivalent to great optimism’ (Shinbun Shusei Meiji Hennenshi 1940, 60; translated by Jessica Chiba). Fujimura is troubled, not only by the universe’s infinitude, but also by philosophy, whose dreams about the universe exclude anything whose ‘truth’ is mechanistically ‘unfathomable’, e.g., his living body. But whereas Jacobi experiences this vision as both natural and dreadful and seeks to avoid it for fear of taking his life, Fujimura finds equal parts ‘pessimism’ and ‘optimism’ in the vision and resolves to die. 11  See Franks 2005, 162–5. 10

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‘an absurd undertaking’ because, whereas natural entities are connected in ‘a chain of conditional conditions’, the ‘unconditional condition of nature’ must be ‘unconnected, hence extra-natural’. Representing the unconditional consequently involves a different kind of apprehension than representing the conditional, for if mechanistic cognition of nature is restricted to ‘the sum-concept of the conditional’, then the unconditional ‘lies outside the sphere of our distinct cognition’. From this, Jacobi infers that the unconditional ‘cannot be apprehended by us in any way except as it is given to us, namely, as fact—IT IS! This supernatural, this being of all beings, all tongues proclaim GOD’ (Jacobi 1994, 376). We see, then, that God, insofar as it is unconditional, falls within the extension of the religious concept that the dreadful vision lacks. But God is not this concept’s only referent. As Jacobi says, in the ‘consciousness of our spontaneous activity in the exercise of our will’, we possess ‘an analogue within us of the supernatural, that is to say, of a being who does not act mechanistically’. The religious concept extends to God’s creations, i.e., to living powers like ourselves, whose actions are not simply externally determined. Indeed, since our idea of nature’s causal mechanism presupposes our self-activity or ‘life-principle’, ‘nobody is in a position to represent the principle of life, the inner source of understanding and will, as the result of mechanistic connections, that is, as the simple result of mediation’ (Jacobi 1994, 377). Representing the principle of life instead requires the concept of the unconditional, whose referent ‘lies outside’ the mechanism of external conditions. Not only God, then, but we too are obscured if our image of nature nihilistically excludes the religious concept of the unconditional, whose extension includes all living powers. In the ‘Open Letter’, Jacobi satirically depicts the Wissenschaftslehre as a science that rejects the nihilistic image of nature: A science that has itself alone, qua science, as object, and has no content apart from this, is a science in itself. The I is a science in itself, and the only one. It knows itself, and it would contradict its concept if it knew, or were to get hold of, something outside itself, etc., etc.… The I, therefore, is necessarily the principle of all other sciences, and an unfailing menstruum with which they can all be dissolved and made to vanish into the I without any trace of a caput mortuum—the not-I—being left behind. (Jacobi 1994, 409)12

This passage depicts a science whose cognitive content is itself and that ‘contradict[s]’ itself if it purports to cognize ‘something outside itself’. This arguably captures Fichte’s claim in 1797–98’s Attempt at a New Presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre that the ‘gist’ of his science is that reason or the I is ‘absolutely self-sufficient’ and thus ‘explicable solely on the basis of […] itself and not on the basis of anything outside of’ itself and, moreover, that it ‘could not get outside of itself without renouncing itself’. Fichte summarizes this claim thusly: ‘[i]n short, the Wissenschaftslehre is transcendental idealism’ (Fichte  SW I, 474). Whereas on Kant’s conception of transcendental idealism reason is not absolutely self-sufficient  Contrast Hegel, who, although critical of Fichte’s conception of the I, follows his pursuit of consistent idealism in The Science of Logic, Part I of 1830’s Encyclopedia Logic, by using ‘caput mortuum’ to refer disparagingly to the thing in itself (Hegel 1991, 87). 12

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in that it depends on the unknowable thing in itself for the matter of sensation, Fichte rejects the concept of the thing in itself for denoting ‘something outside’ of, and thus for ‘renouncing’, reason. Indeed, just before his claim, Fichte calls this concept ‘a complete perversion of reason’ (Fichte SW I, 472).13 Jacobi gives expression to this Fichtean point by saying that no thing in itself or ‘not-I’ conditions the I. But why does he use ‘caput mortuum’, the alchemical term for the remainder in attempts to distil the elixir of immortality, to refer to the thing in itself? Literally meaning ‘death’s head’, the term denotes that which, per impossibile, resists explanation by a philosophical  principle of self-activity or life like the I. Jacobi’s denial that the Wissenschaftslehre tolerates such resistance might therefore imply that this science is anti-nihilistic. However, his depiction of this science is as satirical as his advice to the consistent idealist to embrace egoism in David Hume, for he coins ‘nihilism’ precisely in order to signify the folly of the Wissenschaftslehre. Insofar as this science reduces individuals to modes of the I and rejects the concept of the thing in itself, it cannot but be devoid of life. What this science regards as a perverse and impossible caput mortuum is for Jacobi nothing other than transcendental reality, i.e., the irreducible source of living powers, both divine and human. Rejecting transcendental reality may render idealism consistent, but it denies the living reality on which the I itself depends. As Jacobi says in the ‘Open Letter’: As surely as I possess reason, just as surely I do not possess with this human reason of mine the perfection of life, not the fullness of the good and the true. And as surely as I do not possess all this with it, and know it, just as certainly do I know that there is a higher being, and that I have my origin in Him. My solution too, therefore, and that of my reason is not the I, but the ‘More than I’! the ‘Better than I’!—Someone entirely Other. (Jacobi 1994, 514–5)

2. The I and the Thing in Itself Despite Jacobi’s depiction of the Wissenschaftslehre, we must charitably assess Fichte’s assertion that his science ‘deals only with what is living and by no means with what is dead’, i.e., that it aims to avoid the nihilistic image of nature. In 1796’s Foundations of Natural Right, Fichte offers several remarks on the essence of human individuals: [T]he rational being posits itself as a rational individual […] by exclusively ascribing to itself a sphere for its freedom. He is the person who exclusively makes choices within this sphere (and not any other possible person, who might make choices in some other sphere). (Fichte SW III, 56) [M]atter can restrict only a part of my free movement, not all of it; for in the latter case, the person’s freedom would be completely annihilated; in that case, I would be dead, dead in

13

 Cf. Fichte SW III, 40.

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relation to the sensible world. […T]he free being’s superior power over this external matter arises solely from its freedom to act in accordance with concepts. Matter, in contrast, operates only in accordance with mechanical laws and thus has only one mode of exercising efficacy, while the free being has several. (Fichte SW III, 68) Nature completed all of her works; only from the human being did she withdraw her hand, and precisely by doing so, she gave him over to himself. Formability, as such, is the character of humanity. (Fichte SW III, 80)

Human individuals are defined in these remarks by an intrinsic ‘power’ of freedom, i.e., by a ‘sphere’ of activity that is not determined by external relations either to other individuals or to matter. Were this sphere so determined, freedom would be ‘annihilated’ and individuals would consequently be ‘dead’. In that case, individuals would be governed by ‘mechanical laws’ of nature, whose ‘works’ are ‘completed’ via their total explanation by such laws. Unlike mere matter, however, human individuals ultimately are not externally formed, but instead form themselves. Fichte’s remarks on human individuals seem to adhere to Jacobi’s anti-nihilistic definition of individuals as living powers, i.e., as unifying their perception and action. Nevertheless, insofar as human individuals are instances of I-hood, these remarks must be interpreted as deriving from the I as first principle. Indeed, the subtitle to Natural Right is According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre. Since, for Fichte, it is the I that is ultimately self-active or living, we find that his remarks on human individuals presuppose an immortalist apprehension of the I’s self-activity as the unconditioned condition of intelligibility. I turn now to reconstruct two immortalist arguments from his Jena period that serve to contextualize his remarks on the essence of human individuals. The first immortalist argument is that the I’s self-activity rules out the existence of the thing in itself and thereby vanquishes death’s head. In the First Introduction to the New Presentation, Fichte says that philosophy’s first ‘task’ is to posit the first principle or ‘explanatory ground’ of experience (Fichte SW I, 423).14 He argues that positing a principle is essentially ‘a free act of thinking’ (Fichte SW I, 425). This is because it is a normative act. Whether I posit the I as the first principle of the Wissenschaftslehre or the not-I as the first principle of Spinozism, I regard my act as the correct response to philosophy’s first task, i.e., one that could have failed and for which I am responsible. Regardless of what I posit, then, ‘it is only because I have determined myself’ that I do so (Fichte SW I, 427).15 This entails that Spinozism, which concludes with the denial of the very freedom by which it posits the not-I, is  Cf. Fichte SW I, 91.  Cf. Pippin 2000: ‘Since one cannot get someone to subject himself to the space of reasons unless he has already so subjected himself, the only possible appeal is to call his own experiences to mind in a way that will reveal he must have always already so subjected himself, and to ask him to try “not to be so subject”, to act and think as if dogmatism were true. Such a subject would be in the same fix as the skeptic about practical reason, who must act under the idea of freedom if he is to act at all. To assume otherwise would still be to determine oneself to act as if determinism were true. But that would be to make it a norm for action and so to refute oneself; likewise with any attempt to exempt oneself from the space of reasons or the domain of normativity’ (158). 14 15

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a performative contradiction. In particular, it betrays the vitality on which it depends by feigning a kind of lifelessness, for, since it holds that individuals are modes that are infinitely determined by external relations to modes of the same attribute, it must annihilate freedom and so must nihilistically regard individuals as dead, i.e., as completed works of nature with no self-activity. By contrast, to posit the I as first principle is both to posit the I’s self-activity or living power as the unconditioned condition of intelligibility in response to philosophy’s first task and, since positing is an essentially free act, to posit oneself as an instance of I-hood, i.e., as self-active or living. This rules out one’s determination by the not-I or thing in itself on the grounds that life conditions itself and is therefore not conditioned by any caput mortuum. Thus, when Fichte infers from Spinozism’s performative contradiction that ‘[t]he only type of philosophy that remains possible is idealism’ (SW I, 438), his conclusion expresses a commitment to immortalism, i.e., to a philosophical system in which self-activity unconditionally conditions the intelligibility of our experience of objects. Fichte extends this first immortalist argument in the Second Introduction by casting the mode of apprehending the I, viz., intellectual intuition, in terms of life. He says that intellectual intuition ‘simultaneously’ is ‘the act by means of which the I originates for [one]’ and ‘the act of intuiting [oneself]’ (Fichte SW I, 463). Since, as we saw, positing the I is the act whereby I simultaneously discover self-activity as the first principle of experience and grasp myself as self-active, it is none other than the act of intellectual intuition. Fichte adds that ‘I cannot move my hand or foot’ without this intuition, for it is only through it ‘that I know that I do this’. Whereas in sensible intuition I apprehend objects to which I stand in external relations, in intellectual intuition I apprehend my intrinsic power of freedom, i.e., my capacity to form myself. Fichte accordingly draws the immortalist inference that intellectual intuition ‘contains within itself the source of life, and apart from it there is nothing but death’ (Fichte SW I, 463). Indeed, he says, it is a mode of apprehension that is directed at, not a ‘subsisting thing’, but ‘a sheer activity’, i.e., ‘not a being, but something living’ (Fichte SW I, 465).16 Repeating his claim from the Foundations that the I is positively, not relatively, active, Fichte then explains that, by intellectually intuiting the I, I exhibit an ‘ethical law within’ me through which ‘I am given to myself, by myself’, not by something ‘alien’ (Fichte SW I, 466). The doctrine of intellectual intuition thus recalls Jacobi’s anti-nihilist definition of individuals as living powers that are the explanatory principles of their own unity. As Fichte says, in intellectual intuition, ‘I possess life within myself and draw it from myself’ (Fichte SW I, 466). Of course, Fichte’s doctrine avoids nihilism by appeal, not to non-philosophy, but to a philosophical account of intelligibility on which self-activity is essential and primary. Such an appeal is oxymoronic for Jacobi, for whom philosophy entails the nihilistic reduction of individuals to modes of either the I or the not-I.  Yet

 For an account of the difference between Kant’s and Fichte’s conceptions of intellectual intuition, see Bruno 2022. 16

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Fichte’s appeal directly responds to Jacobi’s epigraphical demand for a foundation in living powers: ‘Intellectual intuition provides the only firm standpoint for any philosophy. […] I am only active. I cannot be driven from this position’ (Fichte SW I, 466–7). It also avoids what Jacobi calls the absurdity of conditioning the unconditioned, for it construes intellectual intuition of the I’s self-activity as ‘unconditioned and thus absolute’ (Fichte SW I, 462). And it distinguishes intellectual intuition from what Jacobi describes as the cognition of mediated existence: ‘Intellectual intuition is the immediate consciousness that I act and of what I do when I act’ (Fichte SW I, 463). Moreover, whereas Fichte arrives at his immortalist position through a conscious conversion from Spinozism with its nihilistic consequences,17 he may well suspect that Jacobi’s religious concept risks ‘the total destruction of human beings’ if its divine referent is ‘a super-powerful being, mediated through senseless, magical means’. Given these considerations, Fichte’s renunciation of the thing in itself is most charitably read as a genuine rejection of the nihilistic image of nature, specifically, an immortalist refusal to concede the existence of a caput mortuum within a philosophical account that is grounded on the concept of life. This cannot be Fichte’s only immortalist argument, however, for it does not account for what it means to die. Immortalism requires this for a complete account of intelligibility. Unless the I specifically renders death intelligible, the caput mortuum ultimately transcends explanation by the I’s self-activity such that, in our final moment, we ourselves refute idealism. The threat is that our mortality conceals the truth of Spinozism, according to which death is simply a quantitative change in the arrangement of modes of nature and hence not conditioned by the I. Fichte’s idealism consequently requires a second immortalist argument to the conclusion that the I assigns a purpose to the entirety of human life, including its cessation. But what purpose can make sense of death?

3. The I and Nature's Moral Perfection An answer lies in recognizing that intellectual intuition of the I’s self-activity discloses the essence of my existence, but not the purpose of my existence, i.e., it specifies the formal cause, but not the final cause, of human life. This causal distinction reflects a methodological division to which Fichte is committed in Jena and in

 See Fichte’s 1807 Königsberg lectures: ‘as a young man I was much more deeply rooted in the same Spinozism to which young people today, on far weaker grounds than those that I then repudiated, wish me to return’ (GA II/10, 114, translated by Breazeale 2018, 105). Cf. Fichte 1987: ‘The universe is to me no longer that ever-recurring circle, that eternally-repeated play, that monster swallowing itself up, only to bring itself forth again as it was before—it has become transfigured before me, and now bears the one stamp of spiritual life—a constant progress toward higher perfection in a line that runs out into the infinite’ (122). 17

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Berlin.18 In 1796–99’s Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo, he articulates this division by claiming that his system has ‘precisely two parts’, viz., intellectual intuition of the I as ‘the true object of consciousness’ and genetic deduction of the ‘conditions from which consciousness’ is ‘constructed’, i.e., of the categories that ‘make it possible for the I to posit itself and to oppose a not-I to itself’ (Fichte GA IV/2, 8, 179). Intellectual intuition apprehends the I as the living power that grounds intelligibility; genetic deduction subsequently comprehends the conditions that are necessary for fully realizing this power in the world. Putting this methodological division in causal terms, we can say that whereas intuition grasps the form of experience, deduction articulates its function. Fichte expresses this causal distinction in the Second Introduction by drawing a distinction between ‘the I as an intellectual intuition, with which the Wissenschaftslehre commences, and the I as an idea, with which it concludes’. On the one hand, the I as intellectual intuition ‘contains nothing but the form of I-hood’, viz., ‘self-reverting acting’. In apprehending the I qua unconditioned condition, I grasp the formal cause of my life, ruling out the latter’s explanation by the thing in itself. On the other hand, the I as idea represents the ideal of the ‘completely cultivated’ human being, viz., one who ‘has completely succeeded in exhibiting universal reason within itself’ and thus ‘ceased to be an individual, which [one] was only because of the limitations of sensibility’, and who ‘has also succeeded in completely realizing reason outside of itself in the world’, whose ‘mechanical and organic laws’ have been ‘geared completely toward exhibiting the final goal of reason’ (Fichte SW I, 515–6). In comprehending the I qua practical ideal, I articulate the final cause of my life. Fichte notes that the two senses of the I have ‘in common’ that neither is ‘considered to be an individual’. As intuition, the I ‘has not yet been determined as individuality’, since, qua unconditioned condition, it is absolutely self-active and not, like an individual person, relatively self-active. As idea, the I represents that which ‘has vanished as a result of a process of cultivation’ (Fichte SW I, 516), since, qua practical ideal, it is a goal for which, per impossibile, an individual person no longer must strive. Each non-individual sense of the I is thus a pole between which our lived individuality is strung. However, this is a limited commonality, for while the I as intuition is the constitutive ground of experience, the I as idea is the regulative goal of experience. Idealism ‘proceeds’ from the I as intuition, which we realize in the act of positing a first principle. But this intuition ‘contains nothing but the form of the I’, whose categorial content ‘becomes thinkable only when the I thinks of a world’, one whose moral perfection is a practical ideal. This ideal is ‘exhibited only within the practical portion of philosophy, where it is shown to be the ultimate aim of reason’s striving’, but an aim that is ‘only something to which we ought to draw infinitely nearer’ and so ‘will never become anything real’ (Fichte SW I, 516). We must review Fichte’s deduction of the necessity of this aim in order to see how it makes sense of death.

 See Fichte SW I, 87; SW III, 2, 9; SW IV, 14-5; GA II/8, 84–5.

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The deduction in question first appears in the Foundations. In Part I, Fichte discovers by a process of analysis that positing the I yields a contradiction whose solution is to be achieved, not through the deduction of theoretical categories in Part II, but ultimately through the deduction of practical categories in Part III. Both stages of Fichte’s deduction make productive use of this originary contradiction and thus proceed according to a dialectical logic that develops throughout the Jena period.19 In §1 of Part I, Fichte argues that the I is the ultimate ground of positing, i.e., the ‘necessary connection’ between subject and predicate in the identity proposition ‘A=A’, for it is in virtue of the I’s identity and its capacity to unify consciousness that subject and predicate constitute a unity. This argument articulates Fichte’s opening claim that the I is the ‘act which neither appears not can appear among the empirical determinations of consciousness, but instead lies at the basis of all consciousness and alone makes consciousness possible’ (Fichte SW I, 91–2, 94–6). In §2, Fichte argues that the I is ‘the same connection’ between subject and predicate in the opposition proposition ‘~A is not = A’, for, again, it is in virtue of the I’s identity that subject and predicate constitute a unity. Indeed, he says, the form of any proposition whatsoever stands ‘under the highest form, that of formability as such—the form of the unity of consciousness’, i.e., the identity of the I (Fichte SW I, 101–2). Moreover, not only would the terms in a proposition fail to constitute a unity if the I that posited them were not an identity, but also if the I that posited both an identity proposition and an opposition proposition were not an identity, then the latter act of positing ‘would not be an act of positing in opposition’, which it would be only ‘in relation’ to the former act of positing (Fichte SW I, 103), viz., within the unity of consciousness that is the I. Fichte then observes that while ‘the form of ~A is determined purely and simply’ by the I qua condition of ‘formability as such’, ~A’s ‘matter’ is ‘determined by A’, for it ‘is not what A is, and its entire essence consists in this: that it is not what A is’. What ~A is can be known ‘only if I am acquainted with A’. It follows that the I provides the form of what is posited, but not the matter. Such matter brutely opposes the I and, Fichte says, ‘that which is posited in opposition to the I = not-I’ (Fichte SW I, 104). Later he will assert that the not-I’s opposition to the I is a ‘postulated factum’, for it is an opposition that ‘underlies and grounds all derivation and grounding’ yet for which ‘[n]o higher ground can be adduced from which one might derive’ it (Fichte SW I, 253). In §3, Fichte says that the foregoing analysis yields ‘two conclusions stand[ing] in opposition to each other’. On the one hand, ‘[i]nsofar as the not-I is posited, the I is not posited’. This is because the not-I materially determines the I, i.e., the not-I ‘annul[s] the I’. On the other hand, ‘insofar as the not-I is to be posited in the I’, i.e., in the unity of consciousness, ‘the I must also be posited’. This is because the I formally determines the not-I, i.e., the not-I ‘presupposes the identity of the I’ (Fichte SW I, 106). Insofar as the not-I is posited, then, the I is and is not posited.  On what makes Fichte’s deduction genetic, i.e., both genealogical and jurisprudential, see Bruno 2018. On what makes this deduction’s logic post-transcendental, i.e., dialectical, see Neuhouser 2014. For an account of the dialectic in the Vocation, see Martin 2013, 134–40. 19

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The opposition between these conclusions reveals an originary contradiction, and hence a disunity, within consciousness such that the I is and is not an identity or, as Fichte puts it, both ‘I = I’ and ‘I is not = I’ (Fichte SW I, 107). The threat that ‘the identity of consciousness, which is the sole, absolute foundation of our knowledge, is nullified’ by the constituent conclusions in the originary contradiction incurs a ‘task’, viz., to ‘discover some X’ through which these conclusions can be regarded as ‘correct without nullifying the identity of consciousness’. Since the task is to preserve the unity of consciousness and thus the identity of the I, X must be ‘a product of an original action of the I’ (Fichte SW I, 107). Indeed, Fichte says, ‘critical philosophy’ only ‘becomes Wissenschaftslehre’ if it derives from the ‘absolute I’ alone a system of categories in which the opposing ‘features’ of the I and not-I are united and that therefore includes X (Fichte SW I, 115, 119). However, the statement in Part I of the task of discovering X ‘by no means determines how’ the two contradictory conclusions, viz., that the I is and is not posited insofar as the not-I is posited, are to be ‘thought together in a manner that does not annihilate and annul them’ (Fichte SW I, 108). It accordingly falls, in Parts II and III, to the second methodological part of the Wissenschaftslehre, viz., genetic deduction, to derive the categories that ‘make it possible for the I to posit itself and to oppose a not-I to itself’. This deduction will culminate in an X that not only reconciles the contradictory conclusions and thereby preserves the unity of consciousness, but also articulates the final cause of human life. In Part II, a deduction of theoretical categories proves inadequate to the task of discovering X and resolving the contradiction within consciousness. A full presentation of this proof exceeds the scope of this paper. It suffices to note that, after analyzing the co-determination of the I and not-I in terms of the categories of limitation, division, and negation, Fichte observes that ‘the contradiction will not be completely resolved in this way, but only displaced and posited anew’. This is because, with each deduced category, [o]ne inserts between [the I and the not-I] some X, upon which both have an effect and by means of which each therefore has a mediated or indirect effect upon the other. Nevertheless, one quickly discovers that this X must, in turn, also contain some point at which I and not-I come into immediate contact [and thus contradict each other]. In order to prevent this, one avoids this sharp boundary by inserting a new intermediate component = Y. But it soon becomes evident that, just as in the case of X, Y also must contain some point in which the two components posited in opposition to each other come into immediate contact. And things would continue in this manner forever were the knot not loosened but severed by means of an absolute decree of reason, not a decree pronounced by the philosopher himself, but one to which he merely calls attention, namely, that since there is no way in which the not-I can be united with the I, there ought to be no not-I at all. (Fichte SW I, 143–4)

Each theoretical category fails to condition the possibility of the I positing the not-I because it only reformulates their co-determination, viz., as co-limiting, co-­dividing, and co-negating. Each category thereby repeats the originary contradiction, only to

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call for yet another category. We escape this regress only by deducing the ‘absolute decree of reason’, viz., that there ought to be ‘no not-I’ determining the I. Since this deduction cannot be theoretical, we must pursue the ‘infinity of the I’ in the ‘practical part of our science’ (Fichte SW I, 217–8),20 viz., in Part III. In §5 of Part III, Fichte says that since, for the sake of the unity of consciousness, the I must be posited ‘purely and simply by the I itself’, the ‘contradiction’ of a not-I that imposes a ‘check’ on the I’s activity ‘must be eliminated’, viz., by conceiving of the I as the ‘cause of the not-I’ (Fichte SW I, 248–50).21 However, this causality cannot annul the not-I’s opposition to the I, for then the not-I would ‘cease to be not-I’ and would ‘itself become I’. Rather, this causality must consist in the not-I’s ‘conformity’ to the I. Fichte understands conformity in the sense of ‘Kant’s categorical imperative’, according to which everything ‘ought to be posited’ through the ‘absolute being of the I’ (Fichte SW I, 254, 260–60n). The not-I conforms, in this sense, to the I’s demand for ‘a world as it would be were all reality to be posited purely and simply through the I’, i.e., ‘an ideal world’ (Fichte SW I, 269). The causality whereby the not-I conforms to the I is therefore final, for it harnesses the not-I toward the realization of an end, viz., nature’s moral perfection.22 However, since the not-I appears to us most directly in the guise of our natural inclinations, the I is the final cause of the not-I within us and is therefore the final cause of human life. We must morally perfect nature because it is our own actions, swayed as they are by inclination, that must conform to the I. As Fichte says, ‘that everything be in harmony with the I’ is a ‘demand’ specifically of our ‘practical reason’ (Fichte SW I, 263–4). Moreover, since we are never rid of our inclinations, fully conforming to the I is impossible. This is why, in §§6–7, Fichte says that ‘striving’ for nature’s moral perfection merely ‘aims to exercise causality’ on the not-­ I.  Were we actually and fully to ‘exercise causality’ on the not-I, we would ‘completely annihilate’ it and thus would cease to strive, i.e., we would, per impossibile, achieve moral perfection (Fichte SW I, 287).23 As the final cause of our life, then, the I represents an ideal our striving for which always presupposes the not-I

 Cf. the Vocation’s account of the limits of theoretical reason in Crowe 2013, 38–44.  See Fichte SW I, 210–2. 22  This is not Fichte’s ultimate characterization of the contradictory relation between the I and the not-I. In Natural Right, he extends his dialectical reflection on this relation, arguing that while the I always limits the not-I, in a ‘prior moment’ the not-I always limits the I, ‘and so ad infinitum’, a regress that is ‘cancelled only if it is assumed that the subject’s efficacy is synthetically unified with the object in one and same moment’ in a way that ‘leave[s] the subject in full possession of its freedom to be self-determining’. Fichte locates this moment in another’s summons, which regards ‘the subject’s being-determined as its being-determined to be self-determining’. Your summons invites and so assumes, even as it opposes and so limits, the exercise of my efficacy. This resolves the contradictory relation between the I and the not-I, for it reconceives their causal interaction as an ‘undivided event’ of ‘free reciprocal efficacy’ (Fichte SW III, 32–4), thereby recasting the world in social rather than merely sensible terms. 23  Cf. Fichte SW I, 254. 20 21

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and so is endless. As Fichte puts it, while the I ‘strives to fill infinity’, this ‘cannot be posited unless an opposing striving of the not-I is [also] posited’ (Fichte SW I, 288).24 Anticipating the terms of the New Presentation, we can say that although conformity to the practical ideal of nature’s moral perfection is ‘something to which we ought to draw infinitely nearer’, this ideal ‘will never become anything real’ and thus is regulative. After deducing the necessity of striving endlessly to satisfy the I’s demand for nature’s moral perfection, Fichte announces in §8 that ‘the most complete system in the entire human being’ is derived from ‘the subordination’ of ‘all theoretical laws’ to ‘practical laws’ or, ‘since there is indeed but one practical law’, to ‘the same practical law’ (Fichte SW I, 294–5), viz., the moral law. This law is the X that ultimately, albeit regulatively, resolves the originary contradiction between the I and the not-I and thus preserves the unity of consciousness. On the one hand, the I determines the not-I by demanding that they ‘ought to be purely and simply the same’ (Fichte SW I, 260). On the other hand, the not-I determines the I by always subsisting alongside its aspiring cause. Both conclusions can now be granted as ‘correct’, for, insofar as we strive for nature’s moral perfection, the I both is and is not posited. It is posited qua the final cause of human life and is not posited qua the complete actualization of this cause. How does this final cause make sense of death? Consider that a statement is an answer to and thus presupposes a question in virtue of which it counts as correct.25 For Fichte, my actions are a collective statement of my effort to answer a question that the I, i.e., the living power that grounds intelligibility, poses to me: will I morally perfect (my) nature? The I’s moral law puts my actions into question and, since no set of actions can be a definitive response to it, I am always answering for myself. Every action must respond to this demand, including my last, lest the latter be conditioned by something other than the I and thereby refute idealism. The moral law is itself an answer to no question because it presupposes nothing, i.e., nothing external to the I.  This law is consequently the highest question. My whole life is my answer to it. Consequently, my life is a continuous moral activity that must include my final act on pain of the Spinozistic scenario in which my death is a non-­purposive event whose cause is external to the I, i.e., a caput mortuum lying in wait to refute the very idea of the I’s selfactivity. My death must instead be my highest answer to the highest question. By supporting this thought, Fichte’s idealism provides an immortalist account of the meaning of death according to which death is intelligible to the extent that it serves the moral purpose of life.26

 Cf. Fichte SW I, 270.  On the relation between statement and question, see Collingwood 1969, 23–32. 26  Cf. Fichte: ‘the only thing that exists is reason, and individuality is something merely accidental. Reason is the end and personality is the means. [...R]eason alone is eternal, whereas individuality must ceaselessly die off’ (Fichte SW I, 550). 24 25

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4. Life and Death The immortalist arguments in Fichte’s Jena period depict humans as living powers whose freedom is intrinsic and whose existence is purposive to the very last. They also clarify the Vocation’s claim that life is eternal, rational, our true being, and the final cause of nature and of death. It is because the I’s self-activity unconditionally conditions the intelligibility of experience that it is eternal and rational. It is because positing the I as first principle and apprehending myself as an instance of its self-­ activity are the same act that the I constitutes my true being. And it is because the I’s identity is ultimately thinkable only as issuing a demand for nature’s moral perfection that it is the final cause of nature in its entirety, including the event of my death. Fichte’s immortalist position rules out the threat that my mortality conceals the truth of Spinozism in the form of an inexplicable caput mortuum. The moral project of bending nature to the I’s moral law cannot be undermined in my final moment, as if the latter could falsify the reality of living powers. Death must rather be conceived, as Fichte says in the Vocation, as life’s own struggle to ‘present itself ever more purely and more like itself’. As we saw, this struggle consists in our endlessly striving to render the not-I ever more like the I. We authentically pursue this goal only if we recognize that death is nothing and life is all. There is no mistaking Fichte’s rejection of the nihilistic image of nature in the Vocation: The system of freedom satisfies my heart; the opposite system kills and annihilates it. […] I want to love, I want to lose myself in taking an interest[.] […] Only in love is there life; without it there is death and annihilation. […] We do not act because we know, but we know because we are meant to act; practical reason is the root of all reason. […] We cannot renounce [practical] laws without having the world and, with it, ourselves sink into absolute nothingness. (Fichte 1987, 24, 79)

It is nevertheless an open question whether Fichte’s philosophical account of the primacy of life is preferable to Jacobi’s non-philosophy of living powers. Jacobi holds that it is only through ‘faith’ that I grasp the ‘wondrous revelation’ that I have a body, that there are other bodies, and that, in general, ‘without the Thou, the I is impossible’ (Jacobi 1994, 231). Although Fichte arrives at the latter claim via genetic deduction in Natural Right, Jacobi will charge that systematic deductive inference entails nihilism. But perhaps Fichte can escape this charge given his view that embracing the Wissenschaftslehre ultimately depends on ‘faith in oneself’, i.e., on ‘confidence in one’s own self-sufficiency and freedom’ (Fichte GA IV/2, 17). In that case, post-Kantian immortalism offers a plausible renunciation of death’s head.27

 Thanks to Addison Ellis, Gabriel Gottlieb, Rory Phillips, and Owen Ware for helpful comments on this paper. 27

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References Ahlers, Rolf. 2003. Vitalism and System: Jacobi and Fichte on Speculation and Life. Idealistic Studies 33 (1): 83–113. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1996. Everness. In Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. Stephen Tapscott. Texas: University of Texas Press. Breazeale, Daniel. 2018. Fichte’s Spinoza: “Common Standpoint”, “Essential Opposition”, and “Hidden Treasure”. International Yearbook of German Idealism 14: 103–138. Bruno, G.  Anthony. 2014. A Peculiar Fate: The Unity of Human Life in Kant and Heidegger. Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review 53 (4): 715–735. ———. 2016. “As From a State of Death”: Schelling’s Idealism as Mortalism. Comparative and Continental Philosophy 8 (3): 1–14. ———. 2018. Genealogy and Jurisprudence in Fichte’s Genetic Deduction of the Categories. History of Philosophy Quarterly 35 (1): 77–96. ———. 2022. From Being to Acting: Kant and Fichte on Intellectual Intuition. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: 1–22. Collingwood, R.G. 1969. An Essay on Metaphysics. Oxford: Clarendon. Crowe, Benjamin. 2013. Fichte’s Philosophical Bildungsroman. In Fichte’s Vocation of Man: New Interpretive and Critical Essays, ed. Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore. Albany: SUNY Press. Di Giovanni, George. 1989. From Jacobi’s Philosophical Novel to Fichte’s Idealism: Some Comments on the 1798-99 “Atheism Dispute”. Journal of the History of Philosophy 27 (1): 75–100. Fichte, J.G. 1889. The Way Towards the Blessed Life or the Doctrine of Religion in The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Volume II.. Trans. W. Smith. London: Trubner ———. [GA] 1962–2012. J.G.  Fichte: Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. R.  Lauth, H.  Jacobs, and H.  Gliwitzky. Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann-holzboog. ———. [SW] 1965. Sämmtliche Werke. I.H. Fichte. Berlin: de Gruyter. ———. 1987. The Vocation of Man. Trans. Peter Preuss. Indianapolis: Hackett. ———. 1994. Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings. Trans. Daniel Breazeale. Indianapolis: Hackett. ———. 1998. Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) nova Methodo. Trans. Daniel Breazeale. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 2000. Foundations of Natural Right. Trans. Michael Bauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2021. Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre and Related Writings (1794-95). Trans. Daniel Breazeale. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Franks, Paul. 2005. All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1991. The Encyclopedia Logic (with the Zusätze). Trans. T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting, and H.S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett. Jacobi, F.H. 1994. The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill. Trans. George di Giovanni. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Martin, Wayne. 2013. The Dialectic of Judgment and The Vocation of Man. In Fichte’s Vocation of Man: New Interpretive and Critical Essays, ed. Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore. Albany: SUNY Press. Neuhouser, Frederick. 2014. Fichte’s Methodology in the Wissenschaftslehre (1794–95). In The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism, ed. M.C.  Altman. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Pippin, Robert. 2000. Fichte’s Alleged Subjective, Psychological, One-Sided Idealism. In The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, ed. Sally Sedgwick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shinbun Shusei Meiji Hennenshi. 1940. Newspaper Compilation Meiji Edition Annals, Vol. 12. Tokyo: Rinsensha. Zöller, Günter. 2013. “An Other and Better World”: Fichte’s The Vocation of Man as a Theologico-­ Political Treatise. In Fichte’s Vocation of Man: New Interpretive and Critical Essays, ed. Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore. Albany: SUNY Press.

“True Life Is Only in Death.” On Rejecting Life and Nature in Romanticism (Fichte, Novalis, Schlegel) Philipp Weber

In common understanding Romanticism often is described as a cultural epoch that aimed at a harmonious unity of human subjectivity, nature and the universe. The associated topics and stereotypes can easily be cited: From Shaftesbury’s re-­ activation of the ancient conception of the καλοκἀγαθία, to the idea of a retour à la nature attributed to Rousseau, to eventually German Romanticism, where Eichendorff expressed his hope that “the world begins to resound,/If you hit the magic word.” (Neutert 1980, 5)1 Although this view is partly justified, a closer look reveals decisive differences. Nevertheless, the stereotype of the Jena Romantics as enthusiasts yearning for unity remains today both unchallenged and widespread. Hegel’s scathing description of the “consumption of the spirit” (“Schwindsucht des Geistes”) (referring to the unifying philosophies of Spinoza and Novalis) has resounded powerfully in the ears of philosophers to this day (Hegel 196 [my translation]). Certain fields of research, particularly in recent years, have been able to differentiate this image, so that the philosophical attempts within Romanticism have received more attention lately (cf. Arndt 2013; Nasser 2014; Rush 2016; Weatherby 2016). This has come at the cost, however, of misjudging its concern with rupture and disunity: For Romantic natural philosophy is characterized not only by a mediation between consciousness and nature, but even more so by a way of thinking that insists on the indissoluble inner conflicts in conceptualizing ‘the world’. This aspect does not just show in certain aperçus written by candlelight and port wine; on the contrary, it is rooted in their philosophical foundation, i.e. the problematization of the idea of the cosmos. In the classical conception the cosmos stands for the idea of  Cf.: “Schläft ein Lied in allen Dingen, / Die da träumen fort und fort,/Und die Welt hebt an zu singen,/Triffst du nur das Zauberwort.” (Eichendorff 1970, 132). 1

P. Weber (*) University of Bochum, Bochum, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Corti, J.-G. Schülein (eds.), Life, Organisms, and Human Nature, Studies in German Idealism 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_8

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a world that is ordered by mathematical and harmonic laws, revealing thereby a positive order of being. However, the end of the eighteenth century brought a critical change in the field of philosophical cosmology. Thus, the rejection of the idea of the cosmos from within the constitution of subjectivity can be considered as one of the epoch’s central philosophical as well as aesthetical challenges. Romantic theory should therefore not be judged simply as a misguided, clouded view of the world, but rather as an intensification of a certain philosophical controversy—with its own poetic consequences. While the poetic dimension can only be touched upon here, it should be mentioned, that it is nonetheless of equal importance. In the following, we propose the term “acosmism” to characterize this phenomenon, which had specific and immensely disruptive effects on the epoch. Regarding this discussion the term “acosmism”, however, goes back to Salomon Maimon (cf. Elon 2019, 2021); he accused Spinoza of acosmism, because the latter’s philosophy of substance seems capable of grasping the (empirical) multiplicity of being only in an ideal-abstract way (cf. Maimon 1965, 153 f.).2 G.W.F. Hegel agrees with Maimon on this when he reproaches the system of Spinoza with a fundamental acosmism in which “the world is in fact determined as a mere phenomenon to which true reality does not pertain” (Hegel 2010, 99). So, in following the argumentation of Maimon, Hegel is not so much confronting Spinoza with the typical accusation of “atheism”, but rather with a specific wordlessness, since all the finite cosmic entities are deprived of their self-standing existence due to their identification with their totality, i.e. with God. The term then finds a different use in Fichte, who even calls himself an acosmist, as we will see later on. It seems to be no coincidence then that the Romantics are often located right in ‘the middle’ between the poles of Spinoza and Fichte, both of which—as we see now—are associated with acosmism. Even if the term, which is in circulation at the time, was not used emphatically (as it tends to be derogatory), the theme of a specific ‘attitude’ towards the world can certainly be found as an urgent concern. We will now focus on the genesis of this idea of acosmism (starting from Kant’s philosophy) in Fichte, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. Nevertheless, a line can easily be drawn from here up to the later F.W.J. Schelling, Søren Kierkegaard and even up to T.W. Adorno and Samuel Beckett, where acosmism is still of great impact.3 Far from being merely a conceptual theory, acosmism—and this is also our hypothesis—is an existential topic arising with modern subjectivity as its often-neglected reversal. It may further be no coincidence then that Romanticism has been considered so often as one-sided (in its harmonious striving), without consideration of its corresponding and decisively modern aspect.  Fichte ironically shares this view on Spinoza when he defines his philosophy as one of “death” (Fichte 1986, 9 (76) [my transl.]) In recent times attempts have been made to defend Spinoza against this accusation, cf. Melamed 2012, 175–196. 3  To take one example, in Beckett’s Watt the protagonist leaves no doubt about his acosmism: “And the poor old lousy old earth, my earth and my father’s and my mother’s and my father’s father’s and my mother’s mother’s […]. An excrement.” (Beckett 2009, 38) Adorno speaks of Beckett’s figures in this regard  as of “acosmism becoming flesh” (“Fleisch gewordener Akosmismus”), Adorno 1958, 202 [my transl]. 2

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1 The End of the Cosmos and the Immorality of Nature: From Kant to Fichte It is Immanuel Kant who, at the brink of modernity, fundamentally shifts our view of the concept of the world as a whole. However, here we focus not on his Critique of the Power of Judgment, with its claim of the rational and functional unity of the world that presupposes a benevolent and reasonable creator. We will instead focus on the cosmological antinomies in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), which contain the actual scandal of the work. Here Kant shows that the concept of the cosmos cannot be thought in a cohesive way without getting into inevitable antinomies. That is to say, if reason claims knowledge of the world as a whole, this necessarily leads to self-contradictions. Kant is not just referring to classic contradictions of metaphysics; the novelty of his approach consists in his demonstrating the impossibility of any positive connection between the idea of a cosmos and subjectivity. This disjunctive synthesis (to speak with Deleuze) is only established by the emergence of a modern subject that not only glimpses a logical paradox, but rather turns out to be itself the reason for the ontological inconsistency of the world. Of course, this inner tension is not yet fully dealt with in the Critique, since the concept of ‘world’ obviously retains its regulative function though. But nevertheless it is first discussed here and produces an epistemological shift that simultaneously bears within itself an existential one (cf. Weber 2017, 27–46). Kant begins his argumentation by noting the lack of an adequate view of the world: “Now I always have the world-whole only in concept, but by no means (as a whole) in intuition.” (1998, 525 (B 546 f.)) Moreover the conceptual understanding leads inevitably into a “regressus in infinitum.” (Cf. Ibid., 526 (B 547)). Thus the question of whether the world has existed forever or has a temporal beginning is just as impossible to answer as the question of whether the world is spatially limited or unlimited (cf. Ibid., 470–472 (B 455–458)). Since the world can be recognized only incompletely and in excerpts (and thus always only its conditional aspect), no conclusions can be drawn about it as a whole (since this would require a knowledge of the unconditional). The world has, nevertheless, the status of a noumenon, so that its modal meaning is distinctly and exclusively regulative for consciousness. A comprehensive view of the world as a whole, meaning the cosmos, would, however, include the knowledge of the unconditioned, which is after all “always contained in the absolute totality of the series if one represents it in imagination.” (Ibid., 464 (B 444)) Rather within cosmology even necessarily contradictory statements are possible, “namely a wholly natural antithetic, for which one does not need to ponder or to lay artificial snares, but rather into which reason falls of itself and even unavoidably.” (Ibid., 400 (B 433 f.)) Thus “the cosmological concept of the world cannot be fulfilled due to the contradiction that adheres to it,” as Brigitte Falkenburg summarizes it (Falkenburg 2000, 185 [my translation]).4

 Cf. for this also Mittelstaedt and Strohmeyer 1990.

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The rejection of the idea of the cosmos then not only affects the concept of the world but leads back from there to the subject as the initiator of this thought. This is a second, decisive point of the Kantian antinomies, if not even more decisive in its existential impact. The idea of a unified world is staged in the realm of the ‘unity of experience’, for which the Critique of Pure Reason aims to set up and provide the conditions of possibility. Thus, the rejection of the idea of the cosmos is the result of the constitutional achievement of the subject itself. Or in other words: the self-­ reference of modern subjectivity results inevitably in an inconsistency of the traditional concept of the world. The modern subject produces, so to say, an inner split within the positive order of beings and knows itself as the decisive point of this disruption. Slavoj Žižek (1999, 60) highlighted this as the specificity of self-reflective consciousness: “[T]he dimension of subjectivity can be conceived of only as something strictly co-dependent with the epistemological misrecognition of the true positivity of being.” Žižek then proposes the term “acosmism” (ibid., 59) for the complex encompassing these two components: Firstly, the experience of the subject that the totality of the world cannot be known as a whole; secondly, the insight that it is the subject itself that renders this wholeness impossible. Although this does not fully accord with the historic notion of acosmism that we find in Maimon, Fichte and others, the term still proves to be useful to highlight the inner conflict in that philosophical discussion: the inevitable contradiction between subjectivity and any idea of a positive order of being, whereby the subject recognizes itself to be the reason for this inconsistency. Subjectivity is then not revealed in the sense of a humanistic ideal as the marvelous center of the cosmos, but rather as a dismissed being and destroyer of this very idea. This implicit scandal of the first Critique, however, must be understood as the starting point of one of the most influential intellectual crises of the epoch. This applies especially to the Romantic movement, which presents a double-sided development within itself. Although there are thinkers and writers that decisively try to establish a unification of nature and subject (e.g. in F.W.J. Schelling’s early writings, Alexander von Humboldt, Franz von Baader, Hans Christian Ørsted and others), we focus here on their counterpart, those who insist on the impossibility of any unification. Both sides of Romanticism, we should note, reflect this crisis in innovative and historically groundbreaking aesthetic forms. This manifests itself on the one hand as an attempt at totalizing the world anew (i.e. the Cosmos of Alexander von Humboldt) and on the other in ‘shattered‘, fragmental forms that reflect upon a broken cosmos (i.e. the iconic fragments of F. Schlegel and Novalis). But before we take a closer look at the Romantics, it is necessary first to clarify Fichte’s role in this discussion. In his Science of Knowledge (1794) he presents his attempt to solve the aporias of self-consciousness that the Kantian theory of the subject ends up in (Fichte 1982).5 Pure self-consciousness, on Fichte’s proposal, can only be understood as a mental intuition, which in contrast to all other forms of

 Still highly relevant on this is Henrich 1966.

5

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intuition is not a sensual but an explicitly intellectual one (ibid., 38).6 What Fichte tries to dissolve from the Kantian transcendental unity is no less than the core of its conception: The division of mundus sensibilis and mundus intelligibilis is no longer needed; instead, the empirical world appears permeated with self-manifestations of the absolute. This prima facie elegant shortening of the two worlds into one, however, now must deal with the moral contradiction of both, as Hegel first noted and criticized in The Phenomenology of the Spirit. Hence even if the unification of both worlds restores a cosmic order in a certain way, the empirical world is now under unprecedented pressure of moral justification. Without the noumenal world, moral claims must already be fulfilled in the phenomenal world, otherwise they may simply fall flat. For this purpose, nature first has to be formed or ‘educated’—and this has to happen on a literally planetary scale (cf. Fichte 1846, 136 f.). In his work The Vocation of Man Fichte expresses his wish that “[n]ature must gradually be resolved into a condition in which her regular action may be calculated and safely relied upon, and her power bear a fixed and definite relation to that which is destined to govern it,—that of man.” (Ibid., 137) This thought had a great impact on Novalis, as can be seen in his fragmentary novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen: Fichte here makes a short appearance as the hermit Sylvester. Heinrich, the protagonist, asks him: “[W]hen will there be no more terror or pain, want or evil in the universe?” (Novalis 1842, 209) And Sylvester answers: “When there is but one power, the power of conscience; when nature becomes chaste and pure.” (Ibid., 209 f.) This idea of an education of nature then is on the one hand central for Novalis (“[n]ature will become moral. We are her educators.”) (Novalis 2007, 11 (No. 73)) but at the same time is the object of biting critique, as is well known in the case of Hegel: Thus, Fichte is not able to take the standpoint of the absolute (from where freedom and necessity unify), he rather hopes that “the hurricanes […] will become milder, the diseases less painful, the miasma of swamps and jungles will improve.” (Hegel 1977, 181) Fichte’s insistence on a harmonious world order, on the idea of the I as an element of a cosmic wholeness, as “a link in its chain”, thus can only be explained by his wish to overcome the Kantian aporias (Fichte 1846, 174). Subsequently, however, Fichte was also confronted with accusations of atheism. He and Friedrich Karl Forberg are accused of popularizing atheistic thoughts; the first thereby loses his chair at the university of Jena. Fichte defended himself against these accusations with the remark that one should better call him an “acosmist” (Fichte 1846, 269 [my translation]). Acosmism now (to which the discipline of philosophy has so far not paid much attention) has great relevance for the intellectual situation of the time, but above all for the context discussed here.7 Already Fichte’s early work On the Ground of Our Belief in a Divine World-Governance (Über den Grund unseres Glaubens an eine göttliche Weltregierung) (1798), which first prompted the atheism controversy, shows the inevitable ambivalence that his idea of a positive order of being (on the ground of the Kantian transcendental philosophy)

 Cf. Tilliette 1995.  For the term acosmism in a historic perspective, cf. Schütte 1971, col. 128.

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brings with it (cf. Estes 2013, 81). His more mature religious thought then starts with the above-mentioned The Vocation of Man, but an inherent tension can be found here as well. The text is one of his few explicitly popular philosophical writings, published in 1800 immediately after the so-called atheism controversy that led to the dismissal from his chair in Jena (cf. Kühn 2012, 376–401). Fichte himself confesses that this writing was his deepest encounter with religion so far.8 However, The Vocation of Man may also reflect Fichte‘s own inner conflict, which has by no means been overcome by the discovery of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Thus, Fichte continuously wrote new versions of his Wissenschaftslehre, sometimes on an annual basis; in 1804 he even wrote three texts in the same year.9 The text already reflects this inner conflict through its complex arrangement of textual voices, which cannot be discussed here in detail.10 Nevertheless, what the text develops is a model of progressive recognition that evolves from doubt, via knowledge, to faith.11 It can be said that a certain ontological holism is introduced during this process; Fichte postulates “the whole world” (Fichte 1846, 146), in which the I is also embedded: “I am but a link in its chain, and can no more judge of the whole, than a single tone of music can judge of the entire harmony of which it forms a part.” (Ibid., 174) Within this chain the human being is distinguished from any other being by its self-consciousness: “[I]n man, as her highest masterpiece, she [that is nature, P.W.] turns inwards that she may perceive and contemplate herself; in him she, as it were, doubles herself, and, from being mere existence, becomes existence and consciousness in one.” (Ibid., 34) And yet this surface of a harmonious nature threatens to collapse the moment one asks for the morale constitution of it. Then the world is plunged “into absolute annihilation”—but at the same time “we raise ourselves from this abyss, and maintain ourselves above it, solely by our moral activity.” (Ibid., 132) Thus, against the nothingness of the abysmal, silent universe, only human morality has any meaning. The remaining paradox, however, is that this morality should be grounded in a cosmic world order—which yet reveals itself to humanity as this very nothingness. This inner tension is nonetheless never fully resolved in Fichte’s work—what therefore leads to an intense discussion in the Romantic projects.

 Cf. the letter from November 5th, 1799 (GA III/4, 142).  Cf. Widmann 1981.This argument can be found developed in detail in in Breazeale 2013, 3. 10  This is also the reason for some misinterpretations of the text. An exception of this can be found in Steinberg 2013. 11  To this day, research is still in dispute on whether the considerations in The Vocation of Man reflect a fundamental shift in his work, from the early, critical to the late, metaphysical philosophy (Gueroult 1974) or rather a strategic but unfortunate defense against the accusation of atheism (Verweyen 2001) or whether it fits seamlessly and without contradiction into Fichte’s phase at the time of the Nova Methodo (Radrizzani 2000). 8 9

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2 The World in Feeling: Novalis One of the essential aims of early Romantic theory is to synthesize Fichte’s idealistic approach with the substance philosophy of Spinoza (and thereby to dissolve the inner aporias of the two approaches).12 While Fichte’s influence on the Romantics is undisputed, Spinoza’s influence remains underappreciated today.13 Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel are the main protagonists striving for an absolute knowledge of subjectivity, yet they distance themselves from Fichte, who they accuse of a one-­ sided orientation towards the principle of consciousness. Fichte’s stance in favor of freedom (and at the cost of nature) falls short in the Romantics’ view because the realistic approach to nature (or the substance or the world) has the same right as an idealistic approach within a philosophy that aims for a secured objectivity of experience. In his Fichte-Studies Novalis expresses his skepticism: “Has not Fichte too arbitrarily packed everything into the I? With what warrant?” (Novalis 2003, 7) His turn to the Non-I then leads Novalis to a concept of nature that reveals itself to be Spinozistic. It comes at first surprising that the choice falls on Spinoza, as his ontological monism is illegitimate in any transcendental-philosophical approach. The choice of Spinoza as the antithesis to Fichte’s philosophy of the I is, however, not so much due to a fashionable ‘pantheistic Zeitgeist’; the reasons for this rather lie in Spinoza’s philosophical stringency in thinking the world as coherent and inseparable substance.14 In his Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (1677) Spinoza gives a conceptualization of nature as a divine oneness—and he presents this in the form of a Euclidean treatise. No demiurge or creator-God are necessary in Spinoza’s system; instead, all being is one divine potentia—and besides there is nothing. Further, this is arguably not an atheistic worldview. The Spinozistic philosophy rather claims that there is no non-divine: God is grasped as an infinite substance, as “a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.” (Spinoza 1996, 1) The one substance is causa sui and its “essence involves existence.” (Ibid.) The Romantics rely on the monism of the Spinozistic philosophy, which amounts to the one and infinite substance that is free of any inner conflicts (as Spinoza and his supporters claim).15 This is moreover a main reason that the terms natura naturans and natura naturata can be found broadly in the texts of that time, i.e. in Schelling and Goethe.16 Novalis in turn probably knew Spinoza’s

 Besides Novalis and F.  Schlegel, who are discussed in the following, we might also mention Schleiermacher, who explicitly tries to synthesize Kant and Spinoza in his Kurze Darstellung des Spinozistischen Systems. Cf. Schleiermacher 1983, 561–582. 13  Cf. also Förster 2011. 14  Most popular documents for this ‘Zeitgeist’ are the writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. 15  A recent and innovative reading of Spinozism in Novalis can further be found in Biareishyk 2019. 16  Cf. for this Förster 2011. 12

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work through the interpretation in Jacobi’s Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn. However, it is important to clarify that the Jena Romantics do not aim just for a purely harmonizing worldview. On the contrary, early Romanticism is characterized by the radical task of bringing the aporias of that time to reflection, manifesting in the concepts of world, universe or nature. In no other protagonist is this tension so clear as in Novalis: There is only a thin line between his enthusiasm for nature and its rejection. This may be rooted, as one might claim, in his biography (marked by lifelong illnesses); nevertheless, this reference seems unnecessary, as the ambivalence can be extracted from his philosophical writings alone. At the center of Novalis’ theoretical studies stands the conception of the ordo inversus: a “figure of reflection” (Frank and Kurz 1977, 75 [my translation]) that reaches a certain knowledge just by inverting the direction of thoughts. The result of this reversal then should lead to a specific order in which the world and the I appear without any false assumptions (built by common reflection).17 Thus, it is only illusory that reflection considers itself the precondition and the starting point of the I, as the I naturally seems to begin with its own thinking. However, because reflection is necessarily focused on a heterogeneous object and cannot be grounded simply in itself, it needs another being as its epistemological as well as ontological precondition. Novalis calls this being “feeling”, for it is the true, hidden, and non-reflective ground of the I. Feeling is then by no means any kind of empiric emotion (like joy, sadness or others), but rather conceptualized as a constitutive part of the I that is constantly averted from its thinking. In this way, the ordo inversus comes into play, for an inversion of reflection is needed to bring this feeling to insight. Novalis writes: “In consciousness it must appear as if it went from the limited to the unlimited, because consciousness must proceed from itself as limited — and this happens through feeling.” (Novalis 2003, 13 (No. 17)). Reflection then may find its counterpart in feeling, as its non-permutable other; and with this assumption it gains insight in the constitution of the subject in the first place. Without their respective others, however, feeling as well as reflection turn out to be nothing: “Reflection is nothing—if it is something—it is only for itself nothing—So it must thus be something then. Feeling is nothing, if it is something in reflection—/Apart from this reflection, as it were, it is nothing.” (Ibid., 17 (No. 19)) The I—this is the paradoxical conclusion of the ordo inversus—gains insight into its unity only at the price of its irrevocable division: “When the subject thinks, the pure I feels—when the subject feels, the pure I thinks.” (Ibid., 30 (No. 40)) Both principles of the I condition and yet exclude each other at the same time: “The I must be divided in order to be an I.” (Ibid., 25 (No. 32)) Manfred Frank has unfolded this inner relationship in detail and thereby shown the high philosophical importance of

 At the same time and independently of each other, Novalis and Friedrich Hölderlin attempt such an inverse approach, in both cases based on the idea of a speculative pre-reflexive being. For our discussion, however, we will focus solely on the Jena Romantics. 17

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Novalis regarding a theory of the subject. Yet what is missing in Frank’s interpretation is the Spinozistic grounding of Novalis’ thoughts.18 Hence a shift towards Spinoza can be observed within the Fichte-Studies, which in particular affects the concept of feeling: Since feeling is non-reflective it must be understood as a being without relations—even to the I. Following the Spinozistic background of his theory, Novalis’ concept of feeling necessarily transcends its subject and must be conceived instead as one with the substance: “Feeling is nature—Understanding is the person.” (Ibid., 66 (No. 218)) Thus, res cogitans or res extensa appear divergent solely from the finite perspective of the I, they nevertheless have to be understood as attributes of the one substance. Feeling is in this sense assigned to the “real” of the substance that exists transsubjectively: “Every thing, like every ground, is relative. […] Only the whole is real.” (Ibid., 140 (No. 445)) This explains the Romantic declaration of Spinozism as a philosophical realism opposed to the idealistic subject-philosophy of Fichte.19 It is feeling that turns out to be this very “real” or nature itself: “Thus insofar as we are actual we are nature. Everything actual in us belongs to nature.” (Ibid., 42 (No. 73)) In light of this reasoning, feeling offers us no “familiarity with ourselves”, as Frank (1997, 819 [my translation]) argues, but to the contrary, the I loses any claims on subjectivity by relating to feeling. The latter is nature, not more, which in other words means of course it is the one and infinite substance. But this discovery of the unity of “feeling” and “nature” should not be taken as a welcoming and joyful act; since Novalis (2003, 168 (No. 566)) detects an “eternal lack” that separates us from intuition in this unity, as it is inevitably lost for reflection and therefore consciousness. The tragedy of Romanticism is in this sense that it knows of a unity with nature—but has no consciousness of it. The specific ambivalence of Novalis is explained by this tragic paradox: On the one hand, Novalis is aware of an inner connection to substance that is always within reach: “The universe is a complete analogy with the human being in body-soul and spirit. This is abbreviation, that is elongation of the same substance.” (Novalis 1960, 382 [my translation]) On the other hand he knows this unity as impossible, since it can never be brought into reflection. When Novalis says that “[i]t is immaterial [“einerley”] whether I posit the universe within myself, or myself in the universe” (2007, 114 (No. 633)) this unavoidably shows an indifference, if not a disappointment. Hence his increasingly intense focus on the inner self is quite comprehensible, as he seeks for the exact point where the universe is discovered in the I—and at the same time forever lost. In his writings universe and inner self therefore become more and more reflected and intertwined on the basis of this core idea: “Theory of the true heaven— of the interior universe.” (Ibid., 7 (No. 50)). One of Novalis’ most famous phrases describes the departure into the interior therefore as a journey into space: “We dream of traveling through the  Frank himself uses term “Selbstgefühl”, which indicates already a certain Fichtean reading (Frank 1990, 155). 19  Recently, various approaches for a new realism have been presented, some of which follow the Romantic approaches (including Schelling). Cf. Gabriel 2014; Grant 2008. 18

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universe—but is not the universe within ourselves? The depths of our spirit are unknown to us—the mysterious way leads inwards.” (Novalis 1997, 25 (No. 17))20 However, these considerations can prove that Novalis not only seeks inwardness in order to withdraw from the world to the idle beauty of the soul (as has repeatedly been imputed to Romanticism). Instead, he seeks a mode of description for the constitution of the universe from the reciprocal reference of reflection and feeling in the I. Because such a project evidently never reaches its goal, one may still agree with Hegel’s observation about the “sad consciousness”. But in return some of the most radical aesthetic approaches of modernity have emerged from this synthesis of cosmology and of a theory of the subject. While the probably most advanced of these attempts can be found in Schelling’s Ages of the World, the poetic and encyclopedic works of Novalis must be seen as the decisive initial point of this line of tradition.21 The inverse reflection, one can assume, virtually provokes poetry as a writing which carries along some certain ‘surplus’, that is set precisely in correspondence to the ontological alterity of feeling. In the Hymns to the Night (Hymnen an die Nacht) (1800), not only the ordo inversus is presented in a lyrical form of highest condensation (cf. Weber 2017, 169–192). While the first lines seem to be maintained in a typical harmonious, ‘romantic’ manner (“What living person […] doesn’t love […] the all-joyful Light—with its colors, beams, waves; with its gentle presence, the waking day” (Novalis 1998, 11)), one can detect shortly after that a profound acosmism, resulting from the disillusioned desire for unification. The empirical sphere reveals itself then as the bright yet blinding part of an otherwise detested world: “How poor and childish the Light seems now how happy and blessed the Day’s departure.” (Ibid., 13) In addition, a wish for a transgression of the boundaries of life can be detected—with a philosophical radicality never before known in literature. This applies in particular to the last hymn, entitled the “Longing for Death” (ibid., 39). There it says: “Blessed be the endless Night to us, /Blessed the endless sleep.” (Ibid.) Here, death is regarded as a hazardous promise of transcending the finite—as the last remaining alterity, beyond unconscious feeling and restricted reflection: “We have no more to search for here—/The heart is full, the world is empty” (ibid., 41). This rejection of ordinary life, which is always tied to reflection and yet knows the impossibility of a conscious unity, finds a dramatic culmination in the hymns. Such a poetic intensification, that should be kept in mind, is made possible solely by the Spinozist shift towards feeling as the—nevertheless impossible in regard of reflection—principle of unity with nature.

20  This refers as well to François Hemsterhuis, whose idea of a moral side of the universe (“la face morale de l’univers”) had a great impact on Novalis, cf. Hemsterhuis 2015, 234 (D 105). 21  Cf. for Schelling’s attempt the interpretation of Žižek in: Žižek and Schelling 1997.

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3 A Flawed Universe: Schlegel Friedrich Schlegel starts from a slightly different philosophical angle as Novalis, but nevertheless the two writers present a broad spectrum of parallels and inner connections. The article will conclude with Schlegel’s thoughts concerning the infinite, which may bring together some of the traces so far (even though certainly not all).22 For that purpose we will focus on his lecture on transcendental philosophy (“Transcendentalphilosophie”), which he gave in Jena in the winter semester of 1800/1801. The text appears often inaccessible; however, it still offers some of the most important insights in early Romantic philosophy. The Fichtean and Spinozist background already becomes evident in the architectonic of Schlegel’s system: Schlegel dismisses witty aperçus, fragments or any other typical Romantic forms and opts for Spinoza’s ascetic formalism in order to provide a systematic approach more geometrico (in axioms, theses etc.).23 Regarding the inner structure of the chapters, he then follows Fichte’s Grundlagen insofar the Transcendentalphilosophie progresses from a “theory of the world” to a “theory of human nature” (Schlegel 1964, 37, 45 [as the latter is not included in the translation]). In terms of content, Schlegel’s lecture begins with the conditioned and arbitrary: “Thus we begin; we begin with something.” (Schlegel 1997, 240) If one follows Schlegel’s invitation and begins with any object of thought, then asks about its cause in the world and continues this questioning, one necessarily ends in an infinite regress, which Schlegel calls an “infinite chain.” (Ibid., 242) The conditioned evokes the question of its cause, which seemingly never reaches an end. One can thus easily see, Schlegel knows how to immediately get to the point of philosophical aporias. In contrast to Fichte, Schelling and other contemporaries, Schlegel does not posit an abstract absolute at the end of this chain, which would then be set again into the framework of finite thinking: “No”; argues Schlegel (1997, 170), “we must constitute what is opposed to that which we abstract. We must therefore simply posit the infinite.” Unlike his fellow philosophers, he does not want to surrender thinking in the face of the infinite; rather the aim of his program is to insist instead on a conceptual mediation of the positive infinity of substance and the negative infinity of consciousness.24 Schlegel’s philosophical wager consists now in the assumption of a consciousness of the infinite: “Now, if we posit the infinite, however, and thereby sublate what is opposed to it, then something always remains for us, namely that which abstracts  Cf. for a more detailed discussion of the following: Weber 2021.  In addition, the text shows deep similarities with Schelling’s Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie. 24  In Fichte’s philosophy, a related approach can be discerned, which—from a Romantic point of view—shifts the weight too strongly on the I. Cf.: “If the I reflects on itself, and thereby determines itself, then the non-I is infinite and unlimited. If, on the other hand, the I reflects on the non-I in general (on the universe) and thereby determines it, then it is infinite itself.” (Fichte 1997, 246 [my transl.]. 22 23

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or posits. There remains, therefore, besides the infinite, a consciousness of the infinite.” (Ibid., 234)25 The phrase of “consciousness of the infinite” was highly provocative as it confronts head-on the major philosophies of the time: It first of all takes on Fichte (in part also Novalis), according to whom the infinite consists solely in intuition (or in case of Novalis: in feeling)—and thus must remain withdrawn from consciousness. Schlegel to the contrary intends a critical thinking of the infinite through revaluating the predominant conceptions of understanding. This also means a confrontation with Kant‘s approach, where understanding only possesses a separating and analytical function. Thus for Kant, the infinite functions solely as a subject to the realm of reason, where it leads to the mentioned antinomies.26 According to Schlegel’s conceptualization, however, consciousness is not simply abstractly opposed, but it is rather linked to the infinite, has constantly to deal with it—and thus is itself “a phenomenon among the infinite.” (Schlegel 1997, 234 [modified transl.]) It is therefore not only the task of reason to deal with the question of the infinite, but it is even more the fundamental operating medium of consciousness, the understanding, that is capable of doing so. Schlegel emphatically assigns to the understanding the task of reflecting upon the infinite: “The understanding is an infinite consciousness, a conscious infinity, a reflected universe, a universal reflection” (Schlegel 1997, 264). In Spinozistic fashion, “infinity” and “universe” are mostly used synonymously by Schlegel, yet he understands the universe as the frame in which this infinity realizes itself. The condensed mirroring of infinite universe and of infinite consciousness is motivated by his wish to shed light on the cosmological impasse that emerged within the Kantian philosophy. Schlegel believes that Kant’s decisive error lies in surrendering in front of the infinite: “The Antinomies should not have moved Kant to give up the infinite [das Unendliche], but the principle of non-contradiction.” (1962, 410 [my transl.]) Schlegel takes the cosmological antinomies seriously, but unlike Kant, he wishes to adhere to an understanding of the infinite that is not only regulative. This forces him to acknowledge an inner inconsistency in the totality of the world in the first place: “If knowledge is infinite, it can only begin irrationally—based on the deepest fallacy the σϑ [synthetic] method must lead to truth.” (Schlegel 1963, 409 [my transl.]) This bold assumption of Schlegel can be called the true starting point of modern dialectic philosophy: Thinking in its basic terms is constituted by contradiction (as seen above), since it is construed as self-referential negativity. This by no means aims at a paradoxical play of thoughts (as it is often attributed to Romanticism); rather one can find here a first form of post-Kantian dialectical thinking that does not avoid but rather embraces contradiction (cf. Arndt 1992). It may come as no surprise then that Hegel was (most probably) among the listeners of Schlegel’s lecture.

25 26

 Here and in the following, italics correspond to the translation.  Cf. Kant 1998, 460–550 (B 435–596).

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In grounding his theory in the Kantian antinomies, Schlegel requires a fundamentally different concept of the world. He opts for Spinoza’s substance, but with a decisive variation. While for Spinoza the world (or the substance) is necessarily self-contained and perfectly constructed—“by reality and perfection I understand the same thing,” writes Spinoza (1996, 32)—the Romantic conception turns this upside-down. Schlegel draws the daring conclusion—from the cosmological impasse—that creation itself must be understood as unfinished: “This sentence, that the world is still unfinished, is extraordinarily important for everything.” (Schlegel 1964, 42 [my transl.]) This assumption has not much in common with the debates about God’s continuous creation of the world, that can be traced back to Augustine and is found as well in Kant’s early cosmological writing, in which the latter refers to a “successive completion” of the universe (Kant 2011, 333 (A 112)). In Schlegel’s conception, and this must be regarded as still highly scandalous at that time, both God and the universe are to be “thought of as mutable and unfinished (unvollkommen)” (Schlegel 1963, 421 [my transl.]). Schlegel thus thinks the infinite as temporal—and therefore the world or the deity manifest themselves as incomplete. In other words: Not only does the world reveal as God, but both seem also over and beyond that as imperfect. This ontological flaw of the universe, however, gives rise to a new appreciation for the outcome of human activity, which now faces a great task: “If we know, however, that the world is unfinished, then our destiny is to contribute to its completion.” (Schlegel 1964, 42 [my transl.]) The most popular conception of Romantic universal poetry (“Universalpoesie”) must now be seen in this particular light, for it is literally conceived as a progressive completion of the universe, as the latter presents itself to be in need. The well-known Universalpoesie then has to be understood as a continuous poetic principle representing the infinity of the universe. Hence this the concept also refers to the ancient ποιέω, hinting at its manufacturing character— which, regarding the unfinished status of the world, also means that with every work the given reality is transcended and at the same time something still otherworldly is made mundane and, thus, ‘real’ (cf. Arndt and Zovko 2007, xxxix). However, this very zealous expression of the human vocation cannot obscure the deep acosmism that is implied in the understanding of the world as incomplete and imperfect. With this bold step, Schlegel leaves behind the Kantian, Christian and even Spinozist conceptions of the world. The Romantic universe is neither a regulative idea, nor a place of salvation, or of infinite immanence; instead, it holds the possibility of a different alterity: For since the universe is unfinished, it always points to an alterity that is not itself, which is therefore its beyond. If in relation to Spinoza one must speak of an impossibility of transgression of the real, one can discern in Schlegel’s conception the idea of a permanent transgression of this very real. That is not only a deviation from Spinoza but reveals even more the wish for an alterity that cannot fit into a thinking based on the assumption of an infinite, self-­ contained immanence. This acosmism becomes obvious in the last axiom of Schlegel’s theory of the world; since ordinary life never reaches any understanding of the infinite (despise all attempts to venture towards it), it does not qualify as ‘true life’ in the strict sense:

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“Ordinary life,” says Schlegel (1964, 40 [my transl.]) towards the end of his exposition, “is not true life.” The following conclusion, which is drawn from the rejection of ordinary life, then sounds completely unromantic to untrained ears: “True life is only in death.” (Ibid. [my transl.]) It is very noticeable that this characteristic sentence is scarcely noticed, which might be not surprising considering the fact, that it opposes completely the typical stereotypes of Romanticism.27 The rejection of the world is here more than explicit; thus, only in death, in the sacrifice of life, one can find a “return to absolute unity.” (Ibid., 36 [my transl.]) It should be mentioned that Schlegel wrote this vehement denial of both life and a comprehensive knowledge of the world shortly before the death of his close, seriously ill friend Novalis. Hence, the Romantic program indicates a deep desire in which the beyond or afterlife plays a significant role. Schlegel’s later conversion to Catholicism, also the object of fierce polemics (most witty to be found in Heine’s The Romantic School), may to a certain part be explained by this. The concluding axiom of Schlegel’s theory of the world, however, appears inconspicuous at first, simply concluding the preceding considerations, but at the same time it expresses a deeply acosmic attitude. For in life, according to Romantic thinking, the idea of a constitutive unity with the world is impossible. It further reveals an insufficiency of the Spinozistic substance, which holds back something from consciousness that one is constantly yearning for. In this sense, Schlegel and Novalis find themselves in agreement as it concerns the rejection of ordinary life, expressed by the unbending desire for the afterlife: “Death is what arises when life neutralizes itself, when the contraposition is dissolved.” (Schlegel 1964, 36 [my transl.])

4 Conclusion The article presented the cosmological ideas in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as a starting point for the modern discussion of the possibility of the idea of the cosmos. The cosmos in its totality, as Kant demonstrates in the antinomies, cannot be the object of discursive knowledge. Additionally, this impossibility proves to be a necessary contradiction in the subject’s act of self-constitution. The article followed the reactions of three protagonists within this context. First, it was Fichte who attempted to reunite the Kantian ‘doubling’ of the world of noumena and phenomena, but at a high cost: Nature must first of all be educated to be able to satisfy the higher demands of the Absolute, which now manifests itself in the empirical world. This results eventually in an acosmism since the real world becomes a “nothing” without its grounding in morality. Secondly, with Novalis a divergent approach can be identified, an attempt to unify certain aspects of the philosophies of Fichte and Spinoza. In his theory of ordo

27

 This is also reflected in the fact that the quoted text is not contained in any translation to this day.

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inversus, Novalis shows how reflection has been misconceived if it is assumed to be the ground of the I.  Rather, as reflection is defined as related to something, it is necessary to acknowledge (what Novalis calls) “feeling” as its ontological precondition. The Spinozistic background of Novalis’ theory now comes into play in the definition of feeling, which must be understood as transsubjective and, thus, as an aspect of the one substance. Unity with nature may thus prove impossible for discursive reflection, but it is nevertheless assertable in feeling. However, since the I has no consciousness of this, any striving for unity reveals itself as hopeless. Because of that Novalis’ work manifests an inevitable acosmism, particularly in his poetry, where the afterlife has a promising role as a last remaining alterity. Finally, with Schlegel, a third approach to acosmism could be presented, which is similar to that of Novalis but with a different emphasis. Schlegel also attempts a synthesis of certain aspects of the approaches by Fichte and Spinoza, though with a focus on the concept of the infinite. In a Spinozist manner Schlegel identifies the infinite universe with the deity, which in this case, however, reveals itself to be unfinished and incomplete. The infinity of the world is preserved in Schlegel’s approach, even marking the core of his philosophy, but thought in a new, dialectical way. The contradiction within the world is taken seriously as an ontological flaw. Yet the romantic twist consists in understanding this flaw as humanity’s task to complete the world. However, this optimism falls short (attesting a fundamental similarity to Novalis’ approach), as Schlegel confesses that true unity with this world can only be found in death. In life, however, the unity of the I and nature is never consummated. This inner tension is both the condition and the driving force of Romantic thinking. Thus, Romanticism does not aim at a sublation in life, but is instead assigned with the task of enduring the break with the idea of the totality of the world. It understands subjectivity as the very condition of this break.

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———. 2021. Die Philosophie Salomon Maimons zwischen Spinoza und Kant: Akosmismus und Intellektkonzeption. Hamburg: Meiner. Estes, Yolande. 2013. J.  G. Fichte’s Vocation of Man: An Effort to Communicate. In Fichte’s Vocation of Man: New Interpretive and Critical Essays, ed. Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore, 79–102. Albany: State University of New York Press. Falkenburg, Brigitte. 2000. Kants Kosmologie: Die wissenschaftliche Revolution der Naturphilosophie im 18. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt a. M: Klostermann. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. 1846. The Vocation of Man. Trans. William Smith. London: Chapman. ———. 1982. The Science of Knowledge: With the First and Second Introductions. Ed. and Trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1986. In Die Wissenschaftslehre: Zweiter Vortrag im Jahre 1804, ed. Reinhard Lauth and Joachim Widmann. Meiner: Hamburg. ———. 1997. Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre. In Jacobs, ed. G. Wilhelm. Meiner: Hamburg. Förster, Eckart. 2011. Die 25 Jahre der Philosophie: Eine systematische Rekonstruktion. Frankfurt a. M: Klostermann. Frank, Manfred. 1990. Das Problem ‘Zeit’ in der deutschen Romantik: Zeitbewußtsein und Bewußtsein von Zeitlichkeit in der frühromantischen Philosophie und in Tiecks Dichtung. Paderborn: Fink. ———. 1997. ‘Unendliche Annäherung’: Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik. Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp. Frank, Manfred, and Gerhard Kurz. 1977. Ordo inversus. Zu einer Reflexionsfigur bei Novalis, Hölderlin, Kleist und Kafka. In Geist und Zeichen. Festschrift Arthur Henkel, ed. Herbert Anton et al., 75–92. Heidelberg: Winter. Gabriel, Markus, ed. 2014. Der neue Realismus. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt a. M. Grant, Ian Hamilton. 2008. Philosophies of Nature after Schelling. New York: Continuum. Gueroult, Marital. 1974. La destination de l’homme. In Études sur Fichte, 72–96. Paris: Aubier Montaigne. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1977. Faith and Knowledge. Trans. Walter Cerf, and H.S. Harris. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2010. Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hemsterhuis, François. 2015. Lettre sur l’hommme et ses rapports. In Œuvres philosophiques, ed. Jakob von Sluis, 180–317. Leiden: Brill. Henrich, Dieter. 1966. Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht. Frankfurt a. M: Klostermann. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. and Trans. Paul Guyer, and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2011. Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels, oder: Versuch von der Verfassung und dem mechanischen Ursprunge des ganzen Weltgebäudes, nach Newtonischen Grundsätzen abgehandelt. In Werkausgabe. Vol. 1: Vorkritische Schriften bis 1768, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, 219–400. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft: Darmstadt. (1998). Kühn, Manfred. 2012. Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Ein deutscher Philosoph. München: Beck. Maimon, Salomon. 1965. In Gesammelte Werke, ed. Valerio Verra, vol. 1. Hildesheim: Olms. Melamed, Yitzhak Y. 2012. Omnis determinatio est negatio: Determination, Negation, and Self Negation in Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel. In Spinoza and German Idealism, ed. Eckart Förster and Yitzhak Y. Melamed, 175–196. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mittelstaedt, Peter, and Ingeborg Strohmeyer. 1990. Die kosmologischen Antinomien in der Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Kant Studien 81: 145–169. Nasser, Dalia. 2014. The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy, 1795–1804. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Neutert, Natias. 1980. Foolnotes. New York: Smith Gallery Booklet. Novalis. 1842. In Henry of Ofterdingen: A Romance, ed. John Owen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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———. 1960. Das Allgemeine Brouillon (Materialien zur Enzyklopädistik 1798/99). In Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, vol. 3, 207–478. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. ———. 1997. Philosophical Writings. Trans. and Ed. Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2003. Fichte-Studies. Trans. Jane Kneller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007. Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia. Trans. and Ed. David W. Wood. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 1998. Hymns to the Night. Trans. Dick Higgins. New York: McPherson. Radrizzani, Ives. 2000. Die Bestimmung des Menschen: Der Wendepunkt zur Spätphilosophie? Fichte-Studien 17: 19–42. Rush, Fred. 2016. Irony and Idealism: Rereading Schlegel, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1962. Dichtungen. In Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, Vol. 5: Dichtungen [=KFSA 5], ed. Hans Eichner. München: Schöningh. ———. 1963. Philosophische Lehrjahre. In Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, Vol. 18: Philosophische Lehrjahre: 1796–1806; nebst philosophischen Manuskripten aus den Jahren 1796-1828 I [=KFSA 18], ed. Ernst Behler. München: Schöningh. ———. 1964. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. Vol. 12: Philosophische Vorlesungen I (1800–1807) [= KFSA 12]. Ed. Jean-Jacques Anstett, 1–105. München: Schöningh. ———. 1997. Introduction to the Transcendental Philosophy. In Theory as Practice, ed. Jochen-­ Schulte-­Sasse et al., 240–267. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1983. Kurze Darstellung des Spinozistischen Systems. In Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Günter Meckenstock, vol. I/1, 561–582. Berlin: De Gruyter. Schütte, Hans-Walter. 1971. Akosmismus. In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Vol. 1, col. 128. Steinberg, Michael. 2013. Knowledge Teaches Us Nothing. “The Vocation of Man” as Textual Initiation. In Fichte’s Vocation of Man: New Interpretive and Critical Essays, ed. Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore, 79–102. Albany: State University of New York Press. Tilliette, Xavier. 1995. Recherches sur l’intuition intellectuelle, de Kant à Hegel. Paris: Vrin. Verweyen, Hansjürgen. 2001. In der Falle zwischen Jacobi und Hegel: Fichtes Bestimmung des Menschen (1800). Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 48: 381–400. von Eichendorff, Joseph. 1970. In Werke: Nach den Ausgaben letzter Hand unter Hinzuziehung der Erstdrucke, ed. Ansgar Hillach, vol. 1. München: Winkler. Weatherby, Leif. 2016. Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism Between Leibniz and Marx. New York: Fordham University Press. Weber, Philipp. 2017. Kosmos und Subjektivität in der Frühromantik. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink. ———. 2021. Romantic Acosmism: On Friedrich Schlegel’s Theory of an Unfinished World. Germanic Review Literature, Culture, Theory 96 (1): 23–40. Widmann, Joachim. 1981. Das Problem der veränderten Vortragsformen von Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre  – am Beispiel der Texte von 1804/II und 1805. In Der transzendentale Gedanke: Die gegenwärtige Darstellung der Philosophie Fichtes, ed. Klaus Hamacher, 143–152. Hamburg: Meiner. Žižek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj, and F.W.J. von Schelling. 1997. The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World. Trans. Judith Norman. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

Schelling on the Nature of Freedom and the Freedom of Nature: The Role of the Naturphilosophie in the Freiheitsschrift Charlotte Alderwick

In the Freedom essay (Freiheitsschrift) Schelling states that the text extends his previous work, and that his Naturphilosophie is central to the view he wants to outline (Freedom x). Despite this, the text is often seen as constituting a break, in particular with regards to Schelling’s conception of freedom.1 The account in the Naturphilosophie tends to be understood as compatibilism: freedom is compatible with natural causality; human freedom is just one instance of nature’s productivity. The Freiheitsschrift is generally seen as doing something new – outlining a novel conception of human freedom rendering it different in kind to the productivity of the rest of nature, thus giving agents a different status to other natural organisms, in particular with regards to moral responsibility. I want to challenge aspects of this account. While I agree that the Freiheitsschrift brings important shifts in Schelling’s view, I argue that considering this work as a break means overlooking a continuity between Schelling’s conception of freedom here and his account of freedom in the Naturphilosophie.2 On the view that I argue  See, for example, Fischer 2020; Kosch 2006, 2014; White 1983.  Here I am using a narrow conception of what constitutes the Naturphilosophie, only using the Ideas, On The World-Soul, the Outline and the Introduction. I do not want to make any claims about what should or should not be considered as ‘the’ Naturphilosophie (this is a complex interpretive question), and I use this set of texts simply because they provide a good sense of Schelling’s thinking about Naturphilosophie at a particular time prior to the Freiheitsschrift, and are therefore a useful set of works to highlight the trajectory of ideas that I argue takes place. 1  2

Thanks to Lydia Azadpour, Joe Saunders, an anonymous reviewer at the BJHP, Daniele Fulvi, and Phoebe Page for comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and to Sean McGrath for a heated and productive discussion of my position at the 2018 NASS conference. C. Alderwick (*) University of the West of England, Bristol, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Corti, J.-G. Schülein (eds.), Life, Organisms, and Human Nature, Studies in German Idealism 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_9

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for the ontology and conception of freedom from the Naturphilosophie remains central to the Freiheitsschrift; I claim that in the latter it remains the case that human freedom is differentiated from the productivity of other natural organisms only by degree rather than in kind. On my view this is a progression of the same core claims rather than a break. I argue that this progression centers on two things: firstly on Schelling’s insistence that Being involves a radically contingent element; secondly on Schelling’s account of the identity relation, which has implications for his account of the relationship between beings and the whole. I show that the Freiheitsschrift remains within the ontological picture of the Naturphilosophie; however by developing this picture in the ways that I outline the later Schelling is able to solve problems he was unable to solve in his earlier work. Further, I claim that these changes allow him to make sense of the unique moral status of agents while still maintaining that human freedom is simply another species of natural productivity. While the differentiatedness of the principles which allows the choice of evil is unique to humans, this is simply an instance of potentiation of the same principles which are operative at lower levels of nature; to use Schelling’s phrase from the Naturphilosophie, human freedom and the possibility of evil that comes with it is simply natural productivity and individuality ‘raised to a higher power’. I begin by sketching Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, outlining the central features of its ontology and the account of human freedom this entails. I raise two worries about ownership and responsibility which arise here. I then present my account of the Freiheitsschrift, highlighting the centrality of the ontological picture of the Naturphilosophie, and drawing attention to two things: the increased element of contingency in Schelling’s account of being; and the importance of the law of identity. I show that this conception of the identity relation does represent a progression from the way that the earlier Schelling thinks about identity; however this re-­ thinking is made possible by the ontology already present in the Naturphilosophie. Further, I claim that this revised view of the identity relation is what enables Schelling to argue that human freedom is no different in kind to the productivity of natural organisms while still accounting for the special moral status of humans. My view therefore enables us to make sense of how Schelling is able to circumvent the problems that arose for the Naturphilosophie, while also viewing his account of freedom between the two periods as developmental rather than fragmented. To be clear, I am not attempting to give a full account of Schelling’s conception of freedom either in the Naturphilosophie or the Freiheitsschrift – to do either one of those in a piece of this length would be a significant undertaking. What I aim to show is the continuity between the two: that the argument of the latter depends on the ontology of the former. Therefore I argue for a naturalistic reading of the Freiheitsschrift, where human freedom is a particular manifestation of nature’s individuality and productivity. Again, for the sake of clarity, I am not arguing that there is no difference between human freedom and the creative activities of other natural products. My claim is rather that human freedom and other forms of productivity

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within nature are instances of the same process. I argue that we should see the relationship between different forms of natural productivity and human freedom in the same way that the Schelling of the Naturphilosophie argues that we should see the relationship between mechanical, chemical, and organic phenomena. To say that there is no difference between these phenomena would be absurd; the claim is rather that they are all different manifestations of the same process (the process which drives nature as a whole), and that therefore their difference is one of degree rather than kind.

1 The Naturphilosophie The Naturphilosophie arises in part from Schelling’s critiques of mechanism, which entail the need for a new account of nature as dynamic, interconnected, and fundamentally active. These critiques (which focus on mechanistic accounts of matter, causation,  and organisms) lead to an account of nature as dynamic process: for Schelling, nature is dispositional and fundamentally active.3 The active nature of the absolute requires that it express itself in finite products: in a world of beings which attempt to express its fundamental nature. The nature of the absolute as infinitely active necessitates that its nature could only be expressed through a system constituted by continual production: a static universe would be inadequate to express its nature. Thus in order to manifest its infinite creativity, the absolute must continually give rise to a world of entities which are themselves active and dynamic.4 This is why the concept of productivity is central to the Naturphilosophie: productivity is necessary for the actualization of the absolute. The absolute is by nature productive activity, however in order to express this productivity it must self-limit; it must express itself in products in order to manifest its productivity at all. However, because actuality is only possible through determinacy, and therefore limitation, any natural product will necessarily fail to express infinite activity. This finitude is an affront to nature’s infinite productivity, so productive nature continually strives to destroy its finite products in order that it can attempt to create new products that come closer to expressing its nature. This productive process must therefore continue infinitely as the productive drive will never be fully expressed in any particular product, nor in any number of or products. This is why Schelling states that ‘nature

 The claim that nature is an infinite activity which necessarily tends towards manifestation is at the heart of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. See, for example, Outline 5–7 and 13–19. This emphasis on the centrality of activity is another element of Schelling’s ontology which is retained in the Freiheitsschrift. See, for example, Freedom 24 and 60. 4  Schelling makes a similar claim in the Freiheitsschrift when he argues that God can only reveal itself in beings which resemble God, and are therefore ‘self-activating’ (Freedom 11–12). That Schelling considers this claim to apply to nature as a whole rather than just to humans is also clear in the Freiheitsschrift – see, for example, 61 and 81. 3

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contests the individual; it longs for the absolute and continually endeavours to represent it’ (Outline 35).5 This highlights nature’s paradoxical relation to its products: nature needs the individual in order that it can manifest itself at all; but needs to supersede the individual if it is to fully manifest its infinitely productive nature.6 Although natural products necessarily fail to fully express the nature of the whole as infinite productivity, they are nonetheless partially constituted by this kind of activity (although in a limited form, as they are also partly constituted by an original tendency for limitation). Therefore natural products rather than being static are continually active: they are ‘permanent processes’ (Outline 32; cf. AA I,7, 98), determinate aspects of the activity of the whole. This is why Schelling likens natural products to whirlpools – a whirlpool is a determinate object, but one which consists in a continual process which is grounded in the whole to which it belongs: A stream flows in a straight line forward as long as it encounters no resistance. Where there is resistance – a whirlpool forms. Every original product of Nature is such a vortex, every organized being. E.g., the whirlpool is not something immobilized, it is rather something constantly transforming – but reproduced anew at every moment. Thus no product in Nature is fixed, but is reproduced at each instant. (Outline 18n)7

This quotation makes explicit the inherent activity of organisms as well as the extent to which Schelling considers all natural products as modifications of a single whole  – nature. Nature as a whole is activity, and ‘individual being can only be viewed as a determinate form or limitation of the original activity’ (Outline 14):8 particular natural products are determinate aspects of a wider whole. In fact, speaking in terms of particular natural products is misleading, as for Schelling there is really only one product, nature as a whole: ‘all these various products = one product that is inhibited in sundry stages.’ (Outline 6)9 The inherent activity of natural products is not only due to the fact that they are manifestations of a whole which is infinitely active; in addition natural products must engage in continual activity in order to preserve themselves against the tendency of the whole to assimilate finitude. On Schelling’s view all finite existence is a struggle to assert individuality in the face of a whole which strives to destroy it. As outlined above, the activity of the absolute could only be fully expressed in an

 ‘Der Natur ist das Individuelle zuwider, sie verlangt nach dem Absoluten, und ist continuirlich bestrebt, es darzustellen’ (AA I,7, 102). 6  See Outline 13–14 for Schelling’s most succinct summary of productive nature’s paradoxical relationship to its products. 7  “Ein Strom fließt in gerader Linie vorwärts, solange er keinem Widerstand begegnet. Wo Widerstand – Wirbel. Ein solcher Wirbel ist jedes ursprüngliche Naturprodukt, jede Organisation z.B.  Der Wirbel ist nicht etwas Feststehendes, sondern beständig Wandelbares  – aber in jedem Augenblick neu Reproducirtes. Kein Produkt der Natur ist also fixirt, sondern in jedem Augenblick durch die Kraft der ganzen Natur reproducirt” (AA I,7, 276). 8  “so kann auch das einzelne Seyn nur als bestimmte Form oder Einschränkung der ursprünglichen Thätigkeit angesehen werden” (AA I,7, 78). 9  ‘alle diese verschiednen Producte = Einem auf verschiedenen Stuffen gehemmten Product’ (AA I,7, 69). 5

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infinite product, yet all natural products are necessarily finite. Therefore the productive drive in nature strives to subsume individual products in its attempt to better express the infinite nature of the whole. This struggle between nature’s tendency towards universality or wholeness and its (mutually dependent but opposing) tendency for particularity is played out in the struggle of the organism to maintain its existence in the face of nature as whole. This is why Schelling claims that ‘life, where it comes to exist, comes against the will of eternal nature, as it were, by a tearing away from it.’ (Outline 62)10 Organisms, from the moment they emerge from universal nature, are engaged in continual activity and a struggle against nature to maintain their individuality. This constant struggle between nature’s tendencies to universality and particularity has an important implication for the nature of organisms. Their struggle against nature necessitates that in order to maintain their individuality organisms must be inherently active: the organism must use its powers against nature; self-organize; and find creative ways to act on itself and its environment in order to preserve its individuality. (Outline 54) Different organisms do this in different ways: less complex natural products with greater reproductive drive preserve their individuality by producing large numbers of offspring (maintaining individuality at the level of species rather than organism), whereas mammals use their high levels of sensibility to continually react to their environment and thus preserve themselves as individuals. The higher the degree of sensibility an organism has the more active it is able to be with respect to its environment, and the more creative it can be in finding different ways to interact with its surroundings thereby preserving its individuality. This ability for creativity culminates in agents with the emergence of reason, which creates new opportunities for creative engagements with the environment. It is important to note however that, for Schelling in the Naturphilosophie, this capacity does not afford agents a kind of freedom not possessed by natural organisms:11 all natural beings have the ability to act upon and creatively engage with their environment; the emergence of reason in agents simply means they have another tool at their disposal to use in this engagement. That humans are not different in kind from other natural products is made clear by Schelling’s account of the way that the progression of nature’s productive and limiting forces through various stages of interaction leads to the potentiated series of beings which constitute nature. The first12 natural product which arises from the

 ‘Das Leben, wo es zu Stande kommt, kommt gleichsam wider den Willen der äußern Natur …, durch ein Losreißen von ihr, zu Stande’ (AA I,7, 126). 11  See Ideas 172, where Schelling suggests that consciousness in fact leads to an illusory sense of freedom in humans. 12  Though ‘first’ should not necessarily be understood in a temporal sense here  – although the Naturphilosophie can sometimes read like an account of the temporal evolution of nature, Schelling’s claims that the different stages (for example in the construction of matter – see, for example, Outline 189–192) presuppose and enable one another throws doubt on whether what is being described here is a temporal progression. 10

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interplay of nature’s fundamental forces is matter.13 The process through which these forces interact to give rise to matter is then repeated on a higher level: matter and forces combine in different ways to give rise to chemical bodies and chemical systems; these systems and forces combine in different ways to produce more complex bodies; and this process continues through higher and higher degrees of organisation until the organism emerges, at which point the process begins again through the emergence of reproduction, irritability and sensibility. For Schelling, it is in the organism that the two aspects of the absolute are united: in the unity of the organism ‘the being is activity, and activity at the same time being (Ideas 138).14 Thus with the emergence of the organism, the indifference point of the real and ideal in the natural world, the ideal aspect of the absolute emerges as reason and the process of the absolute’s manifestation in nature has come full circle, with the original unity of the absolute reproduced in the agent: [W]ith the perfectly real image of the absolute in the real world, the most perfect organism, the completely ideal image, also immediately enters, as reason [. . .] here, in the real world, the two sides of the absolute act [. . .] show themselves as archetype and ectype of each other, just as they do in the absolute; reason symbolizing itself in the organism, just as the act of cognition does in eternal nature; and the organism is transfigured into absolute reality in reason. (Ideas 51)15

Although the organism represents a point of unity in nature, a reflection of the unity of the absolute, this does not signify an end point as the productive drive in nature necessitates that the process continues in organic life: the formative impulse which leads to the construction of matter gives rise to the reproductive drive in organisms; the drive to transform form into essence gives rise to the phenomenon of irritability; and finally the unity of essence and form gives rise to sensibility. There are a couple of central points I would like to draw attention to here. First, it is clear that the process through which humans, and the reason which they embody in nature, is the same process that gives rise to all natural products. The human is an instance of nature’s infinite process in just the same way that a waterfall, a flower, or a donkey is. Further, although the human agent does represent the whole in a distinct way, this is not because the human is different from other natural products in kind, but only by degree. This is made clear as the human agent arises from the same natural process, and by the fact that this process continues in the agent once she has arisen from productive nature. Second, I would like to draw attention to

 See Ideas 153–181 and Outline 19–28 for Schelling’s critiques of the mechanistic account of matter, and his positive account of the construction of matter from the fundamental forces of nature. 14  ‘…daß das ganze Seyn hier Thätigkeit, die Thätigkeit zugleich Seyn ist’ (AA I,13, 210). 15  ‘mit dem vollkommnen realen Bild des Absoluten in der realen Welt, dem vollkommensten Organismus, unmittelbar auch das vollkommne ideale Bild, obgleich auch dieses wieder nur für die reale Welt, in der Vernunft eintritt, und hier, in der realen Welt, die zwei Seiten des absoluten Erkenntnißakts sich eben so, wie im Absoluten, als Vorbild und Gegenbild von einander zeigen, die Vernunft eben so, wie der absolute Erkenntnißakt in der ewigen Natur, im Organismus sich symbolisierend, der Organismus eben so, wie die Natur in der ewigen Zurücknahme des Endlichen in das Unendliche, in der Vernunft, in die absolute Idealität verklärt’ (AA I,13, 107). 13

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Schelling’s characterisation of the rational agent uniting two elements of nature, but as distinct. I will argue below that we see this same account of the nature of agency return in the Freiheitsschrift; however there Schelling utilises this earlier account to make sense of human freedom as the ability to choose evil.

1.1 Freedom in the Naturphilosophie16 The need for organisms to be continually active is central to the conception of freedom we can read from the Naturphilosophie. The organisation and activity required for an organism to maintain its individuality entails an ability to act in a number of ways in the face of environmental pressures. In the Naturphilosophie, freedom simply is this activity and creative instinct that enables an organism to persist in the face of its environment. The emergence of reason therefore marks an increase in the freedom of agents only to the extent that reason constitutes an additional tool that the agent is able to deploy in the struggle against nature as a whole: reason allows for greater creativity and thus gives rise to forms of interaction with the environment which are unavailable to other organisms. However, the conception of freedom in the Naturphilosophie means that human reason merely entails a more sophisticated version of the freedom that already exists throughout nature, rather than being the precondition for a freedom which only arises in humans. In the Naturphilosophie, freedom comes in degrees and increases as organic products increase in complexity; therefore, the difference between the freedom of humans and the creative activity of organisms is one of degree rather than kind. This conception of freedom thus places human freedom squarely within nature. However, I want to argue that this naturalness of freedom leads to a number of problems. Firstly in terms of the ownership of actions which is taken to be a central feature of genuine agency; and secondly with accounting for the particular moral status of humans necessary for moral responsibility.

1.2 Problems from the Naturphilosophie The worry about ownership is familiar with regards to human freedom: any libertarian must hold that it is the agent herself, rather than other natural causal forces or antecedent conditions, which has control over and therefore ownership of her

 Although Schelling includes no explicit discussion of human freedom in the Naturphilosophie, some good interpretive work has been done reconstructing the  compatibilism implied by the Naturphilosophie (see, for example Kosch 2006, 2014; Fischer 2020; Alderwick 2021) which tends to be accepted in the literature, and which I follow in this paper. 16

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actions.17 If this control cannot be secured then the agent falls out of the picture as an agent as she lacks causal efficacy. Schelling’s example of the whirlpool is useful here. There is a sense in which the whirlpool is an individual: we can pick it out from the body of water of which it is part; and we can provide a set of identity conditions for the whirlpool which are distinct from those for the body of water. However, this is not sufficient to justify the claim that the whirlpool is in control of or has ownership over what it does: that it has any causal efficacy of its own distinct from the body of water. Rather, it seems more accurate to argue that the activities of the whirlpool are caused by the body of water and the natural forces which act within it. If, as the Naturphilosophie claims, agents are a manifestation of interacting natural forces, the case of agents is identical to the case of the whirlpool: although we can pick agents out as distinct objects, and provide identity criteria for them which distinguish them from the system of natural powers as a whole, this is insufficient to justify the claim that the agent herself is in control of these powers. Rather, like the whirlpool, it is more plausible to claim that these powers act through the agent, in the same way that the body of water manifests its activity through the whirlpool. Given this, I argue that the account of freedom entailed by the Naturphilosophie is incapable of securing the agent’s ownership of her actions required for genuine agency. It becomes problematic to refer to her actions at all, because this account provides no means of differentiating between the acts of an agent and the activities of the non-conscious powers which constitute that agent and nature as a whole. The implication for freedom of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is that if there is any freedom in the system it exists not at the level of the agent, but at the level of the whole: ‘Our opinion, then, is just that no individual, unique and disconnected life belongs to the animal, and we simply sacrifice its individual life to the universal life of Nature’ (Outline 138).18 Thus there is no important difference between the control that agents have over their actions and the control that, say, a blade of grass has – both are vehicles for the activity of the universal organism. It should be clear from the preceding discussion why I claim that this entails a worry about moral responsibility. We take it that a central feature of human agency is that we are responsible for our actions in a way that other natural beings are not; however given the conception of freedom entailed by the Naturphilosophie it is  It could be argued that this concern with ownership is external to Schelling: this might be an issue for the contemporary libertarian, but not for the Schelling of the Naturphilosophie. While there is some truth to the claim that Schelling is not concerned with this problem within the Naturphilosophie, I claim that it is one of a set of concerns that lead him to develop his conception of freedom (and his ontology as a whole) in the way that I am outlining. The Schelling of the Freiheitsschrift is developing an account of freedom which allows for genuine evil, which he thinks is only possible if an agent can act against the whole in a meaningful way: i.e. has genuine ownership of her actions. I develop my account of Schelling’s philosophical progression in relation to this problem in detail in Alderwick 2021. 18  It is important to note that I (with Schelling) am not denying the reality of individuals: of course, nature consists in trees, humans, books, and many other individuals. The claim is rather that none of these are agents; they are rather particular manifestations of nature’s agency. 17

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difficult to see how to account for this. On this view the freedom and control which agents possess is no different in kind to the freedom exercised by a blade of grass, or a rabbit, or a dolphin – human freedom is simply a more complex version of this activity. In all these cases, the activity cannot be attributed to the individual: it is best understood as an expression of the whole’s productive activity. Given this, it becomes unintelligible to hold humans responsible in a different way than we do blades of grass, rabbits, or dolphins. These problems arise because of features central to the ontological picture of the Naturphilosophie. I now turn to the Freiheitsschrift to outline the changes which take place there which enable Schelling to deal with these worries.

2 The Naturphilosophie in the Freiheitsschrift Although I argue that in the Freiheitsschrift Schelling makes important changes to certain concepts, I also want to demonstrate a fundamental continuity with the Naturphilosophie. I claim that the ontology of the Freiheitsschrift is an evolution of the ontology of the Naturphilosophie: the basic features of the picture remain the same. Further, I argue that central features of the account of freedom remain the same: here as in the Naturphilosophie human freedom remains a more complex version of the activity which exists in varying degrees throughout nature. On my reading, in the Freiheitsschrift Schelling succeeds in retaining the essential continuity between human freedom and natural productivity while at the same time providing an account of the moral responsibility of humans in a way that was not possible in the Naturphilosophie. However this is not achieved through an entirely new ontology, but rather through an evolution of concepts from the Naturphilosophie. In brief, the changes I argue take place between the Naturphilosophie and the Freiheitsschrift are as follows. The first is Schelling’s account of the identity relation: this relation characterizes every process in Schelling’s ontology, including the relationship between individuals and essences; the infinite and the finite; the whole and its parts; etc. In the Freiheitsschrift this relationship is characterized as necessarily involving independence on both sides; as a reciprocal relationship of mutual dependence and determination. This makes possible the Freiheitsschrift’s account of the possibility of genuine individuality, which enables Schelling to make sense of the existence of individuals with ownership of their actions in a way not possible in the Naturphilosophie. Further, because Schelling’s absolute in the Freiheitsschrift is constituted in part by irrationality and contingency, 19 this entails that the essences of the beings which it grounds similarly contain a greater element of contingency than on the Naturphilosophie’s picture, affording natural products a greater degree of self-determination. Finally, Schelling’s account of the radical indeterminacy of

 I will clarify the nature of this irrational element below. For now, we can broadly understand this as the claim that there are some elements to reality that cannot be rationally derived or specified. 19

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the essence of agents in the Freiheitsschrift entails that, although the relationships between the agent’s essence and the whole, and the agent and her essence, remain the same as for any natural being, agents are uniquely morally responsible. Thus, I argue, with these evolutions of the ontology of the Naturphilosophie the Freiheitsschrift is able to solve the problems of the former while still making sense of human freedom as continuous with, not separate from, the rest of nature.

3 The Freiheitsschrift Schelling’s explicit aim in the Freiheitsschrift is to make sense of the possibility of human freedom. However, as he states from the outset, this will entail a consideration of the system within which humans exist: nature (Freedom 1).20 Schelling is also clear that is Naturphilosophie will be central to the account of human freedom he wants to give: he claims the view he will develop here would not be possible unless based on ‘the fundamental principles of a genuine philosophy of nature’ (Freedom 22).21 The early parts of the essay give an account of the way that the absolute22 manifests itself in the dynamic system of nature; the way that this system of nature produces a variety of natural beings which arise from the interactions of the fundamental tendencies of the whole; until we reach the human agent. In the human, these natural principles are united but as separate: this is what enables the unique ability of humans to choose between the principles, thereby enabling the choice of particularity and selfhood over the whole which constitutes evil. It should already be clear that the ontological story of the nature of the absolute and the progression of beings from the absolute outlined in the Freiheitsschrift is essentially the same as that of the Naturphilosophie. The absolute, in its longing for manifestation,23 divides into two opposing but mutually dependent tendencies; this self-limitation is necessary as it introduces the determinacy required for concrete existence. The interactions of these tendencies then give rise to the potentiated series of beings which constitute nature. Schelling states that the account of this progression of beings from the whole has been given in the Naturphilosophie; therefore he will not repeat it here (Freedom 22). However, one addition to the story in  See also Freedom 14–16 where Schelling argues that conceiving of the relationship between activity, nature, and freedom in the right way is central to his project here. 21  “… den Grundsäzen einer wahren Naturphilosophie” (AA I,17, 128). 22  In the Freiheitsschrift Schelling moves away from the term absolute in favour of the term unground. However, there are reasons to think that these terms refer to the same thing (or rather, non-thing) for Schelling, and therefore for reasons of consistency with my account of the Naturphilosophie above I am continuing to use the term absolute in what follows. 23  In the Freiheitsschrift Schelling uses the language of the whole longing to give birth to itself, whereas in the Outline the same claim is parsed in the language of the necessity for manifestation of infinite productivity. The claim in both cases is the same: the nature of the absolute is that it tends towards actuality. This is a further example of the same ontological structure of the Naturphilosophie being replicated in the Freiheitsschrift. 20

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the Freiheitsschrift is the way that Schelling characterizes nature’s two basic tendencies: while the Naturphilosophie tends to describe them as expansive/contractive or productivity/limitation, here Schelling also characterizes them as rational/ irrational and order/unruliness. The addition of these terms points towards a shift in the way that Schelling thinks of the nature of the whole. Where in his earlier work Schelling’s absolute is fully rational and characterized by necessity, the Freiheitsschrift sees him introduce an element of contingency right at the center of being. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly Schelling seems to have realised that evil, and therefore genuine freedom, is impossible without some element of irrationality in the system as a whole: if the absolute is fully rational then any deviation from this rationality can only be a privation rather than the affirmation or choice of another equally real option.24 Second, Schelling begins to think that there are certain natural phenomena which simply cannot be characterized as following from fully rational principles: there are elements of nature that just are chaotic and unruly (Freedom 40–41). One consequence of this shift is in Schelling’s account of the progression of beings from the absolute: where in the Naturphilosophie finite existence arose by necessity, in the Freiheitsschrift Schelling holds that the existence of the finite is contingent. Rather than arising from the whole by necessity, finite beings must perform an act through which they separate themselves from the whole: all finite existence is thus based on volition rather than necessity. Thus in the Freiheitsschrift all finite life grounds its own existence as finite. Although this claim is not explicitly present in the Naturphilosophie, I argue that it is best understood as an evolution of the claim there that finite existence is characterized by continual activity to preserve individuality – that finite life only exits by a ‘tearing away’ from the whole (Outline 62). Finitude is only possible through activity on the part of the finite – finite individuality depends on continual acts whereby the individual asserts itself as an individual. This is the sense in which the activity of the finite is ground of its existence (as finite): without this activity, it would be subsumed into the whole and therefore cease to be an individual at all. The addition of contingency within the absolute has further implications for the world which follows from it: an element of contingency is also present in the essences through which the absolute expresses itself. This contingency thus creates a ‘gap’ in the determinacy of nature: in the Naturphilosophie there is no such gap; as the nature of the absolute is fully rational, it can only give rise to fully rational (thus completely determinate) essences which are then exemplified by individuals in nature.25 In the Freiheitsschrift, however, essences lack complete rationality and  Schelling criticizes accounts of evil as privation of lack at a number of points in the Freiheitsschrift. See, for example, in his discussion of the different possible relationships of dependence between God and evil (19–21); his critique of Leibniz’s conceptions of evil and finitude (34–35); and his critique of Kant’s account of moral evil (36). 25  It is a little strong to say that in the Naturphilosophie natural products are completely determined by their essences: as outlined above, Schelling holds that individuals are partially constituted by their interactions with their environment. The point rather is that in the Freiheitsschrift these 24

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therefore determinacy because they express a whole which itself is not fully rational or determinate. Thus although beings in the Freiheitsschrift are subject to some determination by their essences, these essences are not fully specified, thereby giving individual beings a greater degree of influence over the particular way that they exemplify their essence. I return to this below in relation to human freedom, but it is worth noting that this entails that all of nature is capable of a greater degree of freedom than on the picture from the Naturphilosophie.26 This conception of the relationship between a being and its essence may seem counter-intuitive: generally we think of forms as straightforwardly exemplifying their essences rather than having some degree of freedom. However, the Freiheitsschrift provides a different way of thinking about this relationship, based on Schelling’s account of the law of identity – a law which he describes as ‘intrinsically creative’ (Freedom 10). I argue that not only does this law characterize the relationship between essences and individuals, it also describes the relationship between beings and the whole in such a way that allows for genuine individuality. In the first few pages of the Freiheitsschrift Schelling draws attention to the law of identity, underlining the importance of a correct understanding of it for making sense of his position here. He explicitly warns against a tendency to interpret the relationship that this law describes in the wrong way: ‘this mistake which indicates complete ignorance as to the nature of the copula, has repeatedly been made with respect to the higher application of the law of identity.'’ (Freedom 7)27 This mistake comes from understanding the proposition A=A (the formal expression of the law of identity) as a reproduction of sameness: for Schelling, the operation of the copula between the two terms necessitates that what is being expressed is a relationship between two distinct things, each with a degree of independence: ‘the proposition, “This body is blue”, does not mean that a body in and of reason of its being a body

essences themselves contain a level of indeterminacy, and there is therefore an extra element to the freedom of natural products in addition to their capacities for creative engagements with their environments. 26  It could be argued that using the term ‘freedom’ to refer to other natural products is problematic, because freedom in Schelling’s sense is only possible for beings that are able to make a genuine choice between good and evil, i.e. humans. I have some sympathy with this way of thinking, and although I have been arguing that there is a strong continuity between human freedom and the freedom possible for other natural products, I do not mean to suggest that there is not an important distinction to be made between the two, which I agree hinges on the possibility for evil. However, while I think it is the case that, for Schelling, a particular kind of freedom (the freedom necessary for genuine moral agency) requires the possibility for evil, I think that there are reasons to believe that he does think that other kinds of freedom exist. That the title of the Freiheitsschrift specifies that its subject is specifically human freedom is just one indication that Schelling believes that it is not the only kind of freedom. 27  ‘so ist doch diese Voraussetzung, welche eine völlige Unwissenheit über das Wesen der Copula anzeigt, in Bezug auf die höhere Anwendung des Identitätsgesetzes zu unserer Zeit beständig gemacht worden’ (AA I,17, 115).

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is also a blue body, but only that the object designated as this body is blue, though not in the same sense.’ (Freedom 7)28 What this demonstrates is that the body and its blueness, although in one sense aspects of the same thing, are better understood as two separate things which are engaged in a particular relationship of instantiation which is more complicated and dynamic than the simple repetition of the predicate blue within that particular body. Put differently, the body expresses blueness in a specific determinate way, which is not necessitated solely by the nature of blueness, but is partly constituted by the activity of that body itself. Thus, for Schelling, understanding the claim A=A (or body=blue) as expressing sameness misses crucial aspects of the nature of identity: firstly, that identity is a relation; secondly, that it therefore must involve two elements with a degree of independence (as a relation is impossible without separate relata); and finally, that this is a relation characterized by the production of novelty. That Schelling understands the identity relation in this way is evidenced by his discussion of the relationship of dependent beings to their grounds which follows his initial remarks on the nature of the law of identity: Every organic individual, insofar as it has come into being, is dependent on another organism with respect to its genesis but not at all with respect to its essential being. It is not incongruous, says Leibniz, that he who is God could at the same time be begotten, or contrariwise; it is no more contradictory than for someone who is son of a man to be a man. On the contrary, it would indeed be contradictory if that which is dependent or consequent were not autonomous. There would be dependence without something being dependent, a result without a resultant, and therefore no true result; the whole conception would vitiate itself. (11)

This highlights the necessity for independence in this relationship: to make sense of something being dependent on something else or expressing something else (in the way that a being expresses an essence or a subject expresses a predicate), it must be the case that there are two distinct entities in order that one could express or depend on the other at all. The distance between the two is what necessitates that this relationship is productive: if the first term merely reproduced itself we would not have a relationship but rather simple persistence; in order to have two things engaging with one another the production of the second must involve a degree of novelty not contained in the first. That this element cannot be contained within the first (because if it was there to begin with then no genuine production has taken place) again necessitates that the second term must be independent and active; it needs to be able to engage in its own creative activity, to take the possibilities provided by the first term and to actualize these in new ways. The relationship of determination which holds is therefore reciprocal: it is not the case that the grounding term fully determines a consequent which is passive, but rather through the production of novelty the consequent also confers some determinacy onto its ground – both sides of the

 ‘… indem z.B. der Satz: dieser Körper ist blau, nicht den Sinn hat, der Körper sey in dem und durch das, worin und wodurch er Körper ist, auch blau, sondern nur den: dasselbe, was dieser Körper ist, sey, obgleich nicht in dem nämlichen Betracht, auch blau’ (AA I,17, 115). 28

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relation are equally active, and through this activity each term plays a role in determining the other.29 The parallels between this account of the identity relation and my outline of the relationship between natural products and their essences in the Naturphilosophie should be becoming clear. In both cases we see a relationship where a consequent capable of creativity arises. However, in the Naturphilosophie this creativity is in relation to a being’s environment: natural products have the capacity for creative engagements with their environments within the parameters specified by their essences. Thus, although these beings have a degree of creativity (in the sense that they are responsible for which of the possibilities circumscribed by their essence is actualized, depending on the way that they interact with their environments), they lack the possibility for genuine novelty (as they simply express the possibilities which their essences already contain). In the Freiheitsschrift, the contingency which Schelling introduces at the heart of his ontology entails that essences themselves are not fully determinate, and therefore are incapable of specifying all of the possibilities available to their forms. This, coupled with Schelling’s account of the identity relation as fundamentally reciprocal, means that essences are made determinate by the creative activities of beings themselves. Therefore, these beings are not simply expressions of the whole, mere exemplifications of already determinate essences, but are capable of producing genuine novelty through their interactions with their environments; and through this production of novelty they confer determinacy on to their essences, and in turn the whole itself. This is the sense in which the beings of the Freiheitsschrift are genuine individuals in a way that is not possible in the Naturphilosophie: where beings in the latter simply express something already contained in the whole, the beings in the Freiheitsschrift are genuine actors who are engaged in the creation of the whole. These beings are therefore able to give full expression to the nature of the whole as infinite productivity in a way that the beings in the Naturphilosophie could not – the manifestation of genuinely infinite creativity cannot consist in the playing out of an already specified outcome, but rather in the production of genuinely new possibilities and ways of acting. Thus in order to manifest its nature as infinite productivity the whole must create beings which are independent of it, and capable of surpassing it, such that these beings can bring about new modes of existence. This may seem paradoxical (that the whole can only manifest itself through beings which surpass it), however this paradox is at the heart of Schelling’s ontology. It is the same paradox which is necessary to drive the productive process of nature: that the ultimate expression of the infinitude of the whole is only possible through beings which can act against the whole; giving rise to the dynamic interactions between the whole and its parts which entail that nature is a living, evolving system.

 For reasons of space this discussion of the reciprocal relationship of determination that is expressed by the law of identity has been far too brief to do the complexity of Schelling’s ideas justice. I provide a much more detailed account in Alderwick 2015. 29

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4 Making Sense of Ownership I hope it is becoming clear from the above the way that Schelling’s account of the law of identity, and the implications this has for the relationship between beings and their essences, is able to provide a solution to the worry about ownership which I argued arises in the Naturphilosophie. In order to combat this worry, two things are needed: genuine individuals not reducible to the whole; and the ability of these individuals to exercise their own causal efficacy in performing actions not specified by their essences. The second criterion is met by the account of the relationship between essences and individuals above, and by the element of indeterminacy that the Freiheitsschrift introduces into the heart of being, and therefore into essences. This indeterminacy entails that essences are not fully specified, and that the particular activities of individual beings are therefore required to make their essences determinate, affording individuals a degree of control over the content of their essences as well as over how they actualize these essences the world. That this reciprocal interaction between the individual being and its essence is possible is ensured by the nature of the law of identity: the relationship that this law describes requires mutual determination as well as independence. Therefore beings in the Freiheitsschrift have more control over their actions in two ways: beings are able to act on their essences and increase their determinacy (meaning these essences are partially specified by the beings themselves); and the indeterminacy of these essences means that beings have more scope to determine their particular actions. The account of the law of identity in the Freiheitsschrift also provides Schelling with a way to make sense of genuine individuality. If any relation of identity is constituted by independence as well as dependence, then the proposition ‘beings are identical with the whole’30 entails that these beings must be genuine individuals rather than reducible to the whole. As Schelling argues, this kind of claim is only coherent if there is a genuine separation between the two terms: any relation requires independent relata. This conception of the identity relation also gives grounds to argue that the independence of beings is necessary for the existence of the whole: as outlined above, the two terms in the identity relation require one another. Thus the account builds on Schelling’s claim in the Naturphilosophie that the whole can only manifest itself as actual in the world of nature: the whole can only exist if it produces genuinely independent beings, and is therefore dependent on the finite in the same way that the finite depends on the whole. This is developed in the Freiheitsschrift into the claim about the volition of the finite: the manifestation of the whole depends on the activities of finite individuals which are able to manifest its infinitude by acting in novel and creative ways. Thus the Freiheitsschrift advances an account which can make sense of genuine individuality and ownership of finite beings over their  C.f. Freedom 11 on the claim that all things are immanent in God – I am paraphrasing this proposition above as the language of beings and the whole is more consistent with the rest of my discussions here. 30

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actions; and therefore provides an ontology which sees an increase in the freedom of individuals relative to the whole.

5 Making Sense of Responsibility I claimed that the ontology of the Freiheitsschrift would give us a way not only to account for human freedom as continuous with other natural products (as I have shown above), but that it would also provide a way to make sense of the moral responsibility of human agents. The above secures the first but not the second: this greater possibility for genuine individuality and ownership of acts does apply to agents in the same way that it applies to all other natural products; however the same worry arises as for the Naturphilosophie – if human freedom is simply on a gradient with other kinds of freedom in nature, what justification do we have for attributing a different kind of responsibility to humans than we do to other natural products? The solution to this worry in the Freiheitsschrift lies in Schelling’s account of the essence of human agents. The ontological relationship which humans have to their essences is exactly the same as the relationship which any other natural being has to theirs; the difference lies in the level of indeterminacy which attaches to the essence of agents.31 This indeterminacy gives rise to Schelling’s claim that the essence of a human contains only the fact that she must choose (Freedom 50). An agent’s essence contains the two principles (productivity/limitation, necessity/contingency, etc.) as differentiated, and only the choice of the agent is sufficient to specify which of these principles will ground her character. This entails a radical indeterminacy of human essence in contrast to the partial indeterminacy of the essences of other natural beings. While other natural beings have essences which contain some determinacy and therefore these beings are only able to influence certain aspects of their essences, human essences only specify that they are the kind of beings capable of choice: the

 This is a further central element of Schelling’s conception of human freedom which I have not had the space to focus on here: the full (i.e. self-conscious) separation of the principles of ground and existence in agents which allows them to be able to make the conscious choice of which of these principles to take as a guiding ideal for action. This separation is a fundamental part of the human ability for evil. However, again this does not indicate a difference in kind between human freedom and other natural products  – in all natural products these principles exist in varying degrees of relation and separation – again what we have here is a gradient, not a break: “It can readily be seen in the tension of longing necessary to bring things to completely to birth the innermost nexus of forces can only be released in a graded evolution, and at every stage in the division of forces there must be developed out of nature a new being whose soul must be all the more perfect the more differentiatedly it contains what was left undifferentiated in the others. It is the task of the complete philosophy of nature to show how each successive process more closely approaches the essence of nature, until in the highest division of forces the innermost center is disclosed. For our present purposes only the following is essential. Every being which has arisen in nature in the manner indicated contains a double principle which, however, is at bottom one and the same regarded from two separate aspects” (Freedom 28; cf. AA I,17, 133). 31

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determinate content of these essences is specified by individual choice rather than by the nature of the whole. This gives humans a unique kind of responsibility: while all natural beings are able to make particular choices within the world, only agents are able to make a choice at the level of principles or ideals; to choose the kind of agent that they would like to be. While other natural products can choose some of the ways they make their essences determinate, only agents are able to fully determine the nature of their essences. This choice grounds the possibility for evil, which arises when agents prioritize their individual will over the will of the whole. However, even when an agent chooses the will of the whole as her ideal, she is equally responsible as an agent who chooses evil, because both make an active and positive choice. Only humans are morally responsible in the full sense because only humans are responsible for the entire content of their essences. However, this difference in the level of responsibility does not reflect a difference in kind to the freedom which humans and other natural products have, or a difference in the basic ontological status of these beings. Indeed, in the Freiheitsschrift Schelling even compares the process of the human ability for evil to the growth of a plant into an individual: ‘ Just as in man there comes to light, when in the dark longing to create something, thoughts separate out of the chaotic confusion of thinking in which all are connected but each prevents the other from coming forth – so the unity appears which contains all within it and which had lain hidden in the depths. Or it is as in the case of the plant which escapes the dark fetters of gravity only as it unfolds and spreads its powers, developing its hidden unity as its substance becomes more differentiated. (Freedom 26)32

As I have shown, the relationship between agents and their essences is the same as the relationship between any natural being and its essence; and the indeterminacy of the human essence is simply a greater degree of the indeterminacy which exists in varying degrees throughout nature. The principles which are differentiated in agents are the same principles which exist throughout the natural world, although they appear as separated yet united in agents. Therefore, although there is a difference in terms of responsibility (only agents are morally responsible in the full sense as only agents are capable of deciding which principle will structure their essence), this does not reflect an ontological difference in kind. Rather, when we get to the top end of the gradient of natural beings, the indeterminacy of essence and separability of principles give rise to this particular  form of moral responsibility. This reflects Schelling’s comments about the progression and differentiation of natural forms in the Naturphilosophie; progression is always gradual, however this does not prevent genuinely distinct elements from emerging:  “[S]o wir im Menschen in die dunkle Sehnsucht, etwas zu schaffen, dadurch Licht tritt, daß in dem chaotischen Gemenge der Gedanken, die alle zusammenhängen, jeder aber den anderen hindert hervorzutreten, die Gedanken sich scheiden und nun die im Grunde verborgen liegende, alle unter sich befassende, Einheit sich erhebt; oder wie in der Pflanze nur im Verhältniß der Entfaltung und Ausbreitung der Kräfte das dunkle Band der Schwere sich löst und die im geschiedenen Stoff verborgne Einheit entwickelt wird” (AA I,17, 132). 32

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C. Alderwick Nothing which comes to be in nature comes to be in a leap; all becoming occurs in a continuous sequence. But it by no means follows from this that everything which exists is for that reason continuously connected – that there should also be no leap between what exists. From everything that is, therefore, nothing has become without steady progression, a steady transition from one state to another. But now, since it is, it stands between its own boundaries as a thing of a particular kind, which distinguishes itself from others in sharp determinations. (Ideas 133–134)33

Thus although the Freiheitsschrift is able to build on the Naturphilosophie and deal with some of the problems that arise in the latter, this constitutes a progression of the same basic ontology rather than a radical break. Though Schelling does make some changes to his conception of the indeterminacy of the whole, and the identity relation, I have shown that these are changes which build on rather than departing from his earlier Naturphilosophie.

References Alderwick, C. 2015. Atemporal Essence and Existential Freedom in Schelling. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (1): 115–137. ———. 2021. Schelling’s Ontology of Powers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fischer, N. 2020. Freedom as Productivity in Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature. In Schelling’s Philosophy: Freedom, Nature and Systematicity, ed. G.A.  Bruno, 53–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kosch, M. 2006. Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2014. Idealism and Freedom in Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift. In Interpreting Schelling: Critical Essays, ed. L. Ostaric, 145–159. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schelling, F.W.J. [AA] 1976–. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. ———. [Ideas] 1995. Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature.. Trans. E.  E. Harris, and P.  Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. [Freedom] 2002. Philosophical Investigations into the Nature of Human Freedom.. Trans. J. Gutman. Shrewsbury: Living Time Press. ———. [Outline] 2004a. First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature.. Trans. K. R. Peterson. New York: SUNY Press. ———. 2004b. Introduction to the Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, or, On the Concept of a Speculative Physics and the Internal Organization of this Science. In First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature. Trans. K. R. Peterson. New York: SUNY Press. White, A. 1983. Schelling. New Haven: Yale University Press.

 ‘Alles, was in der Natur wird, wird nicht durch einen Sprung, alles Werden geschieht in einer stetigen Folge. Aber daß deswegen alles, was ist, kein Sprung seyn sollte, folgt daraus noch lange nicht. Vor allem dem also, was ist, ist nichts geworden ohne stetiges Fortschreiten, stetigen Uebergang von einem Zustand zum anderen. Aber jetzt, da es ist, steht es zwischen seinen eignen Gränzen, als ein Ding besonderer Art, das sich von andern durch scharfe Bestimmungen unterscheidet’ (AA I,13, 205).

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The State as Second Nature in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism Kyla Bruff

In this essay, I reconstruct Schelling’s account of the state as second nature, and thereby the objective ground of freedom, in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800).  I first show that Schelling’s interpretation of the legal state as a ‘second nature’ indicates that ‘first nature’ has a key role to play in how we interpret the relationship of the state to individual freedom. The nature-freedom relationship in the System finds an analogy in Schelling’s presentation of the relation of ground to existence in the 1809 Freedom essay. However, in the System, unlike in the Freedom essay, Schelling sees the state as a vehicle for the resolution of a teleology of history in a world federation of states. Therefore, despite some resonances with the Freedom essay, Stuttgart Seminars and the Presentation of the Purely Rational Philosophy (the latter two texts in which Schelling revises his conception of the state), Schelling’s teleological view of providence at the end of history in the System poses a problem regarding the continuity of his political works. This teleological thesis shows that despite his crucial observations about the role of the state in politics in 1800, the System remains a text in political idealism, in which the state contributes to bringing about an objective world order. This preference for the objective over the subjective in describing the development of politics and history will only be exacerbated in Schelling’s subsequent Identity Philosophy. However, Schelling breaks with this political idealism in 1810 and after, as he comes to see such a purely idealist view of politics as deterministic. Therefore, despite the importance of the concept of the state as second nature for all of Schelling’s political philosophy, the first, detailed iteration of which appears in the System, the System does not have the definitive word on, and is not even fully representative of, Schelling’s political philosophy.

K. Bruff (*) Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Corti, J.-G. Schülein (eds.), Life, Organisms, and Human Nature, Studies in German Idealism 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_10

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1 Nature and Freedom in the Early Schelling To fully understand the role of the state as a second nature in Schelling’s political philosophy, in this section I examine the primacy of freedom for Schelling and the relation of freedom to nature (or to ‘first nature’). Although in his early works, Schelling has not yet reached the existential definition of freedom presented in the Freedom essay, namely as a capacity to choose between good and evil, freedom is nevertheless situated at the origin of the unfolding of the world. Under the influence of Fichte, Schelling first defines freedom as a practical willing, which is absolutely ‘indemonstrable, authenticated only through itself’ (Schelling 1978, 33/SW III, 76).1 Freedom in this sense precedes everything, including being itself. However, as discussed below, the unrestricted character of the general notion of unlimited free willing, and the appearance of freedom for a finite being in time, are two different descriptions of freedom advanced by Schelling in the System. This difference, as I will show, has implications for his political philosophy. Let us begin with Schelling’s premise that all individuated or conceptual activity has its origin in unbridled free activity. Influenced simultaneously by Fichte and Spinoza, Schelling presents free, productive activity as prior to the limiting activity necessary to give rise to individuated being: ‘That which in all other systems threatens the downfall of freedom is here derived from freedom itself. – Being, in our system is merely freedom suspended’ (Schelling 1978, 33/SW, 376). By radically situating freedom at the ground of his system, Schelling seeks to preserve the conditions of philosophical knowledge. Knowledge, and a priori knowledge in particular, cannot be contingent upon or subservient to speculative, singular presentations or theories of being. Being, which is always already individuated and distinguished from non-being, is contingent upon a basic notion of free activity. Schelling therefore situates the fact of freedom as prior to and more fundamental than being itself. Freedom accordingly grounds not only knowledge, but also nature itself. To speak in Spinozist terms, freedom and the unconscious productivity of nature together logically precede nature’s products. The freedom characteristic of pure unconscious willing, i.e., the locus of free productive activity, is at the heart of Schelling’s concept of nature. Natura naturans, the blind willing or unconscious production characteristic of nature which logically precedes self-consciousness, gives rise to nature’s products  – conscious nature, or natura naturata. Schelling simply states, ‘Non conscious activity … has brought forth nature’ (Ibid., 12/349). However, both of these levels of nature (natura naturans and natura naturata) are unified in the concept of ‘first nature.’ In Schelling’s words, nature’s unconscious activity is identified with ‘the conscious activity expressed in willing’ (Ibid., 12/349). Nature therefore includes at the same time the objective condition of self-­ conscious life, and self-conscious life itself (including all of nature’s products).

 Following the English, in-text citations of Schelling’s work, I have included the corresponding reference to the German edition of Schelling’s collected works (Schelling 1856–1861). 1

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Analogous to nature’s function as an unconscious ground for its own products, the state is the objective ground of our conscious life. But it is not as if we exist independently to it. Rather, we are held within it, and our relations and experience are partially shaped by it. Furthermore, once first nature (nature itself) and second nature (the state) are considered specifically in time, their laws have a limiting, conditioning effect on the development of life. Schelling accordingly draws a parallel between the function of the laws of sensible nature, in which a cause is necessarily followed by an effect, and second nature, in which an attack on one’s freedom is necessarily followed by an immediate counter-act (‘der augenblickliche Widerspruch’) to the self-interested drive (Ibid., 195/582). Therefore, the law of the state, which upholds human freedom, must immediately react to any attack on the freedom of any one of its citizens with the same automatism and immediacy as the laws of nature. Schelling ultimately settles on a minimal state that operates according to necessity and that is unconsciously present as an extension of nature. He accordingly describes its function as that of an automatic, blind machine: the ‘legal order,’ he writes, is a ‘natural order, which freedom has no more power over than it has over sensible nature … it has to be viewed as a machine primed in advance for certain possibilities, and operating automatically, i.e., entirely blindly, as soon as these cases are presented’ (Ibid., 196/583–584). Moreover, Schelling reiterates that despite our role qua human beings in establishing the state, the state’s laws should operate like the laws of visible nature: ‘Although this machine is constructed and primed by the hands of men, it is obliged, once the hand of the artificer is withdrawn, to operate like visible nature and according to its laws, and independently, as though it existed on its own’ (Ibid., 196/583–584). This comparison reinforces the point that Schelling explicitly makes in 1810 and after, namely, that the state should be minimally present in our everyday lives. If it is more substantially present, then the will of those in power could unjustifiably infringe upon individual freedom. At this early stage in his career, Schelling explores this question in terms of the legal system as the necessary condition for the exercise of freedom. He interrogates the justification of the creation of laws which could provide the maximum scope possible for the exercise of human freedom. These laws together can be interpreted in view of his later work as a state’s constitution. The legal order, for Schelling, is the core of the state. Schelling explicitly denounces any state run by the despotic will of a judge or dictator. There are no individual state saviors who can look ‘into the heart of things’ and individually rule according to own their will or judgment, which is by nature fallible (Ibid., 196/583–584). Such interference ‘with the natural course of the legal process, presents the most unworthy and revolting spectacle that can exist for anyone imbued with feeling for the holiness of the law’ (Ibid., 196/584). Schelling is thus averse to direct meddling of individual wills in state law. We can venture to speculate that Schelling would see the development of the law over the course of history as a cautious, collective process, with checks and balances and limitations to the scope of modifications that can be made at a given time. He does not explicitly state or even suggest where the limits of the jurisdiction of the law may lie. However,

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because the law is grounded in equality through the premise of the guarantee of freedom for all, the rule of law could be considered as the regulative principle for future laws to come. In relation to the proximity of first nature and second nature, it is helpful to remember Schelling’s claim in his earlier Naturphilosophie that there is no lifeless, dead matter that can exist independently of freedom or spirit. Nature is always already imbued with spirit, and spirit is always present in nature. As the famous quote from Schelling’s Naturphilosophie goes, ‘Nature should be Spirit made visible, Spirit the invisible Nature’ (Schelling 1988, 42/SW II, 56).2 ‘Spirit in us’ is therefore identified with ‘Nature outside us’ (Ibid.), and our own thinking is a part of nature. Analogously, the norms and thought of human beings are always both shaped by and shaping the state. We animate the structures of political life, but we also need these structures. Continuing on from his early nature-philosophical insights, in the System, Schelling aims to once again overcome the freedom/necessity, spirit/nature, subjectivity/objectivity dualisms in the account of the development of self-consciousness as well as in political history. Freedom is everywhere in nature. Therefore, on Schelling’s account, the whole of first nature, including its products, appears ‘as a work both consciously engendered and yet simultaneously a product of the blindest mechanism; nature is purposive, without being purposively explicable’ (Schelling 1978, 12/SW III, 348–349). The necessity of the law and the unlimited activity of freedom are equally crucial to the development of self-­ consciousness, history and politics. However, the objective aspect of first and second nature sets real limits on the development of subjective consciousness. Therefore, while ‘ideal activity,’ Schelling claims, seems ‘illimitable,’ theoretical philosophy (which includes the law) shows that this ‘can in fact be limited’ (Ibid., 50/399). Analogously to how freedom is at the basis of the development of consciousness, spontaneous activity is at the basis of nature. It grounds and produces all of conscious nature. As a result, the exercise of human freedom by conscious beings, including, for example, the freedom of human thought and action, is first made possible by the unrestricted, unconscious activity of nature. In this sense, we could say that nature’s unconscious activity is the objective condition of all free action intentionally exercised by human beings in an intersubjective setting. Schelling identifies unconscious freedom (out of which consciousness emerges) and the freedom of individual wills (Ibid., 11/348) via the concept of a ‘predetermined harmony’ (Ibid), or ‘preestablished harmony’ (Ibid., 129/500). Through this concept, the unconscious production of nature is identified with conscious, subjective activity, or of practical and theoretical philosophy (Ibid., 12/348). In predetermined harmony, the ‘activity, whereby the objective world is produced, is at bottom identical with that which expresses itself in volition, and vice versa’ (Ibid., 11–12/348). This predetermined harmony is a postulate of which we cannot have direct knowledge. It allows there to be a ‘fundamental identity’ of the primordial

 Translation here slightly modified.

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will with conscious, free activity. In other words, as a result, the concept of freedom at play in the creation of being is identical with the freedom we exercise in our own practical activity. Freedom pervades all aspects of life (Ibid., 12/349). It should thus not only determine the purpose of the state, but guide its development in history. This primordial function of unconscious activity, together with the creative capacity of the will, is retained by Schelling in the 1809 Freedom essay. The similarities between the System and the Freedom essay help us to identify the political relevance of Schelling’s concept of the state in 1800 for Schelling’s post-1809 work. However, the differences between the two texts equally draw our attention to Schelling’s radical redefinition of individual human freedom in 1809 and its implications for his political philosophy. In the Freedom essay, Schelling redefines individual human freedom in terms of the possibilities of the individual will, which is always presented with a real choice between good and evil. I will now draw a brief comparison between the treatments of the structure of nature presented in the System and the Freedom essay to show the similar position this concept holds in both texts vis-à-vis the realization of free, conscious activity. However, I will also differentiate Schelling’s concept of freedom in both texts to indicate some of the limits of the System for Schelling’s political philosophy. Throughout this comparison it should be kept in mind that, similarly to how the objective aspects of nature precede and condition the emergence of self-­ consciousness, the objectivity of the state precedes political life. The state, as an objective second nature, grounds the subjective exercise of freedom by human beings in civil society (who, without the state, on Schelling’s account, could never be trusted to uphold the principle of the equality of freedom of all). Nevertheless, both first and second nature begin in the unconscious freedom of the blind will for Schelling, which links their origin to their end point (i.e., the subjective exercise of freedom by self-conscious beings who think and act). If we look at the Unground-ground-existence triad of the Freedom essay, the early Schelling’s postulation of the unbridled, blind, unconscious activity at the core of the System can be compared to the Unground. Firstly, the Unground is the locus of the absolutely originary, unconscious willing that gives birth to creation. In the System, this could be considered as the ‘original act of freedom’ of pure willing or self-determining. The will holds primacy in the determination of consciousness. Schelling writes, ‘the self-determining of the intelligence is called willing’ (Ibid., 156/SW III, 533). It is how the self (not just the individual self, but the self considered as absolute) determines itself and eventually recognizes its own activity. It is only through willing ‘that the intelligence becomes an object to itself’ (Ibid., 156/534). Secondly, nature and the state, the latter of which is explicitly described as a second nature in the System, play an analogous role to the ground in the Freedom essay. Although the two concepts are united in the System, nature is the ground of spirit, just as the state is the ground of civil society. As previously stated, this foundational position of the state and its laws as the ground of free activity does not change in Schelling’s future political philosophy. He remains committed to the codification of the natural right of all human beings to freedom in the laws of the

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state (in second nature). In the state, we therefore see the naturalization of the legal system and the protection of human freedom embodied into the law of the state. Once this ‘second,’ objective, temporal world has been created, intelligence can produce ‘consciously, and so here there begins an entirely new world, which from this point on will extend ad infinitum’ (Ibid., 159/537). Like nature, the state is the condition of conscious, intersubjective activity. Not unlike the first unconscious act of the Ungrund in the Freedom essay, which resulted in the split of the ground of being from being’s existence, the first act in the System  – which resulted in a ‘world brought about through unconscious production’  – ‘now falls, as it were, behind consciousness, together with its origin,’ as we – conscious subjects – navigate this second, ‘practical’ world, in which the ideal and the real meet (Ibid., 159/537). Schelling draws this analogy between the two acts which spawn the development of first and second nature and the development of the state himself in the System: ‘Just as, from the original act of self-consciousness, a whole nature developed, so, from the second act, that of free self-determination, a second nature will come forth, whose derivation is the entire topic of the enquiry that follows [the practical philosophy]’ (Ibid., 159/537). This second act is the same act which begins ‘consciousness in time’ and is explicable only through an ‘immediate self-determining’ (Ibid., 155/SW III, 532). It is an absolute act in which ‘the intelligence raises itself absolutely above the objective’ (Ibid., 155/532) and should be distinguished from the original, unconscious act of self-consciousness noted above (Ibid., 159/537). In contrast to the original, first act, this second act ‘marks … the empirical starting point of consciousness’ and thus ‘necessarily occurs at a particular phase of consciousness’ (Ibid., 159/537). Proceeding from the second act, the state emerges as objective condition which grounds subjective human life. This ground is always actively present, but cannot and should not usurp the free, moral activity of human beings. Human beings should, on Schelling’s account, be directly responsible to others without the direct mediation of the state. Finally, the self-determination of human beings in a collective context can be aligned with co-determined personal existence in the Freedom essay (Schelling 2007, 70–71/SW VII, 408–410). However, the concept of intersubjective existence remains underdeveloped in the System. Schelling does not yet describe relations between human beings as distinctly personal or involving the concepts of love or voluntary ‘higher unity,’ which would require that one overcome those impediments of determinative character experienced within oneself. Michael Vater also notes the possible structural comparison between the System and the Freedom essay. He compares Schelling’s account of self-consciousness in the System with the Unground and ground of the Freedom essay, including the political resonances of this comparison. Vater argues that the Unground and ground together can be described as an ‘unspiritual activity and source of realization,’ or ‘a restless, irresistible and infra-intelligible energization’ (Vater 1978, xxxv). Vater explicitly links the successive character of the unfolding of consciousness, understood as productivity in time or ‘the alteration of matter in nature,’ with political life in time. The progression of consciousness includes not only the successive stages

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between nature and self-conscious reflection, but ‘social movement and political deed in history’ (Ibid.). Time is the conditioning factor of the development of self-­ consciousness in the System and the Freedom essay. It is what allows for the failed determinations of the stages of consciousness and a formative role of finitude. This dependence on time can lead one to conclude that the ‘finite endures and resists inclusion within any arbitrary totalization’ (Ibid.). In view of the teleological aims of the System, the debate surrounding just how much empirical finitude is left outside of systematization through the movement of self-consciousness in time remains open for further discussion. I agree with Vater’s thesis that the comparison of the infrastructure and development of the System to the metaphysics of the Freedom essay is helpful for understanding Schelling’s politics. However, on my account, the conceptual distinction between the Unground and ground (which, as stated above, Vater discusses together) is important. The blind activity of an unconscious, free will is at the origin of being in both the System and the Freedom essay. However, in the System, being is addressed in its appearance from the point of view of a knowing subject who plays a constitutive role in determining the object, rather than ontologically or metaphysically. Once we move to the level of the ‘ground of consciousness,’ i.e.,’ nature, we are dealing with that which persists unconsciously to make free, subjective activity possible. It is on this level that Schelling also locates second nature or the state. This ground of our temporal existence – the state – persists in time, which is precisely that which produces the never-resting character of self-consciousness. An unpredictable and irrational threat to self-consciousness is always present. The political state develops in time, and never achieves a perfect form, according to Schelling in the System. The contingent factors of human political coordination in time mean that history displays moments of ‘senselessness,’ even despite the supposed teleological coordination of its ends put forth in the System. Nevertheless, there are numerous important differences between the System and the Freedom essay that have implications for Schelling’s political philosophy. Firstly, what is presented as a metaphysical framework in the Freedom essay is an epistemological framework in the System, i.e., a set of structures in which Schelling can explain the activity of knowing and accordingly the persistence of consciousness in time. The self-determination of one’s own existence in relation to the real presence of good and evil in the world in the Freedom essay is completely absent from the System. Consequently, the definition and role of human freedom in the two texts differ greatly. In the System, freedom is not, as in the Freedom essay, the capacity to decide between good and evil. This new definition of freedom in the Freedom essay allows the individual to overcome that by which she is determined and to develop into a person who can effectively love others. As the project of the System, namely, to describe the development of self-consciousness, is radically different from the Freedom essay, so is its treatment of the concept of freedom therein. In the System, Schelling in fact presents two definitions of freedom, both of which are important for his explication of the development of self-consciousness: (1) the infinite and unconditioned freedom of the ‘ideal self’ (Schelling 1978, 177/SW III, 562) and (2)

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the appearance of freedom for a fully conscious being, or a thinking, acting self (a self that intuits and acts). This second definition of freedom is inherently contradictory, according to Schelling, because once freedom is limited, it is no longer complete and total unrestricted freedom, as per definition 1. However, the appearance of freedom is still necessary for us to coherently experience the world in time. While the ideal self is ‘opened to infinity’ by freedom, its activity in the objective world confines it (Schelling 1978, 177/SW III, 561). Once the subject has determined any object for its own perception, including itself, it is no longer unlimited and its freedom is the appearance of the freedom of choice. Insofar as the self strives to be infinite and in every moment continues to be limited once again, one can accordingly consider it in a dialectical relationship with unconditioned freedom throughout the process of the development of consciousness. This interplay is, according to Schelling, that which makes the continuity of consciousness possible in time (Ibid., 178/562). The persistence of unconditioned freedom creates the condition of the unification of unconscious intuiting (Anschauen) with acting, as the self synthesizes its past impressions to achieve knowledge (which informs its future actions) over time (Ibid.). But the self realizes itself only in the world of phenomena or appearance (Ibid., 178ff./563ff.). Appearance is the ‘condition under which the self was to appear to itself’ (Ibid., 181/566). While on the level of the subjectivity, the theoretical and practical activity of the subject were unified through unrestricted freedom, on the level of the whole or objectivity the ‘appearance’ of ‘absolute freedom’ is simply ‘natural inclination’ (Ibid., 186/SW III, 572). This seems to be a contradictory claim, for Schelling states that a natural inclination could in fact ‘bring forth’ the ‘causality in my action … even without any freedom’ (Ibid.). But this privileging of natural inclination shows just how weak Schelling’s notion of (the appearance of) individual freedom actually is in the System. On his account, natural inclination, as a drive, brings about the consequences of freedom (e.g., free body movements) even before I am conscious of the fact that I am free (Ibid.). Therefore, natural inclination does not need the appearance of freedom, but the appearance of freedom enables the human to operate in a phenomenal world in which its thoughts and activity appear to be united and his actions appear to be completely self-determined. Although the self constructs and experiences a world, this ‘world itself is merely a modification of the self’ (Ibid., 180/563). Any significance of the individual’s ‘free’ activity beyond its own knowledge and the world of appearances is therefore largely determined by an objective teleological development. The capacity for the subject to exercise free activity thus has little to contribute to the objective development of the whole in the System. It could be said that the individual determines his own knowledge, but does not thereby determine his existence the world. The objective course of history, or the realization of a telos in the world through an objective will, overpowers the scope of subjective action. Due to the teleology of the System, we ultimately fulfill ends that we ourselves do not directly choose, and thus the appearance of freedom is exactly that  – an

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appearance.3 While the appearance of freedom is important for the coherence of experience of thinking and action in time, neither is it absolute, nor can we invest it with its own objective significance vis-à-vis the course of history. This is markedly different from the existential concept of individual human freedom put forth in the Freedom essay as the capacity to choose between good and evil (Schelling 2007, ­23/ SW VII, 352). In the latter, the individual constantly confronts that by which she is determined and which she must in some way overcome in the development of her personality. There is no such notion of personality in the 1800 System, which still sees the personal as largely equated with the rational individual. Despite these differences, Schelling defends the stability of the state against revolution in his political philosophy in the System and in his late philosophy. In 1800, he writes ‘insurrection … ought, in a good constitution, to be no more possible than it is in a machine’ (Schelling 1978, 198/SW III, 586). Similarly, in his final work, we find the claim that the state ‘should rest in silence, allowing only reform (not revolution). Like nature, it can be embellished, but it cannot be made to be otherwise than it is’ (Schelling 2020, 120–121/SW XI, 551). Although the latter statement seems to corroborate the former, the possibility of reforming or redirecting the course of human history is not found in the System. While Schelling’s political philosophy in the System is anti-nationalist and he shifts his detailing of political and historical activity to the international scale, he nevertheless sees history as the effectuation of objective will in and through the global order. Freedom here primarily concerns the world of subjective appearance and is thus weak in reference to the whole of historical development (Schelling 1978, 181–182/SW III, 564–567). Moreover, in 1800, Schelling does not yet advocate for the prescriptive roles fulfilled by individuals based on their ‘talents’ as he does in On University Studies, nor does he describe the state as an instrument of the unification of individual, free activity with necessity, as he does in his Identity Philosophy. Rather, Schelling emphasizes the challenges of finding stability in such an order, which pushes back against the human being’s nature to exercise freedom and resist being ‘compelled’ (Ibid., 196–197/585). He specifically acknowledges that the unification of human beings cannot be founded a priori (Ibid.). Political life in the state therefore involves experimentation based on the failed attempts of the latter to forge a successful unity between disparate beings (Ibid.). The subsistence of a state, Schelling claims, either depends on ‘the good will of those who hold supreme power in their hands’ or a ‘sanction’ from a power external to it (Ibid., 198/586). Schelling’s reflections on politics at this point must extend to the global level, as no ‘assured existence is therefore thinkable even for a single regime merely, however perfectly conceived, without an organization extending beyond the individual state’ (Ibid.). This contingency of the state's stability  and form is not ound in On University Studies, for example. Nevertheless, it is important to note that already in the System, Schelling claims the downfall of early states was that they were not established through reason, so they therefore were doomed to fail (Ibid., 197/SW II, 585). This is not a radical statement  for Schelling, as the late Schelling too describes the state as a rational order (Schelling 2020, 110/SW XI, 536).  See Kosch 2006, 79–80.

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2 The State as a Second Nature in the System of Transcendental Idealism Despite Schelling’s radical shift in the 1800 System towards the endorsement of an involuntary community characterized by the coordination of ends effectuated through the necessity inherent in an objective will that runs through history, the core concept of the System upon which his political philosophy is founded – namely, the legal state as a second nature which upholds the exercise of freedom of all citizens – remains consistent. Second nature, or the legal state, is the foundation of the successful, mutual realization of the individual freedom of subjects. Human beings have an active role to play in shaping the form and reach of this state, which holds a permanent role in our life on earth, and which is always changing depending on our historical circumstances. In consideration of this thesis, second nature in the System can be seen as setting the bedrock for the rest of Schelling’s political philosophy. In the practical philosophy (Part IV) of the System, Schelling describes the emergence of the state’s legal system as a second and higher nature (Schelling 1978, 196/ SW III, 583). By the term ‘second nature,’ Schelling generally describes our naturalized, socio-political, cultural condition structured by state laws. The main purpose of the law, which is at the root of second nature, is to uphold the freedom of all (Ibid.). Although Schelling sometimes suggests that second nature is similar to the ‘moral order’ (Ibid., 205/596), it would be more accurate to say that second nature is the condition of morality  – it makes morality  – which we must determine for ourselves through self-legislation – possible. The state is the necessary condition for a moral disposition, i.e., for the free, self-determination of individuals together. But precisely for this reason it does not itself determine morality. We act within second nature as moral agents. For this reason, Schelling, in fact, considers the second nature qua legal system as ‘pre-conscious’ and part of theoretical philosophy. The law, Schelling says, is a ‘theoretical’ science, not a ‘practical science’ or a ‘branch of morality’ (Ibid., 195–196/582–583). Like first nature, second nature serves as an objective condition for the development of self-consciousness. However, as noted above, unlike the blind activity which gives rise to the first act of nature, second nature appears via a second act that marks the beginning of our experience of temporality (Ibid., 155–156/533–534). Through this second act, the finite I sets out on its path of realizing its own activity in an intersubjective, temporal context (Ibid., 158/537). Therefore, for Schelling (and for that matter, also Hegel), second nature broadly designates the production of an objective, political and  cultural order in which we exercise our freedom, and moreover, that we largely perceive as given.4  For an analysis of Hegel’s two concepts of second nature (i.e., [1] the domain freedom as created by the development of spirit, and [2] the unconscious, externalized realm of habit), see Menke 2013, 31–34. Schelling’s concept of second nature does not denote the second, unconscious, Hegelian notion, but it shares much with Hegel’s first notion. 4

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Simply stated, for Schelling in the System, second nature is the domain of the objective, legal state in which conscious, free individuals interact with one another. Through this function, second nature supports the mutual realization of the freedom of all. By comparing the state to nature, Schelling exposes its role as a support and also its mediating function  – and yet, on its own and with regards to action, its simultaneous impotence – for the realization of human freedom: ‘Nature cannot act in the proper sense of the word. But rational beings can act, and an interaction between such beings through the medium of the objective world is actually the condition of freedom’ (Ibid., 194/582). In view of the fact that Schelling locates freedom at the absolute core of the determination of consciousness, it should come as no surprise that the protection of freedom is the first and highest function of the state. Freedom is the most important aspect of human existence, and the state must uphold and defend it. Schelling calls it the ‘holiest’ which ‘ought not to be entrusted to chance’ (Ibid., 195/582). For Schelling, the unlimited, boundless character of freedom, and, in turn, our constant striving for it, is that which allows us to experience continuity in self-­consciousness.5 But for freedom to be exercised in time by multiple, competing agents, a legal state is required: the ‘legal system is a necessary condition for the freedom existing in the external world’ (Schelling 1978, 196/SW III, 584). The domain of second nature is inaugurated by one, single infrangible law of the state that exists to protect of freedom: ‘It must be made impossible, through the constraint of an unbreakable law, that in the interaction of all the freedom of the individual should be abolished’ (Ibid., 195/582). This, Schelling claims, is the one and only ‘natural law on behalf of freedom’ (Ibid.). On Schelling’s account, the law of the state must protect the natural right of each individual to freedom. In short, Schelling’s law on behalf of freedom can be interpreted as the law which seeks to prohibit self-interested wills from infringing on the freedom of others, regardless of the person’s social status or personal circumstances. For Schelling, preserving freedom is the first purpose of the state and its legal constitution. Furthermore, the law which grounds this tenet has an authority which ‘prevails’ in the legal system. This protection of freedom is so integral to Schelling’s transcendental system and to his view of collective, conscious life that Schelling states the ‘legal system’ (specifically, the constitution, or ‘Rechtsverfassung,’ which is now identified with second nature) is ‘deduced as a condition of the continuance of consciousness’ (Ibid.). In stating that the natural law of freedom must act as ‘an instantaneous counter to the self-interested drive,’ Schelling reveals his view of human nature in reference to politics (Ibid.). This self-interested drive is the ‘natural’ drive of a free being to exercise his freedom to the furthest extent possible. While Schelling does not yet have a working concept of evil in reference to freedom, he is clear that human  We are conscious of freedom only because it is limited in the way it can be exercised in time. But Schelling maintains that the nature of freedom is to be unlimited ‘in respect of its striving.’ This unlimited nature of freedom has a regulative role in how we find continuity in self-consciousness. It is the enduring, unlimited nature of the striving for freedom that links the disparate moments of our self-consciousness together over time (Schelling 1978, 178/SW III, 562). 5

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beings, on their own, will not instinctively curtail their freedom in view of others. However, by recognizing the second natural law of the state, namely the law of rightful counteraction to self-interest, the human being can rationally understand the limitation placed on her freedom in the name of its exercise. The negative view of human nature in connection to the role of the state to uphold freedom in the System foreshadows Schelling’s 1847–1852 reference to Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all’. At this point he claims that without the state, individuals could not be responsible, ‘morally free’ persons (Schelling 2020, 110/SW XI, 536). Schelling also here repeats the close relationship of the rule of the law as enforced by the state to freedom, claiming that ‘the individual has no freedom either to act for or against the law, unless it is made possible for everyone to act against it’ (Ibid.). In 1800, Schelling already identifies that the human being inevitably oversteps boundaries with regard to accommodating the freedom of others in her individualist pursuit of her own free action. Therefore, the objective, natural world, now in the form of a second nature, must oppose the unrestrained exercise of individual freedom with its own natural laws. But the human being, qua rational being, can knowingly recognize the legitimacy of the state to oppose the ‘self-interested drive.’ This rational recognition of the rule of law is important, for, on its own, the state works with ‘complete indifference towards the operations of free beings’ (Schelling 1978, 195/SW III, 582). On Schelling’s account, the external world compels this natural drive while at the same time providing, through the state, a grounds upon which the individual can recognize the natural law of freedom. The individual therefore rationally recognizes the impossibility and contradiction of its own activity if pursued without constraint. In this sense, Schelling describes the human being as ‘divided within himself’ (Ibid.). Schelling’s pessimistic view of human nature plays a direct role in his perspective of the institution of the state in its first instantiations in history. The generation of a legal order, claims Schelling, was the result of a ‘natural compulsion.’ We do not remember when or how the first state really came about, for those who brought it into fruition, on Schelling’s account, did so ‘unawares.’ The natural tendency to ‘resort to force’ ‘drove men to bring such an order into being without their own knowledge of the fact’ (Ibid., 204/594). In short, we lived in states before we even knew it.6 Moreover, despite the necessity of its existence, the state is not, on its own, inherently stable. According to Schelling, just because the unity of individuals is formed through legal, state relations does not mean those individuals will not exploit power and react against it. He acknowledges this point again with recourse to the concept of human nature: human beings ‘will only allow themselves to be compelled so long as they find advantage therein’ (Ibid.). On our own, we do not want to comply with the principle of freedom for all.  Once we are within an intersubjective context in time, the legal system becomes the second condition, after the existence of freedom itself, for the ‘continuance of consciousness’ (Ibid., 198/587). If freedom is that which allows consciousness to synthesize its past and continue to think and act in time, such activity is not possible intersubjectively without the laws of the state, which guarantee freedom for each individual. 6

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Although the state exists necessarily and objectively for us, how we execute it is doomed to fail. Schelling attributes such failure in part to culture and national character, and the fact that early states were set up through pressure of circumstances, ‘not through reason’ (Ibid., 197/585). This is even the case for states which seem perfect ‘in a formal sense,’ because the distribution of rights and possibilities of citizens would be hierarchically established and never equalized. Schelling reminds us that nature itself ‘establishes nothing self-subsistent’ or ‘inherently stable’ (Ibid.). The system itself would be open to the threat of other states. States must therefore enter into a universal constitution with other states. In the System, Schelling suggests that intersubjectivity establishes the ontological reality of our collective life while allowing us to recognize our own individuality. This is the foundation of Schelling’s proto-theory of recognition. The mutual acknowledgement of the independent existence of interdependent beings is a ‘reciprocal’ relationship, and ‘no rational being can substantiate itself as such, save by the recognition of others as such.’ Moreover, the restrictions that allow for the self-­ intuition of one’s own free activity ‘are possible only through intelligences outside me’ (Ibid., 169/550). Intersubjectivity at minimum describes how an individual's cognition or intelligence relates to the cognition of others. Schelling locates intersubjectivity at the basis of our knowledge of the external world. For Schelling, intersubjectivity provides an answer to the question of how I can be certain of the existence of the external world at all. The world outside of me is not just a projection or product of my conscious activity because my perceptions accord with the perceptions of other people. However, Schelling makes no attempt at this point to describe or affirm the real existence of these other intelligences outside of consciousness, ontologically or otherwise. In second nature, each individual, conscious, finite self lives in a world with others who can confirm that objects outside of oneself are not just in my head. We need these others to know there is an objective world. The true existence of an objective world cannot be proven to a ‘rational being in isolation’ (Ibid., 174/SW III, 557). Schelling explains that such a being ‘could not only not arrive at a consciousness of freedom, but would be equally unable to attain consciousness of the objective world as such.’ Therefore, ‘intelligences outside the individual, and a never-ceasing interaction with them, alone make complete the whole of consciousness with all its determinations’ (Ibid.). In short, the negation of each individual’s unrestricted free activity (Ibid., 550/169) by other minds makes consciousness as a whole (along with my own individuality) complete. Despite the initial impression that the System may be a solipsistic project, in the end, Schelling rejects solipsism and uses intersubjectivity to affirm that other intelligences in some sense exist. These others confirm the reality of the external world, and intuitively, we share the possibility to access the external world with them, as intuition unites the subjectivity of the self with the objectivity of the external world. Even though Schelling claims that the first negation of unlimited activity is originally unconscious, the external world, and specifically, the existence of others, sets limits on individual freedom and what we can do. For consciousness to persist in time, the ‘negation of free activity in myself’ is required. This is the condition of

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being free, because human freedom ‘only arises with consciousness’ (Ibid, 169/550). To become moral beings, our ‘free actions’ must be limited (Ibid.). The ‘diversity of talents of characteristics’ makes our interaction possible and justifies restrictedness in our action. However, Schelling leaves the question of how we deal with the differences in the abilities and personalities of human beings to something other than transcendental philosophy (Ibid.). In addition to intersubjectivity, politics concerns the world of human affairs in time. When we consider questions of hope, political change, the development of the law, and, to use Schelling’s language of the System, ‘epochs’ of history, we are dealing with temporal processes. According to Schelling, the beginning of self-­ consciousness marks the inauguration of time. Self-consciousness and time are thus prerequisites of the development of the state. At the same time, the state is also the objective condition of the persistence of consciousness and collective life. I explained above that the second act of self-consciousness inaugurates ‘self-­ consciousness in time’ (Ibid., 156/533). From the first unconscious act of self-­ consciousness, out of which first nature developed, there was no empirical experience of time. But from this second act onwards, every action of intelligence happens in time (Ibid., 159/537). Even though it is unconscious, second nature accordingly emerges at the same moment that consciousness becomes aware of its own reflective activity. From the moment the world appears as objective to consciousness, and the subjective, feeling self can distinguish the object from itself, intelligence begins to produce ‘consciously, and so here there begins an entirely new world, which from this point on will extend ad infinitum’ (Ibid.). This marks the creation of a ‘second world, whose gestation begins with consciousness’ (Ibid.), i.e., second nature. In a word, there is no politics – and no development of self-consciousness or intersubjectivity – without time.7 We converge with others on the conclusions of our experiences of the ‘objective world,’ as well as of ‘individual things and events within the same space and time’ and ascribe truth to them (Ibid., 164/544). Time is also required for the concept of continuity in conscious experience (and therewith succession), as well as the periodization of history (Ibid., 178/562). It is our ‘common intuition’ that makes this possible. Schelling therefore calls intuition the ‘foundation’ and ‘solid earth upon which all interaction between intelligences takes place; a substrate to which, for that very reason, they constantly revert, so soon as they find themselves in disharmony about that which is not directly determined by intuition’ (Ibid., 164/SW III, 544). Developing from his analyses of time and intersubjectivity, Schelling’s practical philosophy in the System ends in the philosophy of history. Although the young Schelling does not yet share the eschatological view of the end of history espoused by late Schelling, he does reference time with regards to the incompletion of the system and the fact that the development of consciousness has not yet reached its final stage, which he calls ‘providence.’ There is ‘no point in time at which the

 For a detailed account of the role of time and its characteristics in the System, see Schnell (2010), chapter 3. 7

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absolute synthesis – or to put it in empirical terms, the design of providence – should have brought its development to completion’ (Ibid., 210/602). This openness of the end of history in the System invites numerous possibilities of interpretation of the significance of finitude, time, and phenomena in the stages of history as presented in this work.

3 Teleology and Necessity in History: The Involuntary Community Despite the ongoing striving of finite consciousness for a unity with the absolute beyond itself – accordingly freedom from constraint – in the System, Schelling’s vision of political unity in this text follows an objective telos. For Schelling, the ‘primary characteristic of history’ overall is that it ‘should exhibit a union of freedom and necessity’ (Ibid., 210/SW III, 594). This becomes clear at the end of history, in the aforementioned stage of  providence, at which point humanity retrospectively sees that its contingent activity was subordinated to necessity. The activity of history, on Schelling’s account, is not the uncoordinated, anarchic, chaotic activity that it appears to be from our individual, localized points of view as we go about our daily lives. Rather, our arbitrary actions are all synchronized through necessity. Schelling explains that ‘through freedom itself, and in that I believe myself to act freely, something I do not intend is to come about unconsciously, i.e., without my consent’ (Ibid., 204/SW III, 594). Indeed, what comes about as an ultimate result of my own, individual action may even be contrary to my own will. Freedom therefore does not lead the finite I beyond necessity, as in the case of a community that is formed voluntarily. Instead, there is a necessity ‘hidden’ from individual, acting humans that brings about a guaranteed ‘union,’ which is the ‘highest goal of the entire species’ (Ibid., 207/598). Every individual plays his or her part freely in history, but a ‘single spirit … speaks in everyone’ (Ibid., 210/602). Such a unity is progressively effected through the will of objective spirit, necessarily ensuring the collective coordination of individual wills, and thereby history, over time. Schelling uses an analogy of a coordinated theatre piece to describe the reconciliation of our individual freedom with objective necessity in history. The playwright (i.e., the will of objective spirit) coordinating this play does not exist independently of it. Finite individuals are all actors in this play, whose ‘objective outcome’ has already been ‘harmonized beforehand.’ Nevertheless, the actors act freely and are ‘collaborators’ in the play. In our acting, we disclose the character and essence of the playwright through the roles we freely act out (Ibid.). In other words, our individual freedom progressively realizes an objective, coordinated goal: ‘History as a whole is a progressive, gradually self-disclosing revelation of the absolute’ (Ibid., 211/603). Humans can  contribute to the progress of history by working together to improve our socio-political relationships and bring about justice, but we do not achieve of a peaceful, global, objective federation of states on our

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own – rather, the objective will of history, the necessary drive of the Absolute or immanent God, ensures such a coordination. However, Schelling is clear that such a drive does not violate the legitimacy of individual freedom. In this theory of history, a universal, global, system of ends – an eventual utopic reign of peace on earth – is unconsciously produced. ‘All my actions, in fact, proceed, as to their final goal, toward something that can be realized, not by the individual alone, but only by the entire species’ (Ibid., 205/596). This unity is made possible through the unconscious unification of freedom and necessity in the continuous revelation of an immanent God understood as the absolute: ‘Man, through his history, provides a continuous demonstration of God’s presence, a demonstration, however, which only the whole of history can render complete’ (Ibid., 211/603). Schelling explains that freedom and the ‘the total evolution of the absolute synthesis’ are infinite processes (Ibid., 211/603). Because this infinite nature of the absolute, ‘history,’ on Schelling’s account, is ‘itself a never wholly completed revelation of that absolute which, for the sake of consciousness, and thus merely for the sake of appearance, separates itself into conscious and unconscious, the free and the intuitant’ (Ibid.). In concrete geopolitical terms, Schelling in 1800 imagines history moving towards a ‘federation of all states, who mutually guarantee their respective regimes,’ and which is also grounded in freedom. This can happen only when all the separate states ‘have but one interest, namely to preserve the constitutions of all,’ and also when ‘these states have again submitted to a single communal law, just as was formerly done by individuals in forming each particular state’ (Ibid., 198/586). On Schelling’s account, the only thing therefore that makes such a ‘universal constitution’ even imaginable is the governance of the ‘play of freedom…by a blind necessity, which objectively appends to freedom what would never have been possible through the latter alone’ (Ibid., 198/587). If there is an end of history – in which there would be peace and a total unification of all people  – for the early Schelling, it is ‘providence.’ Although this is a theological term, Schelling employs it here in a secular, immanentist sense as the culmination of his rational philosophy of history in the System. It does not, as in Schelling’s later work, signify the final unification of God and the world through ‘providence,’ i.e., brought about by a God who can, in real terms, himself ‘counter the facticity of the fall’ (Schelling 2020, 131/SW XI, 556). Providence is rather the evolutionary form of ‘the force which appeared in the earlier stages as destiny and nature’ (i.e., stages one and two of history). Providence will only arrive at the end of the long ‘natural’ stage of history, in which we currently find ourselves. In this ‘natural’ period, ‘freedom and wholly unbridled choice’ are compelled ‘to subserve a natural plan, and thus gradually importing into history at least a mechanical conformity to law’ (Schelling 1978, 212/604). It is here that we see the pivotal role of necessity in Schelling’s conception of history. Locating the beginning of this ‘natural period’ in the time of Rome’s expansion, Schelling suggests that from this point onwards, nations come together and follow a course of events that can be described as ‘natural consequences’ that are part of a ‘natural plan’ (Ibid.). Its fate is, through

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necessity, to produce a ‘general comity of nations and the universal state’  (Ibid., 212/605). In the final stage of history, it is revealed that ‘what seemed to be simply the work of destiny or nature was already the beginning of a providence imperfectly revealing itself’ (Ibid., 212/604–605). The stage of providence thus retrospectively reflects the teleology that was always present in the whole. Although Schelling claims we will not know when this period will begin, he implies that it will happen in the future on earth. As the unification of the necessity of nature with the subjectivity of human action, at this moment of providence, ‘God also will then exist’ (Ibid.) To sum up, the state and history are the function of processes which have an unconscious, objective, structural role in the production of our subjective experience. The latter, on the early Schelling’s account, is destined in history to eventually unite with the objective in providence. In this theory of history, the state, or second nature, is the objective order that stands between first nature and the teleological unfolding of history. Furthermore, by claiming in the System that all of our practical activity, whether we know it or not, serves to build an objectively structured and coordinated kingdom of ends, it could be said that Schelling subordinates contingency to necessity. That which is contingent in fact brings about a higher, unified purpose, even if unbeknownst to us as we live our daily lives. Therefore, the type of unity that is brought about in a political sense is still one conditioned by the necessity Schelling sees running throughout history. This forecloses precisely the type of directly willed, free, voluntary unity that Schelling sees as characteristic of a genuinely moral community in his later philosophy. Schelling’s political philosophy in 1800 therefore affirms, contrary to Schelling in 1810 and after, that necessity and reason, through the state and history, can sufficiently unify a political community. This faith in reason only strengthens in his Identity Philosophy period. But by 1810, he asserts that ‘the existence of free beings’ cannot be unified by rational or exclusively political means (Schelling 1994, 227/SW VII, 462).Therefore, the age of providence becomes further and more radically deferred (beyond our experience of time and beyond this world), and the rational teleology of history left behind. ‘The true politeia,’ writes Schelling in 1810, ‘exists only in heaven’ (Ibid.). In summary, although the System indicates the importance of the state as (a) founded on freedom and (b) as a necessary, naturalized, objective condition for the development of self-consciousness, and by extension, individuality, Schelling’s justification of a unified, involuntary community objectively coordinated by necessity diverts from the path Schelling will take in his middle and late philosophy. Ultimately, the System pursues a line of development which seeks to progressively eradicate the root of all contingency in favor of an underlying necessity. The contingency of the finite in the System is thus a relative contingency, not the contingency of rational philosophy itself (or transcendental philosophy), as in Schelling’s later work. As a weak notion of contingency, the contingency of being in System is a mere medium of the effectuation of necessity. Schelling therefore can be read as subordinating contingency to necessity, and arguing, as Hegel will even more

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persuasively a few years later, in favor of the necessity of contingency. What appears as contingent is in fact necessary for a pre-determined outcome in history. Nevertheless, it should be conceded that there is some degree of deep contingency in the System. Free activity, as noted above, is at the root of being itself. The full development of self-consciousness is also contingent upon two free acts. Influenced by Spinoza, the free, blind activity of unconscious production undergirds nature’s products, or conscious activity. But this is not enough to subvert the System’s goal to unify freedom and necessity, subjectivity and objectivity, at the end of history. By contrast, in the Freedom essay in 1809, everything that exists is said to be contingent upon a dark ground (Schelling 2007, 75/SW VII, 413). The transformation of the unconscious, active,  determinative dimension of nature into a dark ground, which human beings, in their development into persons, ought to overcome, changes Schelling’s account of the role of human agency in history. Each human being is free to decide whether to subordinate egoistic selfhood—the dark ground within themselves—to the “light or universal will” (Schelling 2007, 63/SW VII, 399). The closer the individual is to nature, the further away she is from developing into a fully actualized person, whose moral activity is oriented towards servitude to the whole. In the Freedom essay, the path to the providential end of history is thus reconfigured to include the free, directly willed activity of those working to bring it about. God is no longer the Absolute, or the immanent, collective, rational realization of the human community, but a living, personal agent, who is free. With these new notions of God and the dark ground, in addition to the introduction of freedom as the capacity to decide for good or for evil, the roles played by free persons, both human and divine, in the undetermined course of history are redefined. In creation, the free God wills free beings to exist. In their freedom, they do things God does not intend and  can will evil, potentially disrupting history's course. Whether or not human beings come to form a free, loving, voluntary community is now morally and existentially up to them. Therefore, in contrast to the early Schelling, the middle Schelling in the Stuttgart Seminars in 1810 will echo the very early 1796 ‘Oldest System-Program of German Idealism’ by reaffirming its thesis that the state produces only a precarious ‘material unity,’ in contrast to a higher unity willed by the individual persons that decide to enter into a genuinely free community (Schelling 1994, 227/SW VII, 461). At this later point, Schelling holds that any unity forced upon human beings by a natural or necessary structure independent to their individual, conscious will is not a spiritual unity. This relativizes the state as a temporary but necessary structure, which serves to uphold our exercise of freedom so long as we have not yet achieved this higher unity. This later thesis opens new, potential considerations of that upon which the state is contingent, e.g., upon power relations, and the experience of history in a given time. Near the end of his life, the late Schelling revises his doctrine of the state once more to describe it as a rational order (Schelling 2020, 110/SW XI, 536/PRP, 110), leaving behind the negative language regarding the state, found in the Stuttgart Seminars, in which it is described as a necessary ‘curse’ (Schelling 1994, 227/SW VII, 461). This rational characterization of the state may appear to weaken the

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degree to which we can consider the state as contingent. However, the presentations of the state in the Stuttgart Seminars and the Presentation of the Purely Rational Philosophy (1847–1852) are compatible insofar as Schelling does not advocate for a revolutionary abolition of the state, yet remains critical regarding the nature of the unity between human beings it can bring about. In both texts, the unity achieved by the state is precarious and involuntary. In 1847–1852, Schelling simply iterates the possible rational basis of the ‘necessary curse’ of the state, why we need it, how it functions, and how we might improve it. When Schelling claims in the 1847–1852 that we must “preserve” the state (Schelling 2020, 120/SW XI, 550), one can assume this preservation is only insofar as it remains an undesirable necessity for us in the absence of the attainment of the true unity with God. The development of the state in time, and the extent to which it structures and orders human life, remains contingent upon historical experience and imperfect human relationships. Schelling’s pre- and post-1809 approaches to history, and thereby the goals of his political philosophy, are differentiated on the question of contingency and necessity. Politically, the System’s goal is to integrate all finite contingency into an objective teleology of history. Since history in the System is described as the ‘union of freedom and necessity’ in which we progressively realize the ‘rule of law’ (Schelling 1978, 203/SW III, 593), the unification of the human community is postulated as advancing teleologically within the confines of the law, not beyond it. In this depiction of history, religion is simply the description of the ‘system of providence’ in which reflection is ‘elevated to that absolute which is the common ground of the harmony between freedom and intelligence’ (Ibid., 209/601). Schelling officially leaves this teleological view of the progressive unification of freedom and necessity in history behind after 1809. In his late eschatological theory of politics and history, God is also no longer within the bounds of ‘rational religion,’ but ‘outside of reason’ (Schelling 2020, 133/SW XI, 568–569). At this point, contrary to the System, Schelling concludes the stability of the entire human community will remain precarious until the true end of history, which for the late Schelling is signified by the return of the Son and the advent of the eschaton, in which the world is unified with the Father. Nevertheless, the genuinely just, freely willed community on earth is still, on Schelling’s account, a worthy end for our striving. Moreover, the question of contingency in this eschatological philosophy – which sees justice and resolution of the global human community as deferred to a different epoch in history (i.e., one that is not brought about as a progressive, rational culmination of that which came before it) – is linked to Schelling’s reconceptualizing of freedom and evil. Without a doctrine of evil, the System does not offer the existential avenues for moral philosophy and the anarchic basis of the contingency of systematic, rational philosophy that we find in the Freedom essay. Rather, if there are any remnants of the unconscious ground of subjective activity throughout the progression of the System, in the end they should be absorbed into the unity of contingency and necessity. Schelling is clear about his intentions in the System not to produce ‘a moral philosophy of any kind, but rather a transcendental deduction of the thinkability and explicability of moral concepts as such’ (Schelling 1978, 155/SW III, 532). Transcendental philosophy deals with morality only ‘at the highest level of

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generality,’ rather than in relation to individuals, and their contextualized choices for good or for evil. This can explain why the System’s concept of the state is so useful for the future political philosophy, yet it simultaneously offers little in the way of moral philosophy.

References Kosch, Michelle. 2006. Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling and Kierkegaard. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Menke, Christoph. 2013. Hegel’s Theory of Second Nature. Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue Canadienne de Philosophie Continentale 17 (1): 31–49. Schelling, F. W. J. [SW] 1856–1861. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. K.F.A. Schelling. 14 vols. Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta. ———. 1978. System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). Trans. Peter Heath. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ———. 1988. Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature. Trans. Errol E.  Harris, and Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1994. Stuttgart Seminars (1810). In Idealism and the Endgame of Theory. Trans. Thomas Pfau, 195–243. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2007. Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. Trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2020. Schelling’s Late Political Philosophy: Lectures 22-24 of the Presentation of the Purely Rational Philosophy. Trans. Kyla Bruff. Kabiri 2: 93–135. Schnell, Alexander. 2010. En Deçà Du Sujet: Du Temps Dans La Philosophie Transcendental Allemande, 2010. Paris: PUF. Vater, Michael. 1978. Introduction. In System of Transcendental Idealism. By F. W. J. Schelling. Trans. Peter Heath. Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia.

The Psychical Relation Sebastian Rand

In a footnote to his Leben der Freiheit, Thomas Khurana observes that “Hegel is fundamentally much less interested in incorporeal spiritual beings than is the tradition, which always and again sets up angels as the contrast case to embodied spiritual beings” (Khurana 2017, 380n58). Given what could be expected from a hypothetical Hegelian angelology, we may be grateful that both his philosophical commitments and his Lutheran formation blocked this path. Such gratitude is tested, however, by the choice of examples Hegel makes in expounding his conception of embodied spiritual life – examples contrasting not simply embodied with disembodied, but allegedly normally with abnormally embodied, spirituality. Confronted with Hegel’s appeals to (for instance) race, gender, animal magnetism, and sleepwalking, we might feel some nostalgia for the relative conceptual and ethical simplicity of the angel/human contrast. But Khurana’s observation is correct: we search in vain through Hegel’s texts for the traditional discourse contrasting humans with angels.1 And so in making sense of his views about embodied spiritual beings, we must either grapple with, or dodge, his actual examples. Avoidance is tempting, but we miss something when we fail to take these examples seriously, as I will try to do here with one of the more curious  Hegel’s theoretical hostility to angels is present from very early on. See his journal entry of 15 March 1786 (GW 1:28), where he argues that the idea of personal guardian angels contradicts divine providence; see also the Frankfurt manuscripts (the “Geist des Christentums” materials) where he interprets away the reference at Matthew 18:10 to angels (GW 2:136–7, 273); and see the same attitude maintained much later, when in comparing Chinese religions to Christianity he writes that “in our religion angels also show up, but these are fantastic beings who do not belong to pure religion” (GW 27:884). (Translations from the German and French are mine throughout, though references to English translations are provided when available; see abbreviations/references below.) 1

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ones: the relation between the gestating human fetus and its mother.2 I will begin by setting my consideration in the context of two broadly Aristotelian ideas about human reason current in recent debates around Hegel’s philosophy of mind.3 Then I will turn to §§405–6 of the Encyclopedia, where in the course of articulating his concept of the “feeling soul,” Hegel appeals to what he calls the “psychical” relation between the pregnant mother and the gestating fetus. While Hegel’s discussion of gestation initially seems compatible with the relevant Aristotelian ideas, his further discussion of birth is difficult to wrangle into such a framework. I will argue that for Hegel, human birth cannot be understood through either Aristotelian idea alone, but functions as the act in which they are unified “dialectically,” that is, in a way characterized by negativity reflected back into the conceptual structure of those ideas themselves in their Hegelian appropriation.

1 Transformation and Second Nature The Aristotelian ideas in question show up in recent discussions in the service of a common interpretive aim, namely that of clarifying how to reconcile two apparently conflicting claims, both of which Hegel is said to endorse: the claim that our conceptual capacities and practices are irreducible to the principles and concepts through which we understand nature in the natural sciences; and the claim that despite the constitutive role played by such irreducibly normative capacities and practices in human life, we humans are in no way supernatural beings. One idea is that of (a naturalism of) second nature.4 Here the thought is that we should not let the current natural-scientific conception of nature, to which our rational-conceptual lives are irreducible, count as the only or most complete or legitimate conception of nature: we should see our conceptual lives instead as the achievement through education and habituation of a “second nature,” which achievement is just the actualization of capacities characteristic of the kinds of animals we are. It may be that we have to learn to wield the concepts and navigate the practices of our various cultures, but according to this idea it is part of being the sort of animal we are, rather than through some supernatural intervention, that we have the capacity to do so, such that these capacities and practices are no less natural than (say) the laws of motion.

 Although it is occasionally touched on in commentaries (e.g., Stederoth 2001, 192 ff.) only two pieces I know of subject this example to extended examination: (Lindberg 2010) and (Nancy 1984). A brief but still helpful account is found in (Stone 2021, 197–8). 3  Whether these ideas are correctly attributed to Aristotle is not at issue here. 4  See (McDowell 1996), though the importance of second nature and habit in Hegel’s philosophy of mind is emphasized earlier in (McCumber 1990) and developed independently in a quite different direction in (Malabou 1996). More recently see (Novakovic 2017) and (Khurana 2017). For a general intellectual history of second nature see (Rath 1996). 2

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The other idea is that of rationality as transformative.5 Here the thought initially looks something like this: the second-nature capacities I actualize are not, once developed, simply added to some standard human set of first-nature, inborn, animal capacities not requiring, and themselves unchanged by, such an addition. Rather, in developing my second nature I transform all my merely animal capacities as well: once in the habit of thinking, I perceive differently, I hunger differently, I struggle differently. Thought of in this way, both the development of my second, rational nature, on the one hand, and the transformation of my merely animal capacities through my rationality, on the other, are characteristic of the distinctly human form of life, the form of life proper to the sort of animal we are. As just described, the ideas of second nature and of transformation seem not only compatible but like two sides of the same coin: the transformation under discussion seems to be an alteration made to my nonrational capacities by my rationality, while that rationality is actualized by the habituating enculturation practices through which I achieve my second nature.6 But the ongoing debates around the transformation idea have made it clear that this idea and the idea of second nature are not concerned with the same thing. The second nature idea is indeed about a natural capacity of individuals of our species actualized through a temporally extended habituating process of education and training. But the transformation idea, despite its name, is not about any sort of transformation process at all, whether historical, natural, or otherwise.7 It is rather a view about static structures within which the specifically human form of animal life stands in relation to other specific forms of animal life (e.g., bear life), via higher-order abstract (generic) categories like “animal” and “mammal;” more precisely, it is the claim that although various capacities actualized in human life and bear life are of the same generic sort – capacities for eating, or for movement, but above all for perception – they are nonetheless actual in wholly distinct ways, the bear’s eating as part of essentially nonrational bear life, and human eating as part of essentially rational human life. What is “transformed” by rationality, then, is not the infant into the adult, or the ancestral ape into homo sapiens sapiens, but rather a generic, abstract “form” of animality common to both

 See Boyle 2012 and Boyle 2016. Here I draw as well on Thompson 2013, Gobsch 2017, Haase 2013, Pinkard 2011, 2017. 6  McDowell hints at a link between second nature as acquired perceptual sensitivity, on the one hand, and transformative rationality, on the other, when he writes that “we can say that we have what mere animals have, perceptual sensitivity to features of our environment, but we have it in a special form” (McDowell 1996, 64). Other authors frequently phrase the transformation idea in a way that suggests its identity with second-nature acquisition even when they elsewhere clearly separate these ideas: “[O]ur capacity for rationality does not merely complement our animal capacities for perception and desire, it transforms them in a way that distinguishes these capacities essentially from the corresponding capacities of a nonrational animal” (Boyle 2016, 531); “rationality transforms all our principle mental powers” (Boyle 2012, 395); “In our self-consciousness, we become different natural creatures – rational animals” (Pinkard 2017, 12). 7  “[I]t would be wrong to identify the transformation that gives the transformative theory of rationality its name with the process of the formation of human sensibility that is education” (Gobsch 2017, 128n20). 5

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bear and human into the species-forms of bear on the one hand and of human on the other.8 But if the transformation idea is correctly understood as static, then the transformation it points to – perhaps better described as a kind of mental climbing, on the philosopher’s part, among the branches of a Porphyrian tree9 – is not brought about by whatever process results in the acquisition of a second, rational nature. It is rather a figure for an ontological gap between determinate species and their common genus. And while second nature names the result of a species-internal process of developing into a fully mature instance of the human sort of animal,10 it does not explain, but rather presupposes and elaborates upon, the kind of inter-species difference the transformation idea describes but likewise does not explain. Although he is aware of their limitations, Hegel also affirms some version of both the transformation idea and the second nature idea, while stopping short of the claim that either idea adequately addresses the (possibly ill-formed) question of how humans, individually or as a species, come to have their specific difference – the self-relation that characterizes our rational lives.11 We might go so far as to read the systematic transition from the animal (in the Philosophy of Nature) to the soul (in the Philosophy of Spirit) as Hegel’s appropriation of the Aristotelian transformation idea, offering not a concrete or natural but a speculative-dialectical transformation of the animal into the human, while carefully avoiding appeal to any process of historical or natural alteration in which a nonrational animal individual or species would become rational.12 Similarly we can turn to Hegel’s account of habit in the Philosophy of Spirit for an argument giving a central philosophical role to the second nature idea,13 noting that the process detailed there is one by which an individual animal already bearing the characteristically human self-relation develops it from a relatively formless newborn version into a more robust, complex adult version.

 It bears noting that on such an understanding, the transformative theory of rationality seems unable to ascribe any especially transformative power or effect to rationality itself, in contrast to other differentiae specificae: the bear’s differentia, whatever it may be, is just as transformative of generic animality as the human’s rationality, though in some other direction (which is not to say that the bear and the salmon are not somehow – but how? – more closely related than either is to the human). 9  This is particularly clear in Haase 2013, 93–94. 10  There is some debate about whether, for Hegel, nonhuman animal habituation and human habituation are the same. For the claim that they are not, see McCumber 1990 and DeVries 1988; for the opposed view, see Pinkard 2011, 29, and Merker 2012. Thanks to Alex Drusda for this point. 11  “The soul is so doubled that it has in its reality not merely the immediate reality of vitality [Lebendigkeit] but rather also itself as its reality, it is a reality of itself to itself, this is consciousness, I, the relation of the soul to its reality in itself” (GW 25:413; compare Enc3 §382Z, and see similar phrasing at GW 25:555n, 579, 729, and many others); on the connection of this self-­relation to second nature, see the first chapter of Pinkard 2011; on its connection to transformation, see Pinkard 2017, 10–11. 12  See, e.g., GW 25:14, 174–5; compare Enc3 §381Z. 13  See Enc3 §§409–10. 8

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But in keeping with what we have learned about these ideas, at neither systematic place he finds for them does Hegel appeal to either as grounding a story on which an imagined generic animal, or an animal of some concrete nonhuman species, becomes human.14 To this extent, Hegel is a good Aristotelian. And yet between their two systematic moments – in the midst of his account of the human soul, falling between the systematic transition from animal to human, on the one side, and the exposition of human habituation into second nature, on the other – Hegel makes a claim that seems to run counter to this Aristotelianism. The claim arises out of Hegel’s appeal to the gestating fetus/mother relation as an example “in immediate existence” of a structure also characterizing the inner activity of the soul. Having elaborated this example, Hegel then extends his discussion from gestation to birth, and it is through this extension that he makes his surprising claim: that the human individual acquires, for the first time, the self-relation constitutive of the human form of life – and thus both transformative rationality and the capacity to develop a second nature – in and through the event of birth. The question Hegel seems to be answering here  – about how the individual human animal acquires that form of life through which she is distinguished from all other animals – can seem to be ill-formed. After all, to be such an individual just is to have that form, so that there can seem to be no question of its acquisition by the individual herself. And yet Hegel seems to think there is something worth saying about the role of birth in just such an acquisition (or in what he calls an “original reception”). And the fact that he would offer an answer to this question after having already made the systematic transition from the Philosophy of Nature to the Philosophy of Spirit, but before arriving at his treatment of habituation and second nature, indicates that despite his adoption of these Aristotelian ideas, he was not satisfied with the picture they offered of human animal rationality. Thus by looking at the context in which Hegel’s philosophical treatment of gestation and birth occurs, we can better grasp what Hegel has to offer us in our efforts to think through embodied spiritual life, precisely by embracing but also going beyond such Aristotelian insights.

2 The Feeling Soul We can begin with the systematically clear discussion in which the mother/child relation is first raised. This discussion contributes to the elaboration of the individual soul’s second stage, the “feeling [fühlende] soul” (Enc3 §§403–8). Hegel’s claim is that the manifold “sensations [Empfindungen]” that showed up in the first stage of the soul (the “natural soul”) are merely “singular and transient determinations, alterations in the substantiality of the soul” (Enc3 §402); if they are to count as determinations of the unitary soul-substance of one living individual, these

14

 “The human has not formed itself out of the animal” (Enc3 §339).

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various passing determinations must be brought under a “simple ideality, [a] subjectivity of sensation” (Enc3 §403).15 The speculative-dialectical development of the feeling soul is meant to display the structure of the activity in which this bringing of the one moment of the feeling soul (its “substantiality”) under the other moment (“subjectivity”) occurs. That activity is an activity of some one individual, and thus exclusive, soul, and therefore the subjectivity in question is itself exclusive. Because of this exclusivity, the activity’s overall structure is one in which the soul, qua subject-­activity, both differentiates itself from and identifies itself with the other moment, the soul’s (and thus later the subject’s own) substance.16 Hegel characterizes this self-differentiating and -identifying activity internal to the feeling soul in his usual way, as a “judgment” [Urteil]; here the substance of sensation is both the object of the feeling soul’s judging act (and thus different from the soul as the judging subject) and the predicate of the soul qua logical subject of the judgment (and thus identical to the soul in the judgment’s content). The detailed structure of this activity is then elaborated over a series of phases. In the first phase of this series, the soul-substance is immediately distinct and indeed separate from that subjectivity under which it is to be brought: it is in Hegel’s terms not merely a moment characterized by individuality [Individualität], but is an individual [Individuum]. Seen in terms of the judgment model, the subjectivity moment in this phase is separate from the “substance, which is [its] merely non-self-sufficient predicate” (Enc3 §405). Because of their separation, the substance here, though in one sense an individual, is not a proper self but only a “selflike [selbstische] individuality” or “selflikeness” [Selbstischkeit];17 and yet despite their separation, the substance is “determined” by the soul’s subjectivity “in a thoroughly unresisting way” (Enc3 §405).18 Having laid out the structure of the soul’s internal self-related activity at this stage of its (speculative) development, Hegel concludes the body of Enc3 §405 by offering an illustrative instance of this structure. On the one side is the human animal’s soul substance, the totality of its sensory determinations; on the other is the subjectivity organizing that totality into a unity. In the simplest concrete instance, the subjectivity operative in this differentiating and identifying individuality is not some moment within the soul but “another individual [Individuum],” a living individual distinct from the individual soul-substance. In very general terms, Hegel  Hegel describes this bringing-under as follows: “The task of the feeling individual is to posit its substantiality, the filling that is only in itself, to take itself into its own possession and to become the power of itself for itself” (Enc3 §403). Later we read that “[t]his substance is not the content of the soul’s natural life, except as content of the individual soul filled by sensation” (Enc3 §404) – that is, the “soul-substance” is Hegel’s name for the total sensory determinateness of the body, taken by the soul as modifications of it qua ideal unity. 16  Consider that the parallel group of sections in the 1817 Encyclopedia (GW 13) is entitled “The Opposition of the Subjective Soul over against its Substantiality.” 17  Although in contemporary usage “selbstisch” meant “selfish,” Miller’s choice here seems better to match Hegel’s intention in the passage. Compare TWA16:26 (where Hegel, via his editors, distinguishes “Selbstischkeit” from “Selbstsucht”). 18  Hegel further says that the selflikeness “shake[s]” this substance “through and through” (Enc3 §405R); on this characterization see Nancy 1984. 15

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writes, the first individuality is what his readers would have been familiar with as the “genius” [Genius] of the second (Enc3 §405). The Genius in this sense is not a comparatively insightful or brilliant thinker or artist, but the “whole range of existence, life, and character” of an individual, “not as a mere possibility or capacity or in-itself, but as effectivity [Wirksamkeit] and activity [Betätigung]” (Enc3 §405R) – that is, a given individual’s genius is the characteristic way in which that individual takes in and responds to what it confronts and what surrounds it in its existence.19 In the case in question, where the genius is a distinct living individual, one individual’s dealings with the world are given their shape by another.20 And in the shift from the body of Enc3 §405 to its appended Remark, Hegel makes his example fully concrete, saying that “in immediate existence” this doubled individuality is found actualized in “the relation of the child in the womb [Mutterleib]” with the pregnant mother: the mother is the soul-subjectivity-individual, and the gestating fetus is the soul-substance-individual, with the result that “the mother is the genius of the child” (Enc3 §405R). It would be natural to think that Hegel is simply drawing an analogy here between the physiological, somatic relation between the two bodies in gestation and the spiritual relation internal to the immediate feeling soul, using the physiological differentiation and unity on one side of the analogy to stress the spiritual or mental differentiation and unity on the other. Yet in fact it is not simply an analogy but an instance, an actualization of the very activity-structure in question  – though not within an individual mind but rather “in immediate existence,” as Hegel puts it. The non-analogical character of Hegel’s argument here is made clear when he explicitly states that the physiology of gestation, in which “the child, as embryo, exists in its particular skin, etc., and its connection with the mother is mediated through the umbilical cord, placenta, etc.,” is – although real and the basis of any number of related phenomena – not relevant to the fetus/mother relation as it appears here.21 As an instance of the relation constituting the immediate phase of the feeling soul, the mother/fetus relation is “neither solely bodily nor solely spiritual [geistig], but rather psychical [psychisch],” and “for the essential, the psychical relation, [physiology’s] sensible and material mutual externality and mediatedness has no truth” (Enc3 §405R). Thus to understand the argumentative function of gestation here – and of the later discussion of childbirth – we must understand the psychical relation in its specificity.  The contemporary literature distinguished a Genius (as tutelary spirit or character) from Genie (as a quality of the mind); see, e.g., Pierer 1816. 20  Hegel’s own examples of the Genius, beyond the one I will discuss below, center around animal magnetism or hypnosis, in which the hypnotist seems to exert this sort of influence over the hypnotized (this is the topic of Enc3 §406, and especially of Enc3 §406R(δδ)). But there is an important link between this notion of the genius and the emergence of individual subjectivity in Greece, in Hegel’s account, insofar as he identifies the Socratic δαιμόνιον as Socrates’ Genius (TWA 18:490). 21  Hegel says in this context that many effects attributed to the psychical relation between mother and fetus “can have merely organic-physiological causes” (GW 25:66; compare 25:310, reproduced in Enc3 §405Z). 19

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Hegel’s further discussion of the psychical relation in Enc3 §405R does not look helpful. In illustrating this relation, he mostly appeals to alleged (and allegedly familiar) examples of “striking impartations [Mitteilungen] and determinations fixed in the child through the violent [heftige] emotions and injuries [Verletzungen], etc. of the mother” (Enc3 §405R).22 The idea seems to be that some alterations in the fetus originate in the mother but must be explained not on purely physiological grounds but on “psychical” grounds, with the result that the fetus/mother relation provides evidence that the relevant relation is actual somewhere, and hence also possibly actual in the mind. Hegel’s discussions of this topic frequently center not around any single, determinate example but around a vaguely determined anecdote of a pregnant woman falling and injuring her arm, or fearing an arm injury, whose child is then born with the same (or the feared) injury to its arm. But he also repeatedly cites a published case in which a pregnant woman frightened by a white rabbit gave birth to fraternal twins with albinism.23 Although discussions of such phenomena and how to interpret and explain them were not uncommon in the medical literature at the time, Hegel does not help his 21st century readers much when he goes on to classify the psychical relation as a “magical” one also operative “between friends, particularly neurasthenic female friends…, spouses, [and] family members” (Enc3 §405R). We are seemingly very far indeed from transformative rationality and second nature – and perhaps headed back in the direction of angelology.

3 Interiorization and Embodiment Luckily Hegel gives us more to go on, including a theoretically robust account of the psychical relation, appearing just a few sections earlier in the Encyclopedia, where he envisions a future “proper science” called “psychical physiology” (Enc3 §401R). Hegel’s account is rooted in the deep logical connection he sees between the soul as the form of the individual animal’s living activity, on the one hand, and

 Hegel frequently concludes his citation of examples of relevant cases (whether of this relation or of closely related “magnetic” relations) by saying things like “there are infinitely many examples available” (GW 25:336; compare Enc3 §405Z). He is open to the idea that many of the phenomena pointed to in this connection are false or simply misunderstood (see note 21 above), but he insists there are also phenomena of the relevant sort that deserve serious attention. See, e.g., GW 25:675–6. 23  For Hegel’s in-class discussions of such cases, see GW 25:66ff., 310ff., and 676ff. One of his major sources on this topic in general is Hufeland 1811, 108ff.. The editors of GW 25 provide a range of further references to relevant literature at GW 25:1245ff. (including, at 25:1248, the source of the albinism case). But aside from the sources they cite, Hegel’s regular physiological authorities also endorse the general idea of explanations tying the psychological state of the mother to physiological effects on the child: see Richerand 1801–1802, II:401–2, 431–2 and Treviranus 1802–1822, 5:467, 6:29 ff. The debate over the reality of these phenomena was still active in the decade after Hegel’s death; see, for instance, the controversy in The Lancet in Winter 1838–9: [Anonymous1] 1838, Bree 1839, [Anonymous2] 1839, Burgess 1839, and Rankin 1839. For more recent research of a similar bent see, e.g., (Fan et al. 2018). 22

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as its species-form, on the other. This logical connection, in turn, links Hegel’s position to the Aristotelian ideas discussed above. In his general discussion of animal organisms, Hegel gives an account of the basic components that go into the form of any animal individual’s life, including anatomical structures and processes of self-maintenance (“Shape”), relations between the animal and its environment (“Assimilation”), and relations between one individual animal and another (“the Species Process”).24 This last grouping includes activities in which individuals relate not only to other individuals as individuals but to some of those others qua individual members of their own species, and through them to that species as such: these activities are constituted through the individual animal’s sharing a common life-form with other individuals, and thus indicate that the individual’s life-form is larger than, necessarily encompasses more than, the one individual itself.25 So, for instance, in sexual reproduction, individuals have drives aimed at other individuals qua members of their same species, and, through activities necessarily involving those other individuals, produce yet further individuals of the species.26 The species-process shows, according to Hegel, that the species is not an arbitrary abstraction of ours but is dialectically identical with the life-form of the individual itself, who is thus always an individual of a kind.27 That each stage of the “species process” includes a corresponding mode of death also highlights the reality and supra-individuality of the life-form as species-form: while (bracketing extinction) the species does not die with any one individual, the ways in which an individual’s death can come about are determined through its life-form. What kills a fly will not necessarily kill a human, and what kills a human will not necessarily kill a grizzly bear; the individual’s life-form both determines its death and extends beyond it.28 Yet despite its supra-individuality and its determinate role with respect to the animal individual, the species has natural existence only in its individual members, none of which fully actualizes the species itself. Thus the species has no real, natural existence of its own qua species at all, and so nature, insofar as it contains animal  Enc2 §§353–356, §§357–366, and §§367–376, respectively.  Enc2 §§367ff. For a discussion of this Hegelian account and its compatibility with Thompson’s related, but distinct, neo-Aristotelian account, see Rand 2016. 26  Enc2 §§369–370. Hegel does not tell us what to make of individuals who seem to attempt to engage in sexual reproductive activities with individuals not of their species, or with those of their species but of the same sex, or with things that are not living individuals. But there are a number of options open to him that are at least prima facie compatible with this general view. 27  The species process as a whole includes sub-processes by which the individual distinguishes itself from its species and others by which one species distinguishes itself from another as well. 28  “Inner universality thus remains the negative power opposed to the natural singularity of the living, from which it suffers violence and perishes; its existence as such does not have this universality in itself, and therefore is not its corresponding reality” (Enc2 §374). Although the role of death in Hegel’s conception of the individual/species relation is generally acknowledged in the literature, the fact that each subprocess of the species process is linked to a distinct form of death is perhaps not given its due. On death and negativity with respect to a recent vitalist reading of Hegel, see Rand 2021. 24 25

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individuals determined in and through the species, is not intelligible solely in terms of natural objects and their natural relations to each other qua singulars. The species is not itself a real, natural object but the unity in reference to which a very important class of such objects (the living) must be understood; as the moment at which nature organizes itself in terms of a non-natural unity, it is the threshold at which nature opens onto something beyond itself. For Hegel this fact about nature’s organization is one way in which it has spirit as its ground: nature itself is what it is in virtue of a kind of unity that cannot have natural existence and so is not properly a natural unity, but rather what Hegel wants to call a spiritual one.29 This unity, as the form of the life of a given human individual, is her soul, the form of her activity of maintaining herself, differentiating and linking herself in regular ways from and to her environment, but also from and to other individuals of her species, race, nationality, region, and family, and to and from herself, by occupying this or that stage of life (childhood, adulthood), by falling asleep and waking up, or by integrating her transitory sensations into the unity of her life.30 In the Aristotelian terms used earlier, the unity of a human life qua human species-form is what is “transformed” in relation to the genus (animal) in the transformation idea, and that same unity qua the individual soul is what is habituated into rationality in the second nature idea. What Hegel calls the “psychical relation” is tied to both of these Aristotelian ideas insofar as it is the relation holding between the soul and the living body of whose activities that soul is the unity: it captures how the transitory natural changes in the human animal’s body relate to changes in the unity of its life-form. As she lives her life, the individual organizes her body in its natural, physiological diversity and self-externality under the unity of her life-form. But insofar as the soul is not a distinct entity but just the form or unity of the living human body, it too changes when the activities of the body it organizes change, and so in the individual’s living, both the soul as unity and the body unified in it change over time.31 Hegel therefore distinguishes two basic logical directions of the psychical relation: when the unity of the soul is altered in response to a physiological change, this is an interiorization (Erinnerung); when the bodily activity is altered in response to a change in the unity, this is an embodiment (Verleiblichung).32 Oversimplifying a bit, and treating anxiety as a determination of the soul, we can think of interiorization as what happens when, for instance, I feel anxious because my heart rate is elevated (perhaps because I drank yet another espresso), and of embodiment as what happens when,

 “Nature has thereby transitioned into its truth, into the subjectivity of the concept, whose objectivity is itself the sublated immediacy of singularity, is concrete universality, such that the concept is posited that has its corresponding reality, the concept, as its existence, – spirit” (Enc2 §376). 30  See Enc3 §§393–4 on the subdivisions of the species between it and the individual. 31  “What the sensing soul finds in itself is on the one hand the naturally immediate, as made ideal in it and appropriated by it. On the other hand that which belongs originally to being-for-self… is conversely determined to natural bodiliness and so is sensed” (Enc3 §401). 32  I call interiorization and embodiment “logical directions” to emphasize that they are not causal; the soul, like the species, is not itself a natural object but a form of unity of such objects. It is therefore not strictly itself an efficient cause or effect. 29

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for instance, my heart rate goes up because I’m anxious (perhaps because the prosecutor just rose to begin cross-examining me). More robustly we might say that it is my grasping that the prosecutor has stood up (interiorization) that leads to my anxiety and in turn to my elevated heart rate (embodiment), while the tedium of grading induces the fatigue (embodiment) that leads to the coffee that raises my heart rate and in turn my anxiety (interiorization). According to Hegel the psychical relation so described characterizes all the stages of the soul’s speculative development, meaning that the self-relation constitutive of specifically human animal life is actualized in an activity of both embodiment and interiorization.33 The feeling soul in its immediacy thus also has the structure of a psychical relation, and we are now in a position to understand the Remark to Enc3 §405 as claiming that this very same psychical relation relates the pregnant mother to the gestating fetus.34 What Hegel tells us there is that the fetus and mother stand in “undivided soul-unity,” but that in this unity, the mother is a full-fledged, already-existing self and also “the single self of both,” while the fetus is “unresisting.” The fetus is a living individual (Individuum) but lacking “individuality [Individualität]”35 precisely because it does not organize its own activities into an independent totality: it has as of yet no soul properly so called, but is organized by the mother’s living activity. The determinations of her soul (whether perceptual or otherwise) can thus alter the bodily organization of the fetus. And since the mother’s soul organizes not only the unity of her own life activity but also that of the fetus, the embodiment in which the fetus’ body is altered is determined by alterations of the mother’s soul, not of its own (as yet nonexistent) soul. On this basis Hegel claims that changes or disruptions in the mother’s soul – whether originating there as embodiments (of, e.g., “violent emotions”) or in some bodily trauma or impression (“injuries”) she has interiorized – can end up embodied not only in her body but in the fetus. In the cases Hegel refers to, the mother’s sensations are overwhelming and their interiorization demands relief through embodiment, yet they are somehow too much for her to unify in a way that limits their embodiment to her own individuality: her fright, for instance, is embodied not just in her body but in the entirety of the living activity she organizes, and thus also in the body of the fetus. But the fetus’ body, less formed, less habituated, and less hardened than hers, is deeply altered more easily, and an embodiment that is only transitory in the latter can be permanent in the former.36

 Hegel points out that the pole of these psychical processes assigned here to being-for-self as the soul is occupied at later stages by “the I of consciousness and free spirit” (Enc3 §401). 34  “The mother is to be seen here as the genius, as the feeling selfhood of the child… which accordingly embraces and realizes itself in the child” (GW 25:676). 35  “Thus [the individual’s] selflike individuality is a subject distinct from it” (Enc3 §405). 36  Hegel also holds that the mother’s susceptibility to fright and other stressors is due to her being pregnant; see GW 25:66. 33

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4 Birth From the interpretive position we have achieved, Hegel’s claim  – that the fetus/ mother relation instantiates, in “immediate existence,” the feeling soul’s inner spiritual structure – is intelligible enough, at least on his own terms. And with the concept of the psychical relation in view, we can use Hegel’s account of the fetus/ mother relation to make sense of the relation of the soul-substance to the subjectivity or ideality organizing it. Lastly, if we accept Hegel’s characterization of someone’s “Genius” as the individual determinateness of their subjectivity or ideality treated as though it were an entity distinct from them, then it is not hard to decode the claim that “the mother is the genius of the child.” The mother, in all her individual determinacy, provides the unity through which the living activity in the fetus is organized. And to the extent that the psychical relation describes a structure of activity characteristic of our transformed animality and of all processes of the soul, including the habituation into second nature, this Hegelian example fits into a picture of the human animal compatible with the Aristotelian ideas of transformation and second nature. But Hegel somewhat typically will not let us stay put at this moment of compatibility and instead pushes the discussion of his illustration, and his philosophical claims, farther. Having laid out the fetus/mother relation as an instance of the relation constituting the feeling soul in its immediacy, he moves on rather brusquely: the real philosophical interest of the psychical fetus/mother relation, he claims, lies not in the phenomena of maternal traumatic embodiment during gestation but in the “psychical judgment [Urteil] of the substance, in which the womanly nature, like monocotyledons in the plant kingdom, can break itself in two within itself [in sich entzweibrechen]” (Enc3 §405R).37 What is described by the phrase “psychical judgment of the substance” is evidently not the embodiment of strong emotions or impressions, for in these it is e.g., the fetus’s arm, not the mother’s substance, that is broken. Nor can this judgment be the moment of fertilization of the ovum, which Hegel describes not as a breaking in two but in just the opposite way, as “the contraction of the whole individual in the simple self-abandoning unity [sich hingebende Einheit]” such that “conception is thus nothing but this, that what is opposed… become one.”38 The “psychical judgment of the substance” is rather the act of giving birth. As we have seen, Hegel at times distinguishes between the fetus as a substance and the mother as a distinct substance. But he also treats them as having a single substance, presumably precisely because the one subjectivity of the mother

 Hegel sometimes follows Aristotle in ascribing a kind of plant-like nature to women (e.g., PR §166Z); here the comparison to plants is designed to pick out a different feature than those general comparisons, a feature of only one sort of plant, the monocotyledons (on which see, e.g., GW 24:151–2, 902). In this general connection see Allison Stone’s discussions of Hegel on gender and the politics of the “vegetal state” in (Stone 2021) along with Enc2 §§280Z, 345Z, and 346Z2. 38  GW 8:174 – from the Jena period drafts, but incorporated into Enc2 §368Z. 37

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organizes both at once (and because it is this organization that enables their substantial unity and endurance). Thus in his lectures Hegel asserts that in the womb, “there is only one substance of both” mother and fetus (GW25:310); the fetus is “is like a member [Glied] of the mother” and “is only … an accident” of her (GW 25:677).39 It is this one substance that the mother breaks in two in childbirth  – a breaking explicitly described as “psychical,” signalling that what matters about it is not the physiological process of birth alone (which we share in a generic way with many other mammals) but that the event of birth is (also) determined by the mother’s spiritual determinacy, by her rationality, by the fact that she is already constituted in and through the characteristically human self-relation. In gestation the fetus thus shares not only the species form but the second-nature natural spiritual individuality of the mother, so that when it comes to the psychical judgment of birth, the mother’s “dispositions both to illness and also to shape, sensibility, character, talents, idiosyncrasies, etc., do not get communicated [mitgeteilt]” to the child, as though it were already an independently existent individual, but it “rather has received them originally in itself [ursprünglich in sich empfangen hat]” (Enc3 §405R).40 In other words, what has happened in childbirth is not a transmission from one existent individual to another but the splitting of a single individually characteristic form of embodiment and interiorization, a single soul, in two. The list Hegel gives us of what is received in the “original reception” includes both the bodily characteristics (dispositions to illness and to bodily shape) and the soul characteristics (character, talent, idiosyncrasies) he had earlier detailed in his description of the racial, national, and familial determinacy of the individual soul.41 What the newborn “has received… originally in itself” is thus the individualized self-relation constitutive of the mother’s own soul. And in specifying that these determinations are not communicated to the fetus qua distinct previously existent individual, Hegel blocks any interpretation of this event on which the fetus already has its own spiritual self-relation, whether generic or individualized, that then gets the mother’s self-relation imposed on it. Rather, the fetus has no spiritual self-relation at all, and thus no soul, until, in the mother’s self-division in childbirth, the child emerges with the mother’s Genius as truly its own.42 Thus in terms of the transformation idea, the characteristically human self-relation through which the human’s animality is “transformed” from generic animality is not present from conception, nor even the moment before birth, but “originally received” by the fetus in and through birth.

 See also GW 25:310: “The child is merely a feeling subject, not self-sufficient, is the mode [Modus] of another, of a true subject.” 40  Hegel’s word here, “empfangen,” is the German word for fertilization or conception, with the result that although the act of psychical judgment is parturition, it is partly described in the language of impregnation. 41  See the discussion of “natural qualities” in Enc3 §§392–395. Although Hegel attaches spiritual importance to sexual characteristics he treats them not as such qualities but as “natural alterations” (Enc3 §§396 ff.). 42  See GW 25:65: “In itself, it lives spiritually [geistig] but its soul still lives in the mother, cannot yet be for-itself….” 39

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Moreover, according to Hegel this determinate self-relation makes up the “first-­ nature” basis of what the process of habituation will later develop into second nature. The mother’s genius originally received by the child in the psychical judgment of childbirth “not only contains the for-itself unconscious disposition [Naturell] and temperament” with which the child begins its life, but “sustains (in habituation, see below) all further bonds and essential relations… within its enclosing simplicity” (Enc3 §405A). Thus Hegel proposes childbirth as the act through which the child “originally receives” its spiritual self-relation and is thereby transformed into a rational animal, and at the same time as the act making possible the habituation process through which that self-relation is developed into our natural and yet normative second nature.43

5 Concluding Remarks Close attention to Hegel's apparently passing appeal to the mother/fetus relation and childbirth thus reveals that he seeks to bind together the transformation idea and the second nature idea, but without identifying transformation and second nature – that is, without claiming that it is in the process of acquiring her second nature that a human’s rationality transforms her animal capacities. This binding is accomplished by an act that is neither purely spiritual nor purely physiological: parturition as an act of “psychical judgment.” Hegel’s proposal raises a number of questions. We can start with the question of its methodological grounding, and in particular the justification for moving from a discussion of gestation to one of birth. It has turned out that despite appearances, Hegel’s discussion of childbirth is not simply an extension of his gestation example, for gestation exemplifies the feeling soul in its immediacy, a variety of enduring unity, while childbirth is, in Hegel’s own terms, an act of diremption or splitting. Nor does birth serve, like gestation does, as an instance in “immediate existence” of a process or relation also present within the soul. Thus what seems initially to justify the move from gestation to birth is not some conceptual isomorphism between them, or between them and the feeling soul, but just the biological fact that birth comes after gestation. To that extent the logic followed is not speculative-dialectical but natural. Yet at the same time, Hegel claims that his discussion of childbirth is motivated by its relatively greater philosophical, and thus spiritual, interest – presumably, the interest inherent in an act whose outcome is the production of a rational being, an instance of spirit. The move from the gestation case to the birth case can thus itself be understood to obey a specifically psychical logic, in the sense of a logic that articulates the passage between the purely spiritual-­ philosophical and the purely physiological – and to that extent, the method of exposition and its object coincide.  Notably Hegel’s catalog of what the child and mother share includes some habit-related dispositions but excludes, e.g., skills. The individual form of the basic human self-relation seems to rank among the former not the latter. 43

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A further question raised by Hegel’s strategy here is that of the character of the mother’s act of parturition. As Hegel describes it, birth is clearly neither simple maturation or growth of either mother or fetus, nor the natural, concrete transformation of an individual animal of one species into an individual of some other species, nor the transformation of some generically animal individual into a specifically human animal individual. It is instead the transformation of an individual [Individuum] lacking individuality [Individualität] – the fetus – into an individual enjoying individuality – the specific self-relation constitutive of humanity, initially in the individual form that self-relation took in its mother.44 Because for Hegel plants are precisely living things lacking individuality in the proper sense45 – the sense enjoyed by animals – Hegel frequently characterizes the fetus as plantlike;46 it is a plantlike thing that gets transformed, through a psychical maternal power Hegel also likens to plants, into an essentially rational animal. The identification of the plantlike power transforming the plantlike fetus into the human newborn not only purports to locate, in the mother’s own constitutively human self-relation, the self-­ relation constitutive of the newborn’s humanity, but also the basis upon which the newborn will develop his own second nature. Indeed, the newborn’s first nature, destined itself to be transformed through habituation, is just this “originally received” second nature of the mother. In this way the role Hegel assigns to childbirth seems to unite in that act the transformation idea and the second nature idea, though now both seem also altered to a point of incompatibility with their Aristotelian cousins. The purely abstract and static transformation idea is assigned to a determinate process, even if the elements and nature of that process – fetus, mother, and psychical judgment – appear here in starkly unfamiliar form as the transformation of a plantlike individual into a human animal. And the second nature idea is here robbed of its intended naturalism, insofar as its starting-point in an at least notional first nature is now thoroughly mediated through the specifically psychical, and thus no longer merely natural, determinedness of the newborn. Not only is the newborn’s first nature the mother’s second nature, but the sort of birth a human can have is itself conditioned on the mother’s being a human and thus being such as to have a second nature. And to the extent that the transformation of our animality by our humanity occurs in such a birth, second

44  On Hegel’s account the newborn is still organized by the material Genius dwelling within the mother, rather than by his own instance of it, although this relation is now mediated: “The child who lies on her mother’s breast is also affected by the anger of the mother; this is something mediated, for the gall passes into the milk and thus the child drinks unhealthy milk” (GW 25:676, and compare similar claims about wet nurses in the alternate passages to lines 4-8 of that same page, along with Enc3 §405Z). 45  This is in a sense the single controlling theme of Hegel’s discussion of plant life (Enc2 §§343–349). 46  “The first stage is the child as such; at first it has its animal life as a plant; it has as yet no individuality” (GW 25;47; compare Enc2 §369Z); birth is “that enormous leap out of the vegetative life in the womb into the light” (GW 25:249, see also 622); “The child is still hidden in a wholly vegetative way in itself, immediately after birth it shows itself to be human” (GW 25: 622).

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nature doesn’t (only) presuppose or depend upon transformation, but is (also) itself the precondition for it.47 Hegel’s view thus turns out to be that the transformation idea and the second nature idea are neither about different things nor merely two sides of the same coin but are instead dialectically unified, distinguishable but inseparable, both conceptually in terms of their systematic development and concretely in terms of the not merely natural but “psychical” process characterizing the human. Their unity in birth occupies a systematic position between their respective distinct articulations in the transition from the Philosophy of Nature to the Philosophy of Spirit (for transformation) and in the treatment of habituation (for second nature). But although this unity is given a familiar name and tied to a familiar human act – an act Hegel frequently draws on for figuring crucial moments of his thought as moments of birth, rebirth, and second birth – it is described in terms that are themselves seemingly at odds with its status as a unity, as when it is described as an “enormous leap” or when we are told that in childbirth, the mother “breaks herself in two within herself.”48 Yet this way of talking – according to which the specific difference of the human animal and the process in which that animal becomes itself by altering itself into itself are unified in a leap or a break – is entirely of a piece with a host of other Hegelian characterizations of humanity and spirit, for instance as that which becomes other than animal in knowing itself to be an animal, or as that animal whose life is a constant process of negating its animality.49 In the end it may be that we must look to such negations, rather than to the lively charms of vitalist positivity, to understand what Hegel specifically has to offer us.50

References Anonymous1. 1838. Malformations and Their Causes. The Lancet 31 (799): 489–490. Anonymous2. 1839. Report on the Meeting of the Westminster Medical Society. The Lancet 31 (807): 771–773. Boyle, Matthew. 2012. Essentially Rational Animals. In Berlin Studies in Knowledge Research, vol. 2, ed. Günter Abel and James Conant, 395–428. Berlin: De Gruyter.

 Thus while it can seem that Hegel’s position on birth simply assimilates the whole process back into the transformation idea, by proposing – as it seems to do – that human animals give birth in a way wholly distinct from the process of birth in nonhuman animals, in fact the role of second nature in making it possible for a given human animal individual to give birth in the human way makes such assimilation impossible. 48  “Birth is a leap (saltus), not a merely gradual change” (GW 25:622 alternate passage to lines 5–14). 49  GW 25:12, 180–1, 194–5, 579, 586, 593, 637, 737, among others. 50  GW 25:16: “Furthermore… spirit can give itself each determination, it can tolerate infinite pain. To determine means nothing other than to posit a difference in oneself. This is the Urteil, this eternal absolute dividing. To determine oneself means to divide oneself, to posit a negation, to posit another. I am the universal, in that I determine myself, posit a negation against myself.” 47

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———. 2016. Additive Theories of Rationality: A Critique. European Journal of Philosophy 24 (3): 527–555. Bree, C.R. 1839. Letter to the Editor: Malformation of the Foetus. The Lancet 31 (806): 742–743. Burgess, T. 1839. Letter to the Editor. The Lancet 31 (808): 824. DeVries, Willem. 1988. Hegel’s Theory of Mental Activity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Fan, Fenling, et  al. 2018. The Relationship between Maternal Anxiety and Cortisol during Pregnancy and Birth Weight of Chinese Neonates. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth 18: 265–271. Gobsch, Wolfram. 2017. In ‘Der Mensch als Widerspruch und absolutes Wissen.‘ In Selbstbewusstes Leben: Texte zu einer transformativen Theorie menschlicher Subjektivität, ed. Andrea Kern and Christian Kietzmann, 120–172. Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp. Haase, Matthias. 2013. Life and Mind. In The Freedom of Life: Hegelian Perspectives, ed. Thomas Khurana, 69–109. Berlin: August-Verlag. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. [GW] 1964 passim. Gesammelte Werke. Edited by the Nordrhein-­ Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Hamburg: Meiner. – Frühe Schriften. Teil I, GW 1. – Frühe Schriften. Teil II, GW 2. – Jenaer Systementwürfe III, GW 8. – Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1817), GW 13. – Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, GW 14. – Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830), GW 20. – Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Natur, GW 24. – Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des subjektiven Geistes, GW 25. – Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, GW 27. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. [TWA] 1970a. Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Ed. K.M. Michel and E. Moldenhauer. Frankfurt a.M.: Surhkamp. – Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion I, TWA 16. –Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie I, TWA 18. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. [Enc2] 1970b. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. Ed. M. J. Petry, 3 vols. London: Allen & Unwin (references are to section numbers followed by R for Remarks/ Anmerkungen and Z for Additions/Zusätze) [=GW 20 (Zusätze in GW 24,3), =TWA 9]. ———. [Enc3] 2007. Philosophy of Mind. Being Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), Together with the Zusätze. Ed. M. J. Inwood. Trans. W. Wallace and A. V. Miller with Revisions and Commentary by M. J. Inwood. Oxford: Clarendon Press (references are to section numbers followed by R for Remarks/Anmerkungen and Z for Additions/Zusätze) [=GW 20 (Zusätze in GW 25,2), TWA 10]. ———. [PR] 1991. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Trans. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (references are to sections followed by R for Remarks/Anmerkungen and Z for Additions/Zusätze) [=GW 14, TWA 7]. Hufeland, Friedrich. 1811. Über Sympathie. Weimar: Landes-Industrie-Comptoir. Khurana, Thomas. 2017. Das Leben der Freiheit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Lindberg, Susanna. 2010. Womanlife or Lifework and Psycho-technique. In Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone? ed. Kimberly Hutchins and Tuija Pulkkinen, 177–194. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. Malabou, Catherine. 1996. L’Avenir de Hegel. Paris: Vrin. McCumber, John. 1990. Hegel on Habit. Owl of Minerva 21 (2 Spring): 155–165. McDowell, John. 1996. Mind and World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Merker, Barbara. 2012. Embodied Normativity. Critical Horizons 13 (2): 154–175. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1984. Identité et tremblement. In Hypnoses, ed. Mikkel Borch Jacobsen et al., Paris: Galilée, 13–52. Translated as: Identity and Trembling. In The Birth to Presence. 9–35, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Novakovic, Andreja. 2017. Hegel on Second Nature in Ethical Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Pierer, Johann Friedrich. 1816. Medizinisches Realwörterbuch. Abt. 1/Bd. 1, Leipzig: Brockhaus. Pinkard, Terry. 2011. Hegel’s Naturalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017. Does History Make Sense? Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rand, Sebastian. 2016. What’s Wrong with Rex? European Journal of Philosophy 23 (1): 68–86. ———. 2021. The Logic of Life: Apriority, Singularity, and Death in Ng’s Vitalist Hegel. Hegel Bulletin 42 (3): 430–453. Rankin, D.R. 1839. Letter to the Editor: The Influence of the Imagination on the Foetus in Utero. The Lancet 31 (809): 835–836. Rath, Norbert. 1996. Zweite Natur. Münster: Waxmann. Richerand, Anthelme. 1801–1802. Nouveaux élémens de physiologie, 2 volumes. Paris: Richard, Caille, et Ravier. Stederoth, Dirk. 2001. Hegels Philosophie des subjektiven Geistes. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Stone, Allison. 2021. Nature, Ethics, and Gender in German Romanticism and Idealism. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Thompson, Michael. 2013. In Forms of Nature, ed. In Freiheit, Gunnar Hindrichs, and Axel Honneth, 701–735. Frankfurt a. M: Klostermann. Treviranus, Gottfried. 1802–1822. Biologie. Göttingen: Röwer.

The Physical Body and Its Role in Hegel’s Mature Ethical Theory Thimo Heisenberg

Much attention has been paid to the role that Hegel, in his mature ethical theory, attributes to what he calls the social or political body i.e. the institutions of the social order (e.g. PR § 276 Z1). Indeed, commentators have focused on what configurations of those institutions he deems rational (e.g. Wood 1990, 195–208; Hardimon 1994, 174–227; Neuhouser 2000, 114–174) and what kind of relationships individuals are meant to take up towards the social institutions that they inhabit (e.g. Neuhouser 2000, 225–282, Moyar 2011, 174–208). Commentators have also, in many cases, made those kinds of Hegelian views an object of sustained critique, pointing out that Hegel’s preferred institutional arrangements within the social body are problematic and old-fashioned, or that his vision of an individual’s relationship to the social body might leave insufficient room for self-expression and critique (e.g. Tugendhat 1986, 317; Hardimon 1994, 228–250). Ironically, by comparison, much less attention has been paid to what role our literal, physical body plays in the same ethical theory.2 As a consequence, many insightful passages in the Philosophy of Right (e.g. PR § 40A, §§ 47–48, § 57) and his Encyclopedia (e.g. Enc. III § 410–412), that speak to Hegel’s ethical perspective on the physical body, have gone by without the same level of attention from

 In this paper, I cite Hegel’s works in the way indicated in the bibliography. All translations are my own, although I have profited from consulting the Nisbet translation of the Philosophy of Right. 2  This is especially surprising, since Hegel’s earlier, pre-systematic ethics of the body – coming out of his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit– has always intrigued commentators. For this see e.g. Malabou and Butler 2011, Russon 2001. I will not, in this paper, take up the thorny task of asking the question how these earlier views relate to Hegel’s later views, since this would entangle us in the complicated issue of the relationship between the Phenomenology and the later system. 1

T. Heisenberg (*) Rice University, Houston, TX, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Corti, J.-G. Schülein (eds.), Life, Organisms, and Human Nature, Studies in German Idealism 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_12

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commentators that is usually extended to other parts of the text. If Hegel’s mature ethical theory of the physical body comes up at all (e.g. Knowles 2002, 113; Peperzak  2001, 239–242), it is usually only as a brief aside in the discussion of Hegel’s theory of private property, that then fades quickly from view.3 This paper is an attempt to level the scale, by reconstructing Hegel’s ethical theory of the physical body from the Philosophy of Right and the Encyclopedia (in its final, 1830 version).4 Hegel’s leading thesis here, I argue, is that developing and maintaining a good relationship with one’s physical body is not only rather demanding, but also requires the right kind of social institutions – and that absent the right kind of social institutions, individuals will (for the most part) be unable to see and to treat their body in the right kind of way. Achieving a good relationship to their body, hence, is something that individuals cannot just do on their own, on Hegel’s view, but something that requires them to collaborate with others, creating and sustaining social institutions that help them be at home in their bodies. I will bring out this Hegelian view in two larger steps. In the first step (Sect. 1), I analyze how – in principle – a good relationship between an individual and their physical body looks like, according to Hegel, and why this relationship is rather demanding. In the second step (Sect. 2), I show how developing and maintaining such a relationship, for Hegel, requires the right kind of social institutions – and that, without such institutions in place, individuals will be, for the most part, unable to see and treat their bodies in an appropriate way. I conclude (Sect. 3) with a few observations on the contemporary significance of Hegel’s late ethics of the physical body. I argue that this significance lies in the challenge Hegel’s view poses to our contemporary conceptions: while we today tend to see the process of successfully navigating the relationship to our own body as something we have to accomplish on our own, Hegel pushes us to see that it requires collective action and the creation of the right kind of social world. Before I begin, however, one remark on how this present paper connects to the larger arch of this volume on nature (and its relationship to spirit). After all: at least on the face of it, the words ‘nature’ and ‘spirit’ are rarely uttered in the context of this paper, and so one might wonder about what, precisely, the paper is contributing to this volume. But, on second glance, the connection here should be obvious: our own physical body is the most immediate and the most intimate piece of nature that we encounter. Understanding the late Hegel’s view of how individuals will develop a good relationship to this piece of nature within themselves, is therefore a core component of understanding Hegel’s view of the relationship of human agency to

 It deserves to be said that the lack of interest in the ethical perspective on the body, that Hegel’s later philosophy provides, does not extend to the theoretical perspective on the body that we find in the same texts. Commentators have, for example, been interested in the solution to the MindBody problem Hegel presents here (Dien Winfield 2011, 227–242) or have scrutinized Hegel’s remarks on the body from the perspective of Hegel’s philosophical anthropology (Greene 1972). 4  I will also sometimes reference the various Mit– und Nachschriften of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which were produced by Hegel’s students during his lectures: but only to adduce further evidence and illustration, never to overrule Hegel’s own published word. 3

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nature – which, in turn, is a core component of what Hegel calls the relationship of spirit to nature. In that way, I hope that this paper makes a contribution to a larger project by starting at a particular intimate, immediate and important place.

1 Individuals and the Physical Body: Three Models What constitutes a good (or ethical) relationship between individuals and their bodies? Of course: individuals all have a body and so they have to relate to it in some ways. But exactly what kind of activities, attitudes and other conditions make this relationship a good or ethical one is not immediately clear. To what extent, for example, do individuals have an ethical responsibility to preserve their bodies? To develop its potentials and abilities? To affirm, consciously or even reflectively, its characteristics?  – In the following, I want to canvas no less than three potential answers to this set of questions in order to see, ultimately, which answer Hegel endorses. On a first potential view, a good relationship to one’s body has fairly minimal demands. On this kind of account, our body is mostly the realm of our own personal choice: as long as we preserve its organic functioning (and e.g. refrain from engaging in any direct or indirect bodily self-harm), we can do whatever we decide.5 This type of view, indeed, is often motivated by the intuition of a significant ethical asymmetry between our body and the body of others: whereas in the latter case there are significant ethical constraints as to what we may do, these kinds of constraints do not exist in the same way in our bodily self-relation. So, while the body of others is the subject of various, weighty ethical constraints (e.g. we may not interfere in it without consent etc.), there is less ethical constraints vis-a-vis one’s own body. Does Hegel, in his Philosophy of Right and Encyclopedia, agree with this kind of minimalist view? On a very first glance, one might think that he does. After all: In the Abstract Right section of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel indeed discusses the body as a piece of property (PR § 48; VPR Wannenmann, 47; VPR Homeyer, 226): and property, as readers of Hegel know well, is  – at least in some significant respects – a sphere of the realization of our individual choice or of our Belieben (PR § 59) (for an insightful discussion of Hegel’s conception of property, see Knowles 1983, Patten 2002, 139–162, Knowles 2002, 107–138). But this impression is misleading. While Hegel does think that individual choice has some role to play in our bodily self-relationship, the Philosophy of Right also makes very clear – in contrast to the ‘minimalist’ view that I described above – that this choice is subject to a variety of significant ethical constraints. These ethical constraints stem from the fact that the body is the central gateway for our freedom

 There is a long tradition in philosophy that is indeed skeptical of any ethical limits towards the self, see e.g. Singer 1959, 202–205; Williams 1985, 202. 5

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(PR § 47–48, Enc. III § 410Z): not only the first and most immediate sphere in which our will comes to be actualized, but also and at the same time the sphere through which the will actualizes itself in the outside world. Executing any chosen end, let alone executing any truly self-chosen end, therefore depends on a carefully calibrated bodily self-relationship, through which the self (and its will) can determinately manifest itself in the body and, through the body, in the world. To put this into Hegel’s own language: the ‘activity of the will, which consists in resolving the contradiction of subjectivity and objectivity and to translate its ends from the former to the latter’ (PR § 28) is predicated on the body as its main point of translation. The subject therefore needs to engage in a bodily self-relationship that effects a ‘subjection of the body through the soul’ (Enc. III § 410Z), which itself is a ‘condition of becoming free (Bedingung des Freiwerdens)’ (Ibid.). And such a carefully calibrated bodily self-relationship does not merely demand that we preserve our body’s organic functioning (Enc III § 410Z, cf. PR § 47, VPR Hoppe, 61)  – which even the aforementioned ‘minimal’ view would probably grant – but also, and more demandingly, that we develop our bodily talents, with the purpose of making our body into a more accurate tool for the will (PR § 48, § 57; Enc. III § 410Z, VPR Hoppe, 63). After all: even a body that is perfectly well-­ maintained (and is not deprived of any essential resources for its organic functioning), can only guarantee a faithful translation of ends depending on its general physical abilities. Developing e.g. our dexterity or honing our strength – within, of course, the limits of our talents  – becomes an exercise in self-emancipation, on Hegel’s view. Hegel expresses this line of thought in the Encyclopedia, where he explicitly makes the case that the requirements of a good relationship to one’s body go beyond the mere maintaining of its organic functionality, since ‘the soul cannot stop in this immediate unity with its body’ (Enc. III § 410Z). Instead, the agent needs to train and develop the body such that it turns into ‘a pliable and dexterous tool of its [i.e. the agent’s] activity’ (Ibid.), a process that requires a development and formation of one’s physical talents: ‘If I want to actualize my ends, I have to make my body able, to transform the subjective into external objectivity. But it does not do this by nature […] it has to be formed (gebildet) for this purpose’ (Ibid). In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel also compares this process of bodily self-formation to the act of truly taking possession of one’s body, since it is only through this process of formation that the body becomes faithfully expressive of my will and, hence, transforms from something that merely belongs to me into something that is truly my own. Here is the Philosophy of Right: ‘The body, in its immediate existence, is not adequate to the spirit; to become its pliable tool (williges Organ) and soulful means, it needs to be taken into possession’ (PR § 48) – And how is it that we take possession of our body? ‘It is only by developing my body […] that I take possession of myself’ (PR § 57, my emphasis). All this might make us think that Hegel, taking on board what we have just heard from the Encyclopedia and the Philosophy of Right, endorses a second possible view. On this second view, the conditions of a good bodily self-relationship are more extensive than on the minimal view previously canvassed. Instead, on this

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second view, a good relationship to our body demands that we relate to our body, in some sense, as if it was a working animal that we rely on for business (e.g. a horse that tills our acre): above and beyond merely maintaining it (and e.g. abstaining from damaging it), this relationship entails that we ‘train’ its talents, thereby making it into a compliant tool for our freely chosen ends. Does Hegel hold this view? The answer, importantly, is ‘No’. To see why this is so requires a bit of circuitous explanation: As Hegel frequently emphasizes (e.g. Enc. III §410Z), it is worth reminding ourselves that, even if individuals conscientiously preserve their body and develop its talents, their bodily characteristics will still imply some determinate physical limits: our bodies have, even with training and care, only a certain amount of strength, only a certain amount of dexterity, and only a certain amount of time that they last. And those physical limits might seem to impose, or so at least one might think on first glance, some severe and inevitable limitations on our will (see also Enc. III § 412 Z). After all: by circumscribing the extent of what we can do, our body seems to severely limit the ends that we can rationally set for ourselves, thereby (or so it appears) putting severe bounds around our agency. As Hegel acknowledges in the Encylopedia (Enc. III § 410 Z), it is against the background of these seemingly inevitable limitations to our agency that it is easy for individuals to develop a negative evaluative attitude towards their body: an attitude on which they see their own embodiment as, overall, a constraint on their freedom and as something that they would not choose, if they had a choice. Indeed, Hegel describes this kind of view as a view on which ‘it would be better, if the human being had no organic body’ (Ibid.), simply because ‘the body coerces [the human being] to care for his physical needs, thereby pulling him away from his purely spiritual life, and making him unable to have true freedom’ (Ibid., my emphasis). But Hegel emphatically pushes back against this view in the very same paragraph (Ibid.). For him, this negative evaluative attitude betrays a fundamentally mistaken perspective that is built on a dual misunderstanding: for one, this negative evaluative attitude overlooks that having physical limits is a necessary corollary of being determinate (all determination requires negation, after all, as Hegel reminds the reader e.g. in PR § 6 Z). Without a physical body that is, at least in some ways, limited and thus clearly defined, our agency would lack a determinate starting point and, with it, access to determinate self-realization in the finite world. But even more importantly: it is not only that these limits are necessary, it is also true that these bodily limits do not have to inevitably inhibit our agency – that physical limits do not have to equate to limits on our will. This is because, in genuinely cooperative contexts, the effects of bodily limits on our agency can be neutralized and overcome. In such contexts, after all, individuals pool their powers for the sake of a mutually shared end – thereby helping each other overcome their individual limits by sharing each other’s abilities and possibilities. Mortality, for example, becomes a much less severe constraint on our agency, once we take into account that we can actualize our will e.g. in shared projects through which we can influence the world long after our physical death (for this, see e.g. PR § 324, PR § 151Z, for a more detailed discussion see Heisenberg 2021).

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Hence, the negative evaluative view of the physical body goes dually wrong and reveals itself as ‘hollow’ (Enc. III § 410Z): it overlooks that physical limits are necessary for determinate agency, and that – at the same time – they are not inevitably limiting for that agency. The true view of the value of our body is, hence, not a negative one, but a positive one: a view on which we embrace the body, including its physical limits, for the role it plays in enabling our freedom. Indeed, Hegel thinks that this worth and dignity of the physical body is already recognized in simple religious consciousness. Hegel writes, referencing the plea for ‘our daily bread’ in the Lord’s Prayer: ‘This hollow view [that the body is an obstacle to our freedom – TH] is already recognized as such by the innocently religious human being, who deems the satisfaction of his bodily needs worthy to become an object of his plea towards God, the eternal spirit’ (Ibid.). It is against this background that we can see why Hegel’s view of a good bodily self-relationship goes beyond the aforementioned second view (on which we have to merely maintain and train our body). Instead, Hegel endorses what I take to be a third view: on this view, a good relationship to our bodies does not merely demand that we maintain the bodies’ organic functioning and develop its talents – but also that we develop a positive evaluation towards our bodily characteristics (incl. the physical limits they entail), thereby coming to embrace our body consciously and affirmatively. What this reveals, then, is that Hegel’s view is an ethically rather demanding one, particularly when compared with the ‘minimalist’ view with which we started. For Hegel, our own body is not a sphere for our arbitrariness (i.e. for our Belieben), but it is something we have to wholistically respect as the gateway of our freedom: something whose functioning we do not only have to maintain, but whose capabilities we have to enhance and whose limits we need to embrace. This, of course, immediately brings us to the question how, if ever, individuals can meet these demanding conditions of a good bodily self-relationship.

2 Society and the Physical Body: The Social Conditions of Our Bodily Self-Relationship So: how are individuals are supposed to actually achieve or maintain this kind of relationship to their body? How can individuals meet these kinds of standards? Answering this question will require us to attend to three points. To start with the first, and most important, point: Hegel holds the view that, for the most part, individuals will require the help of social institutions to develop or maintain a good relationship to their physical bodies. This general claim is already implicit in Hegel’s insistence that a good bodily self-relationship is a crucial ‘condition of becoming free (Bedingung des Freiwerdens)’ (Enc. III § 410Z) in conjunction with Hegel’s view, prominent in the Philosophy of Right, that the right kind of social order is, by and large, required to actualize the necessary conditions of our freedom

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(PR § 242 and passim.). Hegel, in his texts, also formulates this thought from a different perspective: given that, absent the right relationship to their physical body, individuals lack a certain level of freedom, the social order is required to help them to ‘retrieve from their natural and contingent circumstances […] the infinity of their will’ (VPR Wannenmann, 90), leading them to a state where their natural condition is ‘deprived of its coercive force’ (PR § 324). But what argument might be behind this view? Hegel is not explicit here, but – given what we have already seen about Hegel’s view of the relationship between self and body – the following argument should be attributed to him: Hegel thinks that all three central conditions of a good bodily self-relationship (i.e. organic maintenance, development of one’s physical talents, positive evaluative attitude towards one’s body) are, on a practical level, too demanding for individuals to reliably realize without social support. Absent that kind of support  – and left to their own devices, if you will – individuals will only be able to realize these conditions sporadically or with great difficulty, if at all. We can see this already when we think just of organic maintenance and the development of one’s physical talents (i.e. the first two conditions): maintaining one’s body and developing one’s talents takes resources, time and opportunities, and it is difficult to imagine that individuals might procure all of these just on their own, and without help from others. Of course, we can imagine individuals occasionally and sporadically fulfilling these kinds of requirements on their own, but – as we have already seen  – a good bodily self-relationship demands more than that we occasionally and sporadically manage to maintain our body and develop its talents: it demands that we reliably and durably do so. And for that, a network of supportive social institutions seems to be required. Similar considerations arise, in a maybe even deeper way, when we attend to the formation of a positive evaluative attitude towards one’s body and its characteristics. After all: such a positive evaluative outlook requires that we, once again: reliably and durably, maintain this kind of perspective on our body and recognize its role as a precondition of freedom. Left to our own individual devices, however, it is difficult to see how individuals could avoid feeling the crushing weight of their bodily limitations and the attendant feeling that their body is an inevitable obstacle to their own agency. Just on our own, our agency, by and large, coincides with our bodily possibilities and abilities, meaning that our agency will inevitably run up against the bodies’ physical limits all the time (be it its limits in terms of strength, its limits in terms of ability and, maybe most definitively, its limits in terms of its inevitable finitude and mortality). And each one of those ‘run-ins’ will, in all likelihood, decrease or disturb our positive evaluative attitude towards the body, instead re-enforcing the aforementioned ‘hollow’ view (Enc. III §410Z): namely the view that our body is, at least at some level, a prison – something that is constantly and persistently in the way of our freedom. By contrast, embedded in genuinely cooperative social institutions, our bodily limits will start to feel differently. This is because, in such institutions, our agency will be able to transcend our bodily limits: pooling our abilities and possibilities for the sake of a shared end, we can achieve goals that our body usually would not let

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us achieve – allowing us to feel differently, and indeed more affirmingly, about our body. In that way, social participation in genuinely cooperative institutions can become a formative experience that alters our bodily self-view such that it becomes possible – or, at least, monumentally easier – to embrace the body that we are in. Nevertheless, one might still (rightly, I think) be concerned that all of this sounds very abstract and general. How, one might be prompted to ask, does it look like more concretely when social institutions are structured such that they enable their members to be truly at home in their bodies? Here, and this brings us to the second important point to discuss in this context, the description of the rational society in the Philosophy of Right provides a relatively clear and determinate answer. After all: the institutions Hegel describes here  – even though commentators do not always highlight this – are indeed structured such as to help and support social members with different aspects of their bodily self-relationship. We can see this by discussing a few examples (without aiming, in any way, at comprehensiveness). For one, there is, at the basis of rational ethical life, the rational family i.e. the traditional nuclear family, constituted by two married partners who intimately ‘share a life’ with one another, and potentially raise their own children (PR § 158ff.). Now, of course, the specific institutional structure Hegel envisions here for this rational family  – monogamous, with shared property, and an interfamilial division of labor6 – is meant to accomplish many ethical goals, including the most basic one to provide social members with a sphere of immediate love and recognition that is independent of personal achievement (PR § 163, a sphere that is, in this way, very much unlike e.g. the economic and professional sphere, in which recognition and achievement are much more closely correlated). However, and for our purposes: crucially, the rational family with its specific institutional structure is also meant to help social members with their bodily self-­ development and self-image. Indeed, Hegel thinks that, within the intimate unity of a lasting, monogamous marriage, the two married partners can find a way to express and to fulfill their most intimate bodily needs (e.g. for sexual gratification or intimacy) without feeling any pressure of ‘a feeling of shame (Schamgefühl)’ (PR § 163Z): something that, or so at least he seems to think, a less long-lasting and more ‘open’ form of sexual relationship would not be able to accomplish, given that the partners are less familiar with one another and therefore relate to one another more as strangers. Moreover, and highly relatedly, the two married partners – for similar reason – will also be able to develop the most intimate abilities and talents of their bodies in such a lasting marital unity, thereby nurturing their own bodily self-­ development in a way in which, at least according to Hegel, this otherwise would not be possible (on sexuality and marriage and its reconciliatory function, see also Bockenheimer 2013; Katz 2021). Even more so, the rational family, on Hegel’s view, by being a place where the two marital partners literally ‘share the whole of their individual existence’ (PR §

 A division of labor that comes, for Hegel, with deeply and problematically gendered assumptions (e.g. PR § 166). More on this further below. 6

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163), is the first and most immediate cooperative context in which the married partners pool their abilities for the sake of shared (familial) ends, thereby overcoming their own bodily limits. Indeed, having children together within the stable framework of the family, is a quintessential example of such cooperation, since it involves the realization of a shared end (the having and raising of a child), which – due to our bodily limits – would be impossible to do on our own (no one can procreate alone, after all, see also the extended discussion in VPR Wannenmann, 95/96). Procreation, in this way, is for Hegel not only functional in that it literally perpetuates biological life within ethical life, but also in that it helps the married partners develop a new and better sense of their own body: not as an inevitable limit, but rather as something whose limits they can overcome by acting together with others. Similar considerations apply when we look, as a further example, at the corporations (Korporationen): the professional organizations in which individuals come together with other members of their vocation, coordinating their activity and supporting one another in their economic pursuits (e.g. PR § 250–256). Again, these corporations, with their respective structure of professional cooperation, are obviously multi-functional within the organization of rational ethical life: they serve the purpose of economic regulation, just as much as they take over certain functions of what we might now call the ‘welfare state’ (since members of the corporations are to take over certain aspects of ‘care (Sorge)’ for one another [PR § 252]). Yet, once again, just as with the family, Hegel thinks that the Korporationen also serve to help individuals be at home in their bodies. After all: it is within the professional companionship of the corporations that individual can seek out more experienced members for advice and example, thereby opening avenues for a “development of their ability (Bildung zur Fähigkeit)” (Ibid.), including of their bodily talents, that would otherwise be unavailable. In that way, the Korporationen play a similarly formative role vis-a-vis the bodily self-development of their members as the family does for the married pair: albeit, of course, with a very different set of bodily talents that is in the focus here (namely the bodily talents geared towards economic labor and production). By the same token, corporations also present, once again, genuinely cooperative contexts within the economic sphere, where its members pool their abilities for shared aims (PR § 252, such as – at minimum – the representation of the interest of the profession versus the political sphere of the state). One effect of this is that corporative members are being lifted beyond the limits of their own bodily abilities, thereby helping them see that the extension of their agency can actually reach further than the reach of their bodies. And this realization, just as it does within the intimate unity of the family (albeit with different limits particularly in view), leads, Hegel thinks, social members to develop a different sense of their bodily characteristics and of the limits that these characteristics imply. Now, of course, it deserves to be said that these concrete Hegelian examples – taken from what Hegel calls the first and the second family (PR § 252)  – might invite a variety of different reactions. One might, for example, be immediately prompted to argue that, unlike what Hegel thinks, a monogamous traditional family (esp. when it comes loaded with many gendered assumptions, as it does in Hegel’s

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case!) is not the best sphere to support the bodily self-development of members, and that more non-traditional romantic and e.g. ‘open’ sexual arrangements here would do a better job. One might, equally reasonably, think that professional associations – at least as long as they are still embedded in the framework of a relatively free market economy, as they are in Hegel’s view – will not be sufficient to offset the effects that competing on a market will have on the relationship that individuals have to their own bodies, and that completely different economic structures are required to help individuals develop a healthy bodily self-relationship. But disagreeing with Hegel in these ways, of course, is only a way of agreeing, at least to a certain extent, with the larger point that Hegel is trying to make here, and for which these Hegelian examples where only meant to be concrete institutional illustrations: namely the point that social structures are essential to developing and maintaining a good bodily self-relationship and that, for this reason, forming and creating institutions that enable us being at home in our body is a central task when it comes to confronting the existential challenge of how to relate to our physical embodiment. One last thought: Does Hegel’s view, one might ask, entail that all that we need to do, in order to achieve a good relationship to the physical body, is to create the right kind of social order and that, with such an order in place, the bodily self-­ relationship of individuals will, as it were, sort itself out automatically? The answer to this question – and this is the third point to attend to in this context – is clearly ‘No’. This should already be clear on a purely conceptual level: arguing that the right kind of social order is a necessary condition for individuals to develop and maintain a good relationship to their bodies does not commit Hegel to the view that such a social order is also sufficient. Indeed, Hegel is always very careful to point out that any formative process, even if it has necessary social conditions, requires the right kind of individual attitudes and actions as well (this is one of the implications of his insistence on ethical duties, even within a system of fully rational social institutions, see e.g. PR § 150Z). So, Hegel’s view is not meant to extinguish the thought that developing and maintaining a good relationship to our body is a personal project for each and every one of us: facing the challenge of how to relate to our body is, and always will be, an existential challenge for each single person. But what Hegel’s view is meant to do, is to make the point that trying to face this challenge just on our own – and without attending to social conditions – is a mistake and will doom our personal project to failure. After all: without the right kind of social structures, individuals will, Hegel thinks, be crushed by the practicality of facing their body alone. The only way of facing the physical body is together with others.

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3 The Contemporary Relevance of Hegel’s Position This seamlessly brings me to some concluding remarks about the contemporary significance of Hegel’s position. After all: this contemporary significance becomes, I think, immediately clear, once we remind ourselves that, in contrast to Hegel, we usually tend to think that achieving a good relationship to our body is something that we can just do on our own, without much help by others. This assumption is reflected e.g. in bookshelves filled with self-help literature that appeals to our individual sense of responsibility when it comes to improving our relationship to the physical body: if we just try hard enough on our own, and discipline ourselves in our execution of the proper techniques, we will achieve a good relationship to our bodily self. By the same token – and this is really just the other side of the same coin – if we do not achieve such a relationship, then it must be, most likely, because we did not try hard enough to discipline ourselves into treating our body in the right kind of way. After all: facing our body, or so goes the underlying assumption, is ‘up to us’. Indeed, nowhere is this assumption more obvious then when it comes to the, if you will, most difficult challenge in coming to a good relationship with our body: grappling with, and perhaps coming to be reconciled to, one’s bodily limits, such as our ageing or our mortality. Here, it seems especially clear that we tend to understand this kind of challenge as a highly private and personal one: a challenge that is for individuals alone to undergo, and that involves them – in the privacy of their own mind, perhaps with the help of religion or philosophy – grappling with their own bodily finitude. Death, most eminently, seems to be something that we have to face alone: a final test, if you will, that is existentially given to each one of us individually. Hegel’s position – and herein lies its contemporary significance – pushes back against this kind of underlying understanding. For him, as we have seen, successfully navigating the relationship between self and body does not exclusively depend on what we, as individuals, to do our bodies. Instead, it depends just as much on the kind of conditions that we, collectively and as society, create and sustain around us. From that Hegelian perspective, hence, it is a mistake to approach our relationship to our body merely through the filter of what we alone can achieve for our body (through the right kind of discipline and the right kind of planning). Instead, the Hegelian perspective pushes us to see that our relationship to the body always requires us to collaborate with others in creating the right kind of social institutions that nurture our bodily self-development and self-image. Neglecting this necessarily collective and collaborative component, Hegel thinks, puts us in peril – since, without the right kind of social institutions, we will not be placed in the right kind of practical position to confront the demands of a good bodily self-relationship. All this, and this deserves to be stressed here, also applies very much to the deepest challenge in our bodily self-relationship: to our reckoning with our physical limits. Just in line with what I have just said, Hegel’s position prompts us to think that the challenge of grappling with our bodily limits – such as our ageing or our

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mortality – is, by and large, not something that can be sufficiently done in the privacy of our minds alone, grappling with these issues in deep reflection and contemplation. It requires instead that we go out there and create and sustain the right kind of social conditions, together with others. Death (and ageing, and whatever other bodily limits we have to grapple with), in other words, are something that we always should, and indeed always have to, face as society (for a further discussion of this, see also Heisenberg 2021, 885–889). But is Hegel right about his challenge to our contemporary understanding of the relationship between body and self? Do we indeed require the right kind of social institutions to see and to treat our body in the right kind of way? Answering these questions is beyond the scope of the present paper. I hope, however, that I was able to show the force of these questions – thereby demonstrating that Hegel’s late ethics of the body is not merely a neglected part of his practical philosophy, but also one that still can, and indeed should, command our philosophical attention. Looking at the philosophical body of Hegel’s late ethical theory, hence, might help us enrich and usefully re-assess our contemporary ethical perspective on the physical body and our relationship to it.7

References Bockenheimer, Eva. 2013. Hegels Familien und Geschlechtertheorie. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Dien Winfield, Richard. 2011. Hegel’s solution to the mind-body problem. In A companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur, 272–242. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Greene, Murray. 1972. Hegel on the soul: A speculative anthropology. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Hardimon, Michael. 1994. Hegel’s social philosophy: The project of reconciliation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. [VPR Wannenmann] 1983. Philosophie des Rechts: Die Mitschriften Wannenmann (Heidelberg 1817/18) und Homeyer (Berlin 1818/19). Ed. Karl-Heinz Ilting. Stuttgart: Klett-­ Cotta. [Cited by page number]. ———. 1991. Elements of a philosophy of right. Ed. Allen Wood and Trans. H.S.  Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. [VPR Hoppe] 2005a. Die Philosophie des Rechts. Vorlesung von 1821/22. Edition and commentary by Hansgeorg Hoppe. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. [Cited by page number]. ———. 2005b. Die Philosophie des Rechts. Vorlesung von 1821/22. Edition and commentary by Hansgeorg Hoppe. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ———. [PR] 2013a, orig. 1986. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. [Cited by paragraph number. Hegel’s remarks (Anmerkungen) are indicated by ‘A’, his additions (Zusätze) by ‘Z’ and his hand-written notes by ‘N’]. ———. 2013b, orig. 1986. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. [Enc I.] 2017a, orig. 1986. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften I. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. [Cited by paragraph number, Hegel’s remarks (Anmerkungen) are indicated by ‘A’, his additions (Zusätze) by ‘Z’].

 I would like to think Luca Corti, Raphael Causapin, Johannes-Georg Schülein and Leonard Weiß for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. 7

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———. [Enc II.] 2017b, orig. 1986. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften II. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. [Cited by paragraph number, Hegel’s remarks (Anmerkungen) are indicated by ‘A’, his additions (Zusätze) by ‘Z’]. ———. [Enc III.] 2017c, orig. 1986. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften III. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. [Cited by paragraph number, Hegel’s remarks (Anmerkungen) are indicated by ‘A’, his additions (Zusätze) by ‘Z’]. ———. 2017d, orig. 1986. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften I. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 2017e, orig. 1986. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften II. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 2017f, orig. 1986. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften III. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Heisenberg, Thimo. 2021. Death in Berlin: Hegel on mortality and the social order. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 29 (5): 871–890. Katz, Gal. 2021. Alleviating love’s rage: Hegel on shame and sexual recognition. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 28 (4): 756–776. Knowles, Dudley. 1983. Hegel on property and personality. The Philosophical Quarterly 33: 45–62. ———. 2002. Hegel and the philosophy of right. London: Routledge. Malabou, Catharine, and Judith Butler. 2011. You be my body for me: Body, shape and plasticity in Hegel’s phenomenology of Spirit. In A companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur, 611–640. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Moyar, Dean. 2011. Hegel’s Conscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Neuhouser, Frederick. 2000. Foundations of Hegel’s social philosophy. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Patten, Alan. 2002. Hegel’s idea of freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peperzak, Adriaan. 2001. Modern freedom: Hegel’s legal, moral and political philosophy. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Russon, John. 2001. The self and its body in Hegel’s phenomenology of Spirit. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Singer, Marcus. 1959. Duties to oneself. Ethics 69: 202–205. Tugendhat, Ernst. 1986. Self-consciousness and self-determination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the limits of philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wood, Allen. 1990. Hegel’s ethical thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Second Nature and Self-Determination in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit Susanne Herrmann-Sinai

1 ‘Second Nature’ as a Contested Notion The concept of ‘second nature’ has become the object of increased interest over the past two or three decades within debates discussing the process of formation (Bildung) of an ethical agent. Behind this process is the idea that human beings are not only determined by their natural or biological features but that they need to undergo a process of initiation and familiarization into the customs, norms, and social standards of their culture in order to fully develop their autonomy and become a responsible person. As intuitive as this might sound, the task of conceptualizing such process is enormous as it requires to challenge a common way of understanding the relationship between nature and spirit, namely that of a dichotomy. If such understanding is presupposed, questions arising are such as: in what sense can something be called ‘nature’ if it is acquired through formation? And secondly, if it is nature, how can it be a marker of autonomy? Other questions that are discussed within the broader debate concern the problem whether the process of Bildung moves towards a set universal or whether it can be understood as open and critical (Sandkaulen 2014; Novakovic 2017). The term ‘second nature’ has also been investigated in its relation to other key notions in Hegel’s philosophy, such as ‘social recognition’ (Testa 2009) and ‘habit’ (Lumsden 2013; Peters 2016). Finally, it has been discussed whether ‘second nature’ is not only manifest in an agent’s habituation, but also manifest in objectivity within which the agent acts (Battistoni 2019), so that the institutions of a just state could be understood as (second) nature. Within the rising interest in the term ‘second nature’ that can be traced back to Neo-Aristotelian accounts of human action we can find an attempt to evade the dichotomy between nature and spirit by claiming that an ethical agent undergoes

S. Herrmann-Sinai (*) Oxford University, Oxford, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Corti, J.-G. Schülein (eds.), Life, Organisms, and Human Nature, Studies in German Idealism 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_13

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this ethical formation because it is part of his human nature to do so. In this sense, the acquisition of a second nature is part of his first nature or human life form.1 Of broader interest in this context is the relationship between nature and reason and the question how they can be reconciled with each other when it comes to the human mind by introducing the term ‘second nature’. What defines ethical agents is not merely their first nature, qua biological species, but their second nature, the product of a certain social upbringing which qualify them having particular cognitive capacities that allow them to act rationally and ethically.2 This chapter is not aiming at defending or criticizing a Neo-Aristotelian reading of the relationship between first and second nature. But what this Aristotelian argument points towards is that understanding ‘second’ nature might require to rethink first nature or spirit’s relationship to nature alongside. By taking a closer look at the question in how far Hegel’s philosophy of spirit avoids a conception of nature and spirit as dichotomous, the argument laid out here will show that the process described by Hegel as something becoming ‘second nature’ conceives of the subject as essentially practical.3 And only within this conception of the subject being essentially practical, can the question of the relationship between spirit and nature be addressed. Among the positions, taking interest in Hegel’s use of the term ‘second nature’ while at the same time trying to conceptualize it in a way that allows us to comprehend ethical agency as such, I would like to highlight and contrast two interpretations in particular. The first position emphasizes an antinomy surrounding the notion of second nature, which springs from two contradicting features of the will. The second position highlights the ongoing relevance of second nature that is understood as an open-ended process of self-initiation. Both positions, however, do have certain shortcomings when compared to Hegel himself. While the first position, one might say, underestimates ‘second nature’ and presupposes a notion of ‘nature’ in particular, which is not Hegel’s, the second position overestimates it by equating it to the overall process of Bildung, which is thereby unable to account for limitations in the concept of ‘second nature’ as they are highlighted by Hegel. In this paper, I shall offer a reading of some key passages in Hegel’s texts, which can serve as the basis for an argument to discuss the shortcomings of both readings. In order to develop the argument, I shall focus on two micro-processes which Hegel discusses within his Philosophy of Spirit, the process of transition from sound to speech as he understands it and the process of transition from natural will to ethical will. Thereby, we will be able to mark the differences between mere habit, second nature, and self-mediated self-determination of spirit. Second nature is neither a falling back into nature and therefore a limitation of human freedom, nor is it a notion that in itself could explain the process of Bildung as Hegel sees it. However,  For a critical discussion of different accounts of the relationship between first and second nature, see Kern 2020, even though I do not follow exactly her labels of the debate. 2  This reading can be found in McDowell 1996. 3  de Laurentiis 2021 makes a strong case for a similar point in her excellent book on Hegel’s Anthropology, especially in her discussion of Hegel’s Descartes. 1

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understanding what Hegel means by second nature in the passages that will be discussed, can help us understand in how far spirit continuously appropriates its ‘other’, which is essential for understanding the practical self-relation of spirit. Ultimately, our argument will show that nature and spirit are not antonyms for Hegel, but that nature is spirit’s ‘other’, within which spirit recognizes itself and which it practically appropriates. We shall also be able to see in what sense Hegel claims the second nature of rational animals or ‘minded life’ (Kern 2020) to be different from second nature of animals, such as a well-trained dog. The former is part of a process of self-determination or of ethical formation (Bildung), not mere trained behavior.

2  Bildung as Sprit’s Self-Cognition Before sketching the two positions and Hegel’s own text, it seems appropriate to outline what Hegel is trying to attempt within his Philosophy of Spirit (henceforth PoS), second part of his Realphilosophie, within which the discussion on second nature resides. The PoS as laid out in the third part of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences begins with an Anthropology. In it, human beings are conceived of as sensory beings – a characterization they share with organic matter; more specifically with animals, which are dealt with by Hegel in the concluding chapters of the Philosophy of Nature (Enc. II, 350ff.). In contrast to animals, however, human subjects are at least in principle able to comprehend and reproduce the route, which Hegel takes on in his philosophy of spirit, beginning with the Anthropology. This, animals are unable to do. The argument developed within the PoS as a whole, seeks to conceptualize spirit’s self-mediated self-determination. It conceptualizes how spirit comes to gradually understand itself as manifesting itself as actuality (Wirklichkeit). This is achieved in three stages, subjective, objective, and absolute spirit. While subjective spirit conceptualizes immediate self-determination, objective spirit addresses mediated self-determination, and finally, self-mediated self-determination of spirit is discussed within absolute spirit. Subjective spirit remains within the inner subjective processes of self-determination and does not conceptualize the means by which these are mediated. For example, within subjective spirit, the section entitled Phenomenology conceptualizes desire and satisfaction of desire – both of which are subjective states –, yet it does not account for the means by which the satisfaction is achieved, for instance as in a welfare state with certain institutions, designed to provide the means for desire satisfaction. It is in this sense that self-determination in subjective spirit is ‘immediate’. Objective spirit conceptualizes mediated self-determination. Here, Hegel discusses a person, a moral and ultimately an ethical agent, who is able to conceive of their agency and the produced outcome of their actions as mediated. The means for

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their actions are comprehensible to the agent, because they are provided by the objectivity within which the agent pursues his actions – a world which is rational and therefore liable to much of the same laws and concepts by which the agent understands himself. However, it is in particular the contrast between subjectivity and objectivity which at the same time defines the limits of this stage of spirit’s development. Even though the self-determination is mediated and the means of the subject’s manifestation are comprehended by the subject, the means cannot be understood as being brought about by the subject himself. An ethical agent, for example, will understand that his agency depends on laws as well as on means provided by a world, which is shaped by these laws. Institutions of a just state, which ensure contracts are being kept and violation of these is prosecuted, provide the mediation for an ethical action. Yet, this does not mean that the ethical agent himself is able to produce these means of his agency. His subjectivity depends on an objectivity and while both are conceptualized as a manifestation of spirit in the ethical practice, they are not brought about by the same act.4 This self-determination is mediated, but not self-mediated. In absolute spirit, which encompasses art, religion, and philosophy as practices of self-determination, the means of self-determination are brought about by the same act as the self-determination itself. An example here is the production of art, whereby the process of creating the work of art is the same as creating the means by which the product comes into being.5 This all too brief sketch of the overall path of Hegel’s PoS raises the question of how the stages of this development are motivated. Thus, it is one question how spirit moves through these, yet it seems to be a separate, methodological question, how the philosophy of spirit moves through them. However, Hegel makes it clear at the very beginning paragraph of the PoS (Enc3, §377) that these two questions are indeed not separable. Here, he quotes the imperative ‘Know thyself’ and thereby sets out the path of the PoS as a path of self-­ cognition. He contrasts this imperative in said paragraph with the ‘understanding of human nature’; here, he rejects ‘understanding’ as a method of philosophy of mind. It would not be an adequate method for the PoS, because it would presuppose a universal, a pre-existing or otherwise justified theory of mind, under which a particular form of spirit is then subsumed. This however, would contradict the set out path, in which conceiving of the universality of spirit precisely is the task the PoS sets itself to solve. Yet, ‘know thyself’ is not an imperative for the prioritization of subjective knowledge and allow cognition of the world only through a subjective lens. Rather, it is the imperative for conceiving self-cognition in confrontation with its other – or to  As Thomas Dwoschak discusses in Dworschak 2020, the right of individuality remains in tension with Hegel’s theory of freedom in a state. 5  Enc3, §384 Z: ‘Absolute mind recognizes itself as positing being itself, as itself producing its Other, nature and finite mind, so that this Other loses all semblance of independence in face of mind, ceases altogether to be a limitation for mind and appears only as the means by which mind attains to absolute being-for-itself, to the absolute unity of its being in-itself and its being-for-itself, of its concept and its actuality.’ 4

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know oneself ‘in its other’ – an ‘other’, which at the very beginning of spirit’s development is ‘nature’.6 Throughout the process of its development, spirit encounters different ‘others’ – such as a sound-pattern as habit or the socially determined ends of an agent’s intentional actions. In all these encounters, the process is very similar. Spirit attempts to overcome the difference from the ‘other’ by appropriating what initially appears to be other than itself. It does so by changing its own self-­conception so that the reformed one is capable of conceiving of what initially appears to be other than spirit as spirit’s own product and manifestation. It is within this process of reforming self-knowledge and conceptualizing something as brought about by spirit, where the term ‘second nature’ will gain its significance as I explain in more detail below (Sects. 4 and 5). A remark from §2 in the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right (henceforth PR) – which in scope is identical to objective spirit of PoS – strikes a similar tone to the imperative of ‘know thyself’ and again sets out a methodological route. The PR says: The science of right is a section of philosophy. Consequently, its task is to develop the Idea – the Idea being the rational factor in any object of study – out of the concept, or, what is the same thing, to look on at its own [eigenen] immanent development of the thing itself [Sache selbst]. (PR, §2, translation altered by SHS)

The verb ‘to look on’ [zusehen] designates a double perspective that is constitutive of spirit. Spirit is the subject of its own immanent development yet at the same time the onlooker.7 It is fair to say that this double perspective is not far from the imperative ‘Know thyself’ as quoted above, and it as well combines the two questions how spirit moves through the stages of the PoS and how the philosophy of spirit moves through them methodologically. With this in mind, the last thing to be pointed out before we start discussing ‘second nature’ is that different stages of spirit’s development are faced with different types of ‘other’. To rephrase this, our look on the world is always partly determined by the way we conceive of ourselves. The PoS analyses what the relationship between both parameters mean for spirit’s self-determination. For a subject which is only conceivable in terms of the Anthropology (soul) the world is categorized differently from the world of a subject conceivable in terms of the Phenomenology

 Enc3, §381 Z: ‘As the distinguishing determinacy of the concept of mind we must designate ideality, that is, the sublation of the otherness of the Idea, the Idea’s returning, and its having returned, into itself from its Other;’ as well as §382 Z: ‘But the freedom of mind is not merely an independence of the Other won outside the Other, but won within the Other; it attains actuality not by fleeing from the Other but by overcoming it.’  – For a discussion of the methodological links between the Science of Logic and Subjective Spirit, see Ng 2016. 7  PR §31 Remark: ‘This development of the Idea is the proper activity of its rationality, and thinking, as something subjective, merely looks on at it without for its part adding to it any ingredient of its own. To consider a thing rationally means not to bring reason to bear on the object from the outside and so to work on it, but to find that the object is rational on its own account [für sich]; here it is spirit in its freedom, the culmination of self-conscious reason, which gives itself actuality and engenders itself as an existing world. The sole task of philosophical science is to bring into consciousness this proper work of the reason of the thing itself.’ 6

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(consciousness), the Psychology (intelligence) or from the objective world of a subject conceivable in terms of objective spirit (person, moral and ethical agent). The double perspective of being the subject of a development as well as its onlooker, implied by the quote from the PR is held together by the imperative of ‘know thyself’. And it sets out more clearly what the process of Bildung, which spirit enters with the Anthropology, implies; the process of self-cognition by which spirit manifests itself in a self-mediated self-determination. Yet in order to conceptualize this double perspective of spirit’s self-cognition, the distinction between spirit’s self-determination (Bildung) and different forms of subjectivity ought to be preserved.

3 Two Accounts of Second Nature in Hegel In this section the two interpretations of the term ‘second nature’ mentioned in the introduction are introduced in more detail. The first position, which is for example held by Christoph Menke (Menke 2018) highlights an antinomy into which the term ‘second nature’ is heading. The acquisition of a second nature is understood as the necessary initiation of an ethical agent into the norms of a social practice that is guided and shaped by these norms.8 It is necessary, because it is only when such initiation has taken place that the norms of this ethical practice do in fact shape the agent’s dispositions and allow him to act ethically. Much like Aristotle’s virtuous agent, a Hegelian ethical agent not only knows that it is wrong to commit murder, he knows it in a sense that he cannot lose this knowledge as a lapsus (such as someone could forget the bus timetable or the name of a distant acquaintance). An ethical agent is liberated from deliberating every one of his acts and the norms, which become second nature to the agent, ensure a manifestation of spirit. However, such initiation into norms can lead to these norms being conceived of as fixed or ‘frozen’, such that they become a ‘nature’ which is limiting the agent’s freedom. An example would be an agent, who follows his norms blindly or in an conformist manner. In short, the antinomy of second nature is that it is a liberation and allows manifestation of spirit insofar as it is ‘second nature’ but that it limits spirit insofar as it is ‘second nature’. Hegel does provide some support for this reading. Initially, Hegel discusses ‘second nature’ when he addresses habituation in the early sections of his PoS; the development of  – routinely done  – processes of the mind, which initially do not have to be virtues. Within this discussion, Hegel calls habit a ‘liberation’ as well as a ‘necessity’. ‘According to the first perspective in reference to the natural determinations and particular feelings, habit is a liberation. But in reference to the will,

 Cf. Testa 2009: ‘[…] ethical life […] has to objectify itself in social habits of recognitive interaction stabilized through habit and internalized by individuals’ (Ibid, 354). 8

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habit is a necessity.’ (LPS, 152/53)9 Here, we seem to have support for the antinomy, understood in the sense that second nature for Hegel can provide freedom as a liberation for the will, yet at the same time is a constraint to the will. However, Hegel does not limit his notion of freedom within the PoS to the notion of ‘liberation’ and he does not conceive of nature only as a limitation for spirit. Therefore, the antinomy would underestimate the notion of ‘second nature’ if it implied this particular understanding of freedom as liberation and nature as spirit’s limitation. The second position highlights the infinite relevance of second nature that is understood as an open process. This interpretation is put forward by Georg Bertram, who contrasts various notions of second nature and concludes by defending his reading of a Hegelian notion in which second nature is not a state that is achieved by an ethical agent after his initiation into an ethical practice has been successful.10 Instead, second nature is a continuous task: Indeed, transformation is an essential dimension of second nature. Practices of initiation and education that children pass through do not lie at the border of second nature, but rather at the center of it. As Hegel clearly states, education has to be understood as a practice that subjects or cultures develop for themselves. Thus, the self-understandings that self-conscious subjects develop are brought forth by practices of self-initiation. (Bertram 2020, 75).

As one example of such self-initiation, Bertram brings up someone teaching himself the piano by playing the piano, in which they might fail or succeed. Regardless of the outcome, the person who is engaging in this self-initiation is projecting their future self as someone who has acquired certain dispositions as second nature. Self-initiation has to be grasped as the realization of determinations by which human beings bind themselves to their own open future, such that these determinations are constitutively bound up with indeterminacy. By realizing the projects they commit themselves to, human beings expose themselves to indeterminacy, because they cannot wholly determine how their projects will turn out. (Ibid, 76/77).

If second nature, however, is understood as a continuous task, then it becomes difficult to distinguish it from spirit’s self-mediated self-determination. To some degree, Bertram is thus overestimating what the notion of second nature according to Hegel is able to account for. After sketching these two positions, which both link the notion of second nature to Hegel, yet with different implications, I will now turn to analysing the process of transition from sound to speech as Hegel understands it and the process of transition  Full quote: ‘So in one of its aspects habit resembles natural qualities. But habit also has an aspect that is related to the will as such, and from this perspective it appears as a necessity in relation to freedom. According to the first perspective in reference to the natural determinations and particular feelings, habit is a liberation. But in reference to the will, habit is a necessity.’ (LPS, 152/53). 10  Bertram attributes this conception of second nature to Kant and McDowell: ‘In summary, I think that the Kantian conception takes second nature to be an achievement, because it holds that second nature is reconstituted over and over again after being established. And it is an achievement in a double sense, because it is achieved by a collective and, at the same time, by individual human beings.’ (Bertram 2020, 71) 9

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from natural will to ethical will. In highlighting the two markers ‘liberation’ as well as ‘necessity’, I will discuss the micro-structure of ‘second nature’ but come to different conclusions than Menke. The antinomy of second nature is an antinomy either because freedom is conceived of as liberation only and not as self-­ determination, or because the conception of ‘nature’ involved is understood as a limitation to spirit. However, if spirit’s freedom were to be understood as ‘liberation’ only, it would remain mysterious how spirit could bring about second nature in the first place. For in order to bring it about, spirit needs to be understood as productive. Understanding spirit’s freedom as self-determination rather than mere liberation, implies an understanding of spirit as essentially practical  – a productivity which appropriates nature, whether first or second. Furthermore, the discussion of second nature as regards the transition from natural to ethical will within the PR will challenge the reading of Bertram, who conceives of Hegelian second nature as a continuous task and thereby runs into the danger of equating it with Bildung.

4 Voice and Language In the following two sections, we shall discuss the way in which spirit is productive and appropriates its other by looking at two examples that parallel the distinction between mere habituation (second nature in subjective spirit) and ethical habituation (second nature in objective spirit).11 The first instance discusses Hegel’s argument for the transition from habitually hearing the sounds of a voice to forming of language, the second instance discusses the transition from natural will to an ethical will. Despite the parallels in both instances, which will help us understand the way spirit represents itself as well as the practical dimension of its self-determination, a crucial difference between both instances remains. Whereas mere habituation determines the content of the habituated form accidentally, ethical habituation determines a reflected content. It is in this sense that ethical agency can be said to be free in form as well as content. What this difference is teaching us, is that the notion of ‘second nature’ can mean something different at different stages with regard to spirit’s activity. As indicated above, the beginning of the PoS is marked by the Anthropology, in which human beings are conceived of as sensory beings, who are – in contrast to mere animals – in principle able to engage in the path of self-cognition that the PoS in toto is setting out. So even though sensitivity is shared by both, animals as well as human subjects, human sensitivity is able to develop into a habit, as shown in the example of the sensation (Empfindung) aroused by the sound of the human voice, which Hegel discusses in §401. This sensation is initially linked to sympathy or

 For this distinction between mere habituation and ethical habituation see also HerrmannSinai 2020. 11

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antipathy towards the person behind the voice.12 These sensations of sympathy and antipathy are thus the affective content of the voice heard. Continuous exposure to a particular sequence of voiced sounds makes the listener accustomed to it and listening to these voiced sounds becomes a habit. With the creation of habit, the linked sympathy or antipathy is more and more irrelevant and what remains embodied is not the affective content of the sensation, but its mere form. This first step precisely marks liberation from the content of a sensation;13 it is a liberation, because spirit can now refer to itself without referring to itself as an accidental content (a particular sensation). It can refer to itself solely as a form and can reproduce this form, by which it represents itself.14 In a second step, after this habituation by repetition, the form by which spirit represents itself can be determined as speech.15 Here, the habituated  – voiced  – sound receives a particular content, a meaning awarded to the habit, now liberated from its original content (Ziglioli 2016, 113ff.). What matters now, is the fact that the content is determined independently of the original sensation of sympathy and antipathy to the originally voiced sound.16 Freedom of spirit shows itself to be first a liberation or ‘freedom from’, but secondly a ‘freedom to’ determine the content.17 Spirit determines itself by determining the habituated form with a new content.18 Because habit is the result of a mechanical repetition19 of a sensation’s form, it is a product of spirit. And because it is spirit’s product, it can recognize itself in it. By

 Enc3, §401 Z: ‘In the melodious-sounding voice, therefore, we believe we can safely recognize the beauty of soul of the speaker, and in the harshness of his voice, a coarse feeling. In the first case, the sound evokes our sympathy, in the latter case our antipathy.’ 13  Enc3, §410 R: ‘The essential determination is the liberation from sensations that man gains through habit, when he is affected by them.’ 14  Cf. Magrì 2016b, 253–54: ‘The rules that we follow in habit are those that we have given ourselves in the originary act of learning, but we no longer need to recall them to perform the habitual action. Thus, the self constantly refers to itself without having itself as content of thought.’ 15  Hegel distinguishes between speech and language in that only the latter is ‘articulated’. For the step discussed here, articulation is not necessary. ‘Articulated’ means language rather than speech and implies some syntactical distinctions (Inwood 2007, 364, R. 28). 16  What cannot be discussed here is the dimension of time within intuitions an within the being of sounds. Hegel states (Enc3, §459): ‘Intelligence is this intrinsic negativity; thus the more appropriate shape of the intuition that is a sign is a reality in time, − a disappearance of the reality as soon as it is, and, in its further external psychical determinacy, a positedness by intelligence, emerging from its own (anthropological) naturalness, − the sound, the fulfilled externalization of selfannouncing inwardness.’ Cf. Herrmann-Sinai 2009. 17  Peters 2016 makes a similar point by focusing on mechanical processes in subjective spirit: ‘the activity in question is spirit’s essential activity of liberating itself from nature, understood both in the negative and in the appropriative sense.’ (127) 18  de Vries 1988 describes in more detail how the subject becomes the universal in the process of acquiring a language. De Laurentiis 2019, by contrast, discusses with reference to the Anthropology how in the process of ‘becoming the universal’ lies the potential for derangements of the soul. 19  LPS, §153: ‘Here the universality is brought forth, produced, and proceeds out of particular cases. This [process] contains the determination that what is supposed to become habit for us, is a repetition of feeling. Habit is acquired through repetition so that the individual is appropriated to a 12

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recognizing itself in its product, spirit is recognizing itself in its ‘other’. The habituation that is happening in the transition from mere sound to speech is not dissimilar to the habituation achieved by learning to play an instrument. By playing the piano, I am moving my fingers along the instrument in a trained way that requires no conscious decision on my part for every single movement. I do not have to remember the process of training, which I might often have hated as a child, as I am actualizing my skill here and now (Magrì 2016a, 79). The muscle movements have become second nature to my hands, which marks the step of liberation. But I can at the same time, while playing the instrument, award this habituated activity with a new content, such as recreation or expressing certain emotions, which I associate with the music now for very contingent reasons. This marks the step of freedom to determine the content of this habituated form as second nature. To reiterate, the notion of freedom employed in this picture is freedom as practical self-determination, not just freedom as liberation. Even though some might argue that sensitivity is a shared capacity between animals and human subjects, only the latter are able to develop a habit as second nature from it, which eventually turns into speech and language. Animals do not take this route, because even though they might develop a routine behavior they do not have the freedom to determine the content of an acquired habit and appropriate it as second nature. They are not the subject of and subject to the Anthropology, constituting the beginning of the philosophy of spirit, thus nature for animals is different than spirit’s nature.

5 Natural and Ethical Will Second nature continues to be a central term beyond the discussion of ‘habit’ in the Anthropology, and becomes crucial for understanding ‘ethical life’ in the context of the Philosophy of Right or ‘objective spirit’. Here (PR, §4), Hegel names the system of right a second nature. The basis of right is, in general, the realm of spirit [das Geistige]; its precise place and point of origin is the will. The will is free, so that freedom is both its substance and its goal, while the system of right is the realm of freedom made actual, the world of spirit [Geist] brought forth out of itself as a second nature. (PR, §4)

The second example of moving from habit to second nature to be discussed here, which shows parallels to the step from voiced sounds to speech, is the step from natural will to ethical will. Here, we see a similar process of forming a habit by repetition, which will allow for a determination of content in a second step.

universality.’  – And LPS, 157 (130): ‘What one does out of habit, one does without thought, mechanically.’

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‘Natural will’ is a term which Hegel uses in the introductory paragraphs to his PR20 in which he provides the reader with a summary of the steps presupposed by objective spirit. Thus, he provides us with a summary of subjective spirit in particular as it occurs in the Psychology, which precedes objective spirit within the PoS. The term ‘natural will’ thus is not part of objective spirit, but rather of its propaedeutic. Already prior to the PR Hegel develops an account of intentional action and free choice (Willkür). Someone is acting intentionally in the sense set out is these passages, if his practical activity is determined by ends, which are products of his theoretical intelligence. The intuition (Anschauung) of a sweet, red, round something that will appease hunger can guide practical activity just as much as the representation (Vorstellung) of a house that will provide shelter, or the totality of a life in happiness (Enc3, §§471–480). Whoever acts as described in these terms, determines himself, because the ends of his activity determine practically the order of his actions.21 This is a self-determination, since the ends, which determine the practical activity are products of the same intelligence, in its theoretical mode. However, the notion of ‘action’ developed thus far is not that of a Handlung in Hegel’s terminology. What is lacking is the conceptualization of the thought that would allow us to think of the action’s actualization as a deed (Tat).22 An agent, intentionally determining himself in the sense of the Psychology, thus has knowledge of his intention as well as knowledge of what he is doing, but no knowledge of what he has done as the actualization of intention.23 This kind of self-determination is free, insofar as both the end or purpose of the intentional action as well as the drive (Trieb) are products of spirit’s activity. The ‘free spirit’ as discussed in §§481/482, realizes that its own activity presupposes something, which can only be thought if spirit can know itself as the source of it. All this can be discussed within the Psychology without even touching upon objective spirit. However, the PR builds on these arguments and this is where the quotation from the beginning of this section becomes relevant. Within this quotation ‘the system of right is the realm of freedom made actual, the world of spirit brought forth out of itself as a second nature’, the key phrase for my argument is ‘brought forth out of itself’. The system of right can be understood as a similar two stage process like establishing a habit which becomes second nature as in the case of sound to speech. Within this process ‘brought forth out of itself’ emphasizes the second shift towards the determination of content of a habituated form. First, the system of right is formal by repetition in the same sense as the auditory habit was  PR, §11: ‘The will which is free only in itself [an sich] is the immediate or natural will.* The determinations of difference which the self-determining concept posits within the will appear in the natural will as an immediately existing content, i.e. as the impulses, desires, inclinations, whereby the will finds itself determined in the course of nature.’ 21  LPS, §§469, 248: ‘The will [in practical spirit] means nothing else but the end that is active. End and reason are immediately connected; what is rational is an end.’ 22  Enc3, §444: ‘[…] its products, in the theoretical mind, are the word, and in the practical mind (not yet deed and action, but) enjoyment.’ 23  It can be called ‘subjective action’ for this very reason (cf. Herrmann-Sinai 2016). 20

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formal by repetition. We might call this ‘mere’ habituation. Second, this formal habit can be determined with another content. This content is different insofar as it depends on spirit’s recognizing itself in the formal habit. We may exemplify this by considering an agent acting intentionally in the terms given in the Psychology. This subject is an agent who is part of a social practice, which provides him with the norms and ends for his actions.24 The notion of ‘social practice’ at stake here is not what Hegel will term ‘ethical life’ later on. It is a social practice in the sense of serving as a formal condition for individual action. The ends with which an agent is provided by the practice he belongs to are accidental and can differ between cultures and across history. Therefore, any practice that sets conditions for action by providing the social norms that determine an agent’s drives as well as ends, enables a subjective freedom. A practical self-determination understood in the categories of the Psychology requires a social practice so that an agent is habitually used to acting towards its ends, ends which might differ in detail but which will satisfy his needs (such as food, shelter, or long term life goals). The need for shelter can be satisfied by different ends, which are highly contingent on socio-cultural as well as historical conditions. The same contingency prevails in these ends as in sounds of speech, given that two natural languages have different sound-patterns linked to the same meaning. However, the form of the practice itself is neutral as regards these contingent contents. We can understand this as a range of customary ways of doing things, which are justified with a simple ‘This is how we do things around here’. Being initiated into a practice like this allows a liberation, because an agent does not have to question his motives or make his ends explicit as he is doing his actions. Within subjective spirit, however, moral and ethical action are not yet conceptualized. Someone being initiated in those practices has acquired a habit. But it is not part of that habit or of any condition provided by the social practice for it to be seen as morally right or wrong. This distinction is not available yet and cannot be applied to the ends of an agent. An agent understood in the categories of the Psychology can, however, strive for happiness (Enc3, §§479/480). Still, according to Hegel, happiness remains contingent, insofar it rests on the conditions that my intentions can be executed unhindered and no contradictions among my intentions or within the social practice occur. But if there were contradictions, the notion of social practice employed in subjective spirit would not be differentiated enough to resolve these. Social practice remains a mere condition of the intentional action(s) and thus formal. The fact that this kind of subjective action is a practical self-determination, which equally depends on the presupposition of a social practice to which this agent belongs, allows spirit to see this presupposition as its own product. With this insight, we are at the starting point of the PR and we can begin to understand the ‘system’ of right. Within it, spirit will gradually develop a better understanding of the way it

 For the difference between this notion of ‘social practice’ and ‘ethical life’ see HerrmannSinai 2020. 24

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determines itself into a social practice not only in form but also as content – a development that will lead to the notion of ‘ethical life’. Objective spirit goes beyond a conception of social practice as a mere condition for individual action. Only here can the agent conceive of himself as living in a world, which is providing him with opportunities to act. The world as represented by the subject that understands itself in the categories of subjective spirit (as soul, as consciousness, as intelligence) is different from the world within which a person acts, who understands herself in the categories of objective spirit (i.e. as a person, a moral or ethical agent). Objectivity within objective spirit guarantees that the formal condition of my action (now as Handlung) becomes determinable with a reflected content. The formal habit resulting from the initiation into any social practice is the way in which spirit refers to itself as a form and is able to reproduce this form by which it represents itself. Second nature is now the ‘system of right’ which means it is the newly determined social practice – the form of normativity inherited from subjective spirit which now receives a mediated or reflected content. In order to understand such mediated content, it would be inappropriate to use the example of the skill to play a piano. Mediated content here is a content which already reflects the form of social practice. The formal habituation which is the result of initiation into a culturally contingent social practice as understood in subjective spirit, allows spirit to conceive of social practices ‘as such’ as its own product. Out of this self-cognition, objective spirit develops a reformed conception of spirit, in which it determines itself as ethical practices in form as well as content. It does so by justifying a legal framework, which protects those social spaces within which social initiation takes place, such as the family,25 but also protected spaces of education, for example. Certain social spaces need protection in order to offer the social initiation that is key for an agent to develop autonomy as self-determination outside these protected social spaces. Thus, objective spirit has appropriated as its own what was merely a given condition in subjective spirit. Playing a piano is not an ethical content,26 nor is the new content awarded to the form of social habituation simply one among the multitude of social practices lifted to a more general universality of law.27

 I do not intend to defend Hegel’s notion of family in toto.  But one could argue that practices of art, religion, and philosophy need to be among those protected spaces objective spirit ought to offer, even though it does not determine their content. 27  It would be a sign of dictatorship, whereby one social group or normative practice declares its norms to be laws and therefore applicable to all (such as if all houses had to be timber-framed houses or all spoken languages need to be reduced to one). From a logical point of view, this move would ignore the difference between two types of universality. What explains the difference between subjective spirit and objective spirit is a logical distinction, which Hegel has established within his Science of Logic or its equivalent, the first of the three volumes of the Encyclopedia. Whereas under the universality of reflective allness, that is constitutive of subjective spirit, any content is accidental (Enc1, §175 and §190, Enc3, §410; PR, §10), under the universality of genusspecies, which is constitutive for objective spirit, the content is not (PR, §13R). Rather, it contains 25 26

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However, similarly to the change from the contingent, affective content of sympathy and antipathy, which vanishes in the process of habituation and makes room for the new content of meaningful speech, the contingent content of subjective normativity and contingently grown social practices vanishes and creates a space for ethical normativity. And similarly to the way in which speech, once understood, allows a systematic initiation of a child into sound patterns (namely into the sound patterns of the natural language spoken by the culture it is born into), the protected social spaces in which ethical habituation takes place allow a systematic initiation of a person insofar as they prepare this person to become a citizen of a just state. The system of right as second nature is the determination of content of spirit’s product, a product which it recognizes as being the result of its own activity. Spirit is able to determine itself in form and content, because it is initially able to recognize itself as already being productive.28 A notion of freedom as liberation does not contain the idea of a productive spirit and is therefore insufficient to explain how second nature depends on an already established habit in order to be determined with a reflected content. Freedom of spirit is thus not merely the liberation from natural conditions and constraints but the freedom to practically determine itself and thereby recognize itself in its product. Because the habituation into a social normativity is the result of an initiation into a contingent social practice, partly by mechanical repetition and re-enactment of its norms, this habituation is a product of spirit. Thus, the fact that spirit recognizes itself in its product – that we recognize that we have to conceive of ourselves as always already embedded into social practices in order to act at all –, means that spirit becomes free to fully determine its product not just as form but also in content. As Hegel has put it, ‘The will is free, so that freedom is both its substance and its goal.’

an immanent relation to its form as the idea of right precisely is the free will as its form as well as content (Enc1, §177 and §191 and PR, §24R). 28  A note on ethical action as compared to subjective action: the legal system defines whether the use of a knife counts as ‘murder’ or ‘performing a surgery’ or that touching wood with a lightened match counts as ‘arson’ (PR, §119 and §121R). Hegel’s notion of Handlung rests on these legal notions not in the sense that his philosophy of action presupposes a particular set of laws. Rather, it rests on the system of right because right determines subjectivity as well as objectivity and allows us to think Handlung as well as Tat as the actualized deed. Because the agent acts in a world, which is already actualizing freedom as objectivity, this world is not only offering opportunities to act, which differ from a mere socially normed practice, it also is able to accommodate the actualized intentions in the deed of an agent. Thus, the agent can have knowledge of what he has done as the actualization of his intention. Intention within objective spirit is Absicht and not just a mere ‘end’ (Zweck) as in subjective spirit. What defines a ‘content’ within the context of ‘objective spirit’ is different compared to what defines ‘content’ in the context of ‘subjective spirit’.

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6 The Limits of Second Nature In the previous two sections, we saw a notion of spirit’s freedom as being more than mere liberation. Spirit’s freedom according to Hegel is freedom as self-­ determination – immediate self-determination in subjective spirit and mediated self-­ determination in objective spirit. This idea of freedom conceives of spirit as essentially practical and thereby as capable of recognizing itself in its own product. In objective spirit, such product is a system of right, protecting social spaces of ethical habituation, which are ‘the realm of freedom made actual, the world of spirit [Geist] brought forth out of itself as a second nature.’ With these results in mind I now look at whether they can be challenged by another central passage, which makes use of the term ‘second nature’. A brief analysis of the quote in this concluding section will allow us to consolidate the distinction between the acquisition of ‘second nature’ for an ethical agent and the overall process of Bildung of spirit. In §151 of the PR Hegel seems to justify to talk about an antinomy with regard to second nature: But in simple identity with the actuality of individuals ethical life [das Sittliche] appears as their general mode of conduct, i.e. as custom [Sitte], while the habitual practice of ethical living appears as a second nature which, put in the place of the initial, purely natural will, is the soul of custom permeating it through and through, the significance and the actuality of its existence. It is spirit living and present as a world, and the substance of spirit thus exists now for the first time as spirit. (PR, §151)

The unity (‘the substance of spirit’) between an ethical agent and the ethical practice he belongs to, which seem to be at the heart of this quote, might give rise to the suspicion that any such practice might be liable to be reduced to a mere custom. Could Hegel thus be read in a way that he supports the antinomy as laid out by Menke, so that an ethical agent can become too familiar with ethical living? At first sight, it looks from the Zusatz of said paragraph that the antinomy cannot be avoided, as he speaks of ‘spiritual or physical death’ as a result of this over-familiarity: […] when he has once come to feel completely at home in life, when he has become spiritually and physically dull, and when the opposition between subjective consciousness and spiritual activity has disappeared; for the human being is active only insofar as he has not attained his end and wants to produce and assert himself in the effort to attain it. When this has been fully achieved, activity and vitality are at an end, and the result – loss of interest in life – is spiritual or physical death. (PR, §151 Z)

Even though we seem to have support for the antinomy insofar as the fixed and frozen ethical life can endanger the agency of a person, I would like to offer a different conclusion. What Hegel is saying here is that with this conception of nature, spirit ceases to be free, because it stops being active. However, this does not lead necessarily into an antinomy. It simply reminds us of the fact that spirit’s freedom as self-determination includes the activity of appropriation of its ‘other’, including first and second nature.

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Menke’s antinomy is right insofar as it acknowledges a danger to ethical agency that comes with second nature. However, it is not a danger that threatens the freedom of agency as such but a step within spirit’s appropriation of its other. What the antinomy presupposes as a non-Hegelian assumption is that ‘nature’ is a limitation to spirit, whereas Hegel consistently claims that nature is spirit’s ‘other’ which it seeks to appropriate. Thus, second nature is a danger, which – if overcome – leads back to the path of Bildung to spirit’s self-mediated self-determination which is at the heart of the entire PoS. Bertram’s conception of Hegelian second nature as an ongoing and open-ended task is right insofar as it acknowledges the continuous effort of spirit of self-­ cognition by appropriating its other. However, the term ‘second nature’ on its own is insufficient to explain Bildung as the dynamic of spirit’s development. As the quote from the Zusatz indicates, second nature of an ethical agent ought to be considered as part and parcel of spirit’s Bildung but not be equated with it. Otherwise, we would lose the sense in which second nature can threaten the interest in life and result in a loss of ‘vitality’ in individual cases – a threat which can turn into a task of spirit if understood as part of the continuous process of Bildung.29 And as our argument above has shown, we would also lose the sense in which the appearance of second nature in habitually heard sound patterns is different from second nature of ethical practices insofar as ethical practices are free in form as well as content.

References Battistoni, Giulia. 2019. The normative function of the right of objectivity in Hegel’s theory of imputation. In Concepts of normativity: Kant or Hegel? (Critical studies in German idealism), ed. Christian Krijnen, vol. 24, 120–140. Leiden: Brill. Bertram, Georg W. 2020. Two conceptions of second nature. Open Philosophy 2020 (3): 68–80. de Laurentiis, Allegra. 2019. Derangements of the Soul. In Hegel’s philosophy of spirit: A critical guide, ed. Marina Bykova, 83–103. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2021. Hegel’s anthropology: Life, psyche, and second nature. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. de Vries, Willem A. 1988. Hegel’s theory of mental activity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Dworschak, Thomas. 2020. Das Recht des Individuums und die Substanz der Sittlichkeit. Hegel-­ Studien 53 (54): 135–164. Hegel, G.W.F. [Enc2] 2007a. Philosophy of nature. Being part two of the encyclopaedia of the philosophical sciences (1830), Together with the Zusätze. (Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830). Mit den mündlichen Zusätzen). Ed. Michael J. Inwood and Trans. William Wallace and Arnold V. Miller with Revisions and Commentary by Michael J. Inwood. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. [Enc3] 2007b. Philosophy of mind. Being part three of the encyclopaedia of the philosophical sciences (1830), together with the Zusätze. (Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830). Mit den mündlichen Zusätzen). Ed. Michael J. Inwood

 Lumsden 2021 writes that Bildung ‘allows individuals to adopt the perspective of the universal’, which would be difficult to formulate if Bildung was exhausted in the acquisition of second nature. 29

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and Transl. William Wallace and Arnold V. Miller with Revisions and Commentary by Michael J. Inwood. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. [LPS] 2007c. Lectures on the philosophy of spirit 1827–28 (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des Geistes, Nachschriften zu dem Kolleg des Wintersemesters 1827/28 und sekundäre Überlieferung). Trans. Robert R. Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. [PR] 2008. Outlines of the philosophy of right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts). Trans. Thomas M. Knox. Revised and edited by Stephen Houlgate. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. [SL] 2010. Science of logic. (Wissenschaft der Logik). Trans. and Ed. George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herrmann-Sinai, Susanne. 2009. Musik und Zeit bei Kant. Kant-Studien 100 (4): 427–453. ———. 2016. Subjective action. In Hegel’s philosophical psychology, ed. S. Herrmann-Sinai and Lucia Ziglioli, 127–152. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. ———. 2020. Hegel on the difference between social normativity and normativity of right. HegelStudien 53 (54): 117–134. Inwood, Michael. 2007. A commentary on Hegel’s philosophy of mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kern, Andrea. 2020. Life and mind: Varieties of neo-Aristotelianism: Naive, sophisticated, Hegelian. Hegel Bulletin 82 (41/1): 40–60. Lumsden, Simon. 2013. Between nature and Spirit: Hegel’s account of habit. In Essays on Hegel’s subjective Spirit, ed. David S. Stern, 121–138. Albany: SUNY. ———. 2021. The role of Bildung in Hegel’s philosophy of history. Intellectual History Review 31 (3): 445–462. Magrì, Elisa. 2016a. The place of habit in Hegel’s psychology. In Hegel’s philosophical psychology, ed. S. Herrmann-Sinai and Lucia Ziglioli, 74–90. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. ———. 2016b. A note on some contemporary readings of Hegel’s master-servant dialectic. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 12 (1): 238–256. McDowell, John. 1996. Mind and world. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Menke, Christoph. 2018. Autonomie und Befreiung. In Studien zu Hegel. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Ng, Karen. 2016. Life and mind in Hegel’s logic and subjective Spirit. Hegel Bulletin 39 (1): 23–44. Novakovic, Andreja. 2017. Hegel on second nature in ethical life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peters, Julia. 2016. On naturalism in Hegel’s philosophy of Spirit. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24 (1): 111–131. Sandkaulen, Birgit. 2014. Bildung bei Hegel  – Entfremdung oder Versöhung? Hegel-Jahrbuch 2014: 430–438. Testa, Italo. 2009. Second nature and recognition: Hegel and the social space. Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory 10 (3): 341–370. Ziglioli, Lucia. 2016. World of representation and thought. Hegel on subjective knowing. In Hegel’s philosophical psychology, ed. S. Herrmann-Sinai and L. Ziglioli, 104–124. Abingdon/ New York: Routledge.

Gattungswesen and Universality: Feuerbach, Marx and German Idealism Christoph Schuringa

It is widely recognized that the concept of Gattungswesen is central to Marx’s early thought. The way in which Marx understands the concept has, however, received surprisingly little detailed philosophical examination. Relatedly, the connections between Marx’s use of the concept and the role it plays in the German idealist tradition have been insufficiently examined. While it is often acknowledged that Marx inherits the concept from Feuerbach (in particular as it is deployed in The Essence of Christianity), the roots of Feuerbach’s own use of Gattung and associated concepts tend to be left out of account. In this paper I want to show that rectifying this helps in particular with understanding a dimension of Gattungswesen that Marx takes to be crucial: its universality. Tracing the career of Gattungswesen further back into German idealism will also, eventually, help us to understand the connections between what Marx calls ‘naturalism or humanism’ and communism.1 Marx writes, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (‘Paris Manuscripts’) of 1844: Der Mensch ist ein Gattungswesen, nicht nur indem er praktisch und theoretisch die Gattung, sowohl seine eigne als die der übrigen Dinge zu seinem Gegenstand macht, sondern—und dieß ist nur ein andrer Ausdruck für dieselbe Sache—sondern auch indem er sich zu sich selbst als der gegenwärtigen, lebendigen Gattung verhält, indem er sich zu sich als einem universellen, darum freien Wesen verhält. (MEGA2 I/2: 239).

I translate this as follows (leaving the word ‘Gattung’ and cognates untranslated):

 A recent treatment of Hegel that gives a detailed account of Gattung and its role in Hegel’s logical account of life is Ng 2020. 1

C. Schuringa (*) Northeastern University, London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Corti, J.-G. Schülein (eds.), Life, Organisms, and Human Nature, Studies in German Idealism 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_14

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The human is a Gattungswesen, not only since he practically and theoretically makes the Gattung, both his own and that of all remaining things, his object, but—and this is merely a different expression for the same thing—since he relates himself to himself as the present, living Gattung, since he relates himself to himself as a universal and therefore free being.2

The term ‘Gattungswesen’ functions in two different ways in German. First, Wesen means ‘essence’; and so ‘Gattungswesen’ can designate the essence of the human. But a Wesen is also a being or creature; and so each human is a Gattungswesen. (Note also that in German the word remains unchanged when the latter usage is pluralized: we may speak of a Gattungswesen, and of many Gattungswesen.) Marx’s claim can be spelled out in terms of either usage. I participate in an essence (in Gattungswesen); I, this one here, am a Gattungswesen. I translate ‘der Mensch’ by ‘the human’. Traditionally, the sexist term ‘man’ has been used in English to function as ‘der Mensch’ does in German and ho anthrōpos in Greek. (I have preserved the sexist pronoun ‘he’, as tracking Marx’s use of ‘er’.) What’s important is that ‘der Mensch’ here figures as the subject in what Michael Thompson has called a ‘natural-historical judgement’ (Thompson 2008). That is, reference is made not to some individual human being, nor to the totality of human beings, nor to some statistically relevant sample of human beings, but to the human being as bearer of a life-form. It is important that a plural not be used here: Marx does not say that human beings are Gattungswesen. The subject of the natural-­ historical judgement is not a collectivity. Now, what does Marx mean by saying that the human, qua Gattungswesen, is a universal being? Marx’s claim remains enigmatic if we take what it is to be a Gattungswesen in a way that has seemed natural to many, i.e. in terms of membership of a species amongst other species—sometimes, specifically, of a biological species amongst other biological species (Sect. 1). Such readings encounter difficulties that stem from their failure to recognize the lineage of the concept Gattung from Hegel through Feuerbach to Marx. Although commentators tend to recognize that Marx’s use of the concept of Gattungswesen is indebted to Feuerbach, they tend to confine their attention to The Essence of Christianity. I examine Feuerbach’s earlier writings, in which the connection with Hegel’s conception of Gattung is explicit (Sect. 2). Feuerbach’s position can be read as a high-strength, uncompromising Hegelianism. I then return to Marx’s texts of 1843 and 1844 to show how a proper appreciation of his conception of Gattung and Gattungswesen as a development of this Hegelian-Feuerbachian line helps with the apparent puzzles with which we

 Cf. Rodney Livingstone’s translation: ‘Man is a species-being, not only because he practically and theoretically makes the species – both is own and those of other things – his object, but also – and this is simply another way of saying the same thing – because he looks upon himself as the present, living species, because he looks upon himself as a universal and therefore free being’ (EW 327). My surmise is that Livingstone’s translation choices, in particular the language of ‘looking upon’, have, in a number of ways, been responsible for various problematic interpretative trends I discuss in Sect. 1. In what follows, I have throughout tacitly emended English translations cited where appropriate. 2

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started (Sect. 3). Finally, I ask whether Marx is effectively returning us to the conception of the human as concretely universal to be found in Hegel himself (Sect. 4).

1 The Apparent Puzzle It is a not unreasonable supposition that being a Gattungswesen is a matter of membership of a species. On that supposition, Marx’s further claims about the Gattungswesen seem to require interpretation as features, or consequences, of such membership. So, for instance, the freedom and universality he talks about are to be understood as trappings of the species-membership in question. The seeming naturalness of this supposition may be in part underwritten by the standard English translation of ‘Gattungswesen’ as ‘species-being’. But this is by no means the whole story. It is right to point out that it can often be more appropriate to translate the pair of terms Gattung and Art as ‘genus’ and ‘species’ respectively, and some have advocated translating ‘Gattungswesen’ as ‘genus-being’.3 One issue with this is that the suggestion simply comes too late; ‘species-being’ is now the accepted translation throughout the literature on Marx. Another is that ‘genus’ and ‘species’ are relative terms: the generality of some given species gets to be fixed with respect to some greater or higher generality—that of a genus. Furthermore, Marx himself is happy to assimilate ‘species’ and ‘Gattung’, as when he writes: ‘In der Art der Lebensthätigkeit liegt der ganze Charakter einer species, ihr Gattungscharakter’ (‘The entire character of a species, its Gattung-character, lies in its kind of life-activity’, MEGA2 I/2: 240; cf. EW 328). The philosophical difficulty that has seemed to present itself to some interpreters of Marx and that I want to bring out in this section cannot be resolved by reflection on terminology. However, such terminological reflection can prime us for what I want to show in Sect. 2: that the generality of Gattung is not what we assume it to be if we think in terms of an all-too-familiar conception of species. Commentators often observe that Marx, in telling us that the human is a Gattungswesen, is telling us both that human beings are characterized by belonging to a kind (to the Gattung in question), and also that this kind to which we belong is something like an essence from which certain consequences flow about how we ought to be. The relevant Gattung, that is, not only brings out something that we have in common but also, in some sense, sets a standard for what it is for us to do well.4 Some have worried about how to unify what seem like a descriptive and a normative dimension here, but I will set this to one side. That worry in any case rests on a fact–value dichotomy of which Marx is innocent. What I want to bring out is

 E.g. Skempton (2011), and most recently Khurana (2022). See also French translations as ‘être générique’ (e.g. in Toàn 1971, and in the writings of Louis Althusser). 4  Commentators who have concentrated on the second dimension include Leopold (2007) and Brudney (1998). 3

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instead a structural issue that can be revealed, and does indeed reveal itself in the literature, whichever of the two dimensions in question. This is clearly seen in Adam Schaff’s Marxism and the Human Individual. In the following passage, we see Schaff distinguish between the two dimensions, and we see the issue to which I want to draw attention exhibited along both dimensions. Schaff writes: What matters here above all is to draw a line between two meanings of the phrase ‘species-­ being’: First, one stresses that man belongs to a biological species as a specimen sharing some general characteristics with all other specimens of this species; and second, one emphasizes that man possesses a certain model of what man should be like, which is a result of his own reflection on the properties and tasks of his own species—a model which is a source of the norms of human conduct as a ‘species-being’, that is a being which fits in with a certain model or stereotype of man (the ‘essence’ of man). (Schaff 1970, 82–3).

Schaff is perhaps unusual in stating explicitly that, when it comes to the first dimension, the conception of species he is operating with is a ‘biological’ one (although we see that assumptions that are best made sense of on a biological conception of Gattung animate other interpreters). Conceiving Gattung in this way, Schaff lands us with two problems—one along each dimension. Along the first dimension, individual human beings must somehow come to recognize or ascertain that they belong to the species they belong to. Along the second dimension, each individual human being must, further, engage in a process of reflection ‘on the properties and tasks of his own species’, in order to discover the standards for human conduct. This raises a set of epistemological issues about how the individual negotiates this mediation with the species to which she belongs. Although Schaff brings out the issue particularly starkly, it can be seen to recur in the literature. John Plamenatz asks: ‘What was it that Marx had in mind when he called man a species-being?’ In response, he tells us that Marx ‘appears to have used the term in two senses, of which one at least is clear’. Here is Plamenatz’s first sense: Man is a species-being in the sense that he is aware of himself as a being of a certain kind; he is conscious of his humanity, of what is common to him with other men. (Plamenatz 1975, 68).

This is akin to Schaff’s first sense. Plamenatz directs us towards the second sense, which he finds more difficult to understand, by pointing to Marx’s remark that (as Plamenatz quotes it) ‘“man is a species-being … in the sense that he makes the community … his object both practically and theoretically”’ (Plamenatz 1975, 69). The word translated here as ‘community’ is: Gattung. So for Plamenatz the dual problem is that individual human beings must, on the one hand, recognize themselves to belong to a species, by seeing what they have in common with other members of the species, and, on the other hand, they must come to see something general (the entire ‘community’, in the translation Plamenatz quotes) as their ‘object’. Plamenatz rightly finds this idea difficult, given his conception of membership of a Gattung, and he proceeds to give a tentative reconstruction of what Marx may have meant by considering ways in which some individual

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might come to be ‘aware of himself as a member of a community’ (Plamenatz 1975, 70). A further difficulty shows up in Joseph O’Malley’s reading: To say that man is a species-being is to say that he can apprehend in thought not only his own individual self, but also his own species-character, his own essential nature. Human consciousness differs from animal consciousness by reason of the fact that it includes an awareness of the self as being a member of a species, as sharing a common nature with others, as being one kind of being among other kinds of beings. Human consciousness thus includes, among other capacities, the ability to define and to classify, and therefore to be scientific. (O’Malley 1970, xli).

When O’Malley tells us that human consciousness ‘includes an awareness of the self as being a member of a species’, that is so far like Schaff and Plamenatz. But when he writes that human consciousness ‘thus’ includes the ability to define and to classify, the non sequitur is evident. That non sequitur again shows up that something must be amiss with Marx’s conception of Gattungswesen if the general line of interpretation found in Schaff, Plamenatz and O’Malley is correct. The general problematic that these commentators experience as emerging from Marx’s handling of Gattungswesen is one that is exhibited particularly clearly in Allen Wood’s reflections on the supposed issue of how our universal capacities get established. Wood writes: For both Feuerbach and Marx, the human being’s species being is bound up very closely with the fact of our own self-consciousness, as well as with our characteristically human intellectual abilities. Feuerbach believes that it is our consciousness of our own species nature which makes it possible for us to be conscious of the species nature of other things, and hence that our species being is the foundation of our ability to form universal concepts. There are some passages in Marx which may be read as endorsing this thesis. Neither philosopher, however, presents any real argument in favor of the thesis, and I confess that I see no way in which one could be made out. Prima facie, in fact, the truth would seem to be just the opposite, that it is the human ability to form universal concepts which makes it possible for people to know themselves as members of a species. (Wood 2004, 19).

The argument that Wood demands is one that is only needed on the assumption that the self-conscious universality of Gattungswesen is something that an individual Gattungswesen has first to ascertain, and that this is something independent of the capacity for universal thought. As I will demonstrate in the remainder of this essay, that assumption is mistaken, as can be illuminated by careful attention to the concept as it is handed down from Hegel, through Feuerbach, to Marx.5

 I have concentrated here on some instances from the Anglophone literature that I take to bring out something more widespread. I do not mean to imply that there exists no corrective to these tendencies, even within the Anglophone literature. An example of such a corrective is Gould (1978). 5

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2 Gattung in Feuerbach’s Hegelian Phase I want to begin from the way in which Feuerbach handles the concept of Gattung in his earliest writings, in a manner derived from Hegel. Hegel, in his Philosophy of Nature, presents nature in terms of a hierarchical scala naturae, culminating in the animal organism. All living beings engage in the Gattungsprozess. This process of self-reproduction takes different forms according to the form of life in question. But it is in the highest form of animal, the human being, that the Gattungsprozess is fully realized. Here the animal becomes for-itself ‘the Gattung’: that is to say, we now have individuals who not only belong to some Gattung or other, but are ‘the Gattung’ as such. To say this is to say that the animal has now achieved universality. In this, it is revealed that ‘spirit is the truth of nature’. In the last paragraph of the Philosophy of Nature (Encyclopaedia II, §376) Hegel announces: ‘With this, Nature has passed over into its truth’ (TWA 9: 537; Enc2: 443). He repeats the point that ‘spirit is the truth of nature’ at the outset of the Philosophy of Spirit at Encyclopaedia III §381, adding that spirit is ‘the absolutely first’ with respect to nature (TWA 10: 17; Enc3: 9).6 It is helpful to work up to Marx’s handling of Gattung through an examination of Feuerbach’s earliest writings, beginning with his doctoral dissertation, since here Hegel’s conception of the Gattung is brought into particularly stark focus. I do not claim that Marx was directly influenced by Feuerbach’s earliest writings.7 There has been considerable debate as to when Feuerbach turned away from Hegel, and whether he had even ever been a Hegelian at all.8 The evidence is clear, however, that the dissertation is a document that thinks of itself as thoroughly, and orthodoxly, Hegelian (even if, as I will go on to show, Feuerbach’s understanding of  On the relation between nature and spirit in Hegel, see Schuringa 2022.  We know that Marx read Feuerbach’s Vorläufige Thesen, Grundsätze and Wesen des Christentums. We also know that he read Hegel extremely thoroughly, so the kind of Hegelian conception that Feuerbach crystallizes would have been familiar to him as the background to Feuerbach’s talk of Gattungswesen in the texts that he did read. According to Wartofsky (1977: 163) ‘the earliest discussion of this concept [Gattungswesen], in the form in which it becomes central for Feuerbach[,] occurs […] in Philosophy and Christianity’, i.e. in Feuerbach’s ‘last defense of Hegel’ (1977: 160). It is perhaps more accurate to say that Philosophy and Christianity is a transitional text with respect to Feuerbach’s conception of Gattungswesen. Here Feuerbach still locates the Gattungcharacter of humans in the power of thought, but there is the beginning of the idea that something more than sheer engagement in thought is required of human individuals in order to make good on this Gattung-character. 8  Simon Rawidowicz (1931) gives conclusive arguments for regarding Feuerbach as a devoted Hegelian at the time of the composition of the dissertation. He is followed in this by Kamenka (1970) and by Wartofsky (1977). Earlier readers and editors of Feuerbach’s work such as Wilhelm Bolin and Friedrich Jodl had played down Feuerbach’s Hegelianism as much as possible, in an attempt to secure the absoluteness of his originality. This anti-Hegelian strain in readings of Feuerbach continues to be found in non-specialized treatments of Feuerbach. There are of course grounds to take seriously the idea that Feuerbach harboured doubts about Hegel (even on his own idiosyncratic reading of him) even as he was writing the doctoral dissertation. This is evidenced by the ‘Doubts’ of 1827/8 reprinted in FB. 6 7

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Hegel is, in fact, unorthodox in important respects). It was written under a strong direct influence from Hegel. Feuerbach had attended Hegel’s lectures in Berlin in the 1820s, and sent his dissertation with a praise-filled letter to his former professor. Hegel’s own works are cited at philosophically crucial points in the dissertation. The dissertation is written in Latin, and bears the title De ratione, una, universali, infinita. We find here that the relevant Latin term is genus, and that Feuerbach contrasts this with, and relates it to, species. This corresponds to a distinction between Gattung and Art found both in Hegel and the early (Hegelian) Feuerbach. The genus–species contrast is then deployed in a variety of ways, as will become clear. The dissertation makes a series of interconnected claims about the nature of reason. Reason is said to be (as the title announces) una, universali, infinita—one, universal and infinite. Its unity is manifested in its universality. As a sensible being, I have a particular character distinct from yours (as is true of animals in general). But qua rational being, I am not distinct from you. As a thinking being, I do not have my particular character distinct from yours. For what I think is available to be thought by you, and when we both think it what we think is the same. As Feuerbach pointedly puts it, ‘in thinking, I myself am the human genus, not the individual human that I am in so far as I feel, live, and act, and not a particular human being (this or that one), but no one’.9 Now, how is thought to be understood? Feuerbach claims that it is to be understood in terms of a genus–species relation. Namely, thought is the self-articulation of consciousness (the genus) into cognitions shaped by individual thought-­ determinations (species). Consciousness, qua genus, remains always the same, as it articulates itself into individual cognitions. Furthermore, consciousness (following Hegel) is self-consciousness. One can rightly call consciousness a genus. As relation to itself it is the original relation, through which alone cognition can come into being. It is present no less in its thinking about itself than in cognition and it is ongoing and uninterrupted, true to itself and the same in all its cognitions and thought-determinations. And cognition, by contrast, in so far as it relates only to determinate and finite things […] must be called a species of consciousness. (GW 1: 52).10

 Feuerbach, De ratione, §6 (GW 1: 30): ‘cogitans ipse sum genus humanum non singularis homo, qualis sum, quum sentio, vivo, ago, neque certus quidam homo (hic vel ille) sed nemo.’ 10  Feuerbach, De ratione, §11 (GW 1: 52). Feuerbach here draws for support directly on Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit, which he footnotes. The passage from PhG that Feuerbach cites is the following: ‘Denn die vielen Kategorien sind Arten der reinen Kategorie, heißt, sie ist noch ihre Gattung oder Wesen, nicht ihnen entgegengesetzt. Aber sie sind schon das Zweydeutige, welches zugleich das Andersseyn gegen die reine Kategorie in seiner Vielheit an sich hat. Sie widersprechen ihr durch diese Vielheit in der That, und die reine Einheit muß sie an sich aufheben, wodurch sie sich als negative Einheit der Unterschiede constituirt. […]’ [pp. 168–9 of the first edn.; chapter ‘Gewißheit und Wahrheit der Vernunft’] This is ¶236 in Michael Inwood’s translation: ‘For to say that the many categories are species of the pure category means that this latter is still their genus or essence, not opposed to them. But they are already something ambiguous, which at the same time has in itself otherness in its plurality in contrast to the pure category. In fact, they contradict the pure category by this plurality, and the pure unity must sublate them in itself, thereby constituting itself as negative unity of the differences. […]’. 9

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What we are, then, is thinking beings: as such (as what we really are) we are genus. We are all one. The genus–species model is used not just for understanding the way in which individual cognitions fall under the genus thought, however. A similar picture applies to living nature, in which the various species (Arten) fall under (what is ultimately appropriately called) ‘the genus’. Here the genus, as for Hegel, does not exist other than through the generation and passing away of individuals. Any genus is mere form in relation to the individuals that fall under it.11 Thus it is at the point of death that the individual is most truly its genus. There is a genus, however, in whom this Gattungsprozess is most fully realized. This is the human. Here the individual, we might say, becomes one with its genus. For it, the genus is present not just at death but throughout the lives of the individuals (in thought). Two components of this picture come out particularly clearly in Feuerbach’s text of 1830, Thoughts on Death and Immortality. Here Feuerbach argues that there is no such thing as individual immortality. It is not wrong to say that the human mind survives bodily death, but this is to be conceived as a dissolution back into the genus; it is not I who survive. (This view cost Feuerbach any prospect of academic employment.) The first component that is particularly clear in Thoughts is the notion that the Gattung contains within itself a hierarchy of ‘stages, levels, and kinds of life’. Feuerbach now emphasizes, secondly, that nature itself is to be conceived as Gattung: ‘the earth is also a universal, infinite, meaningful measure’ and ‘terrestrial nature is the universal Gattung of all life, the Gattung that has developed all the possible modes of life as they exist on the earth’.12 Not only is nature the Gattung; furthermore, no possible forms of life are left out. So there are two sides to the universality of the Gattung. Feuerbach maintains this view even in Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Philosophie (1839). Here, despite all his differences with Hegel, Feuerbach can still write: Human form cannot be regarded as limited and finite, because even if it were so the artistic-­ creative spirit could easily remove the limits and conjure up a higher form from it. The human form is rather the genus of the manifold animal species; it no longer exists as species in man, but as genus. The being of man is no longer a particular and subjective, but a universal being, for man has the whole universe as the object of his drive for knowledge. And only a cosmopolitan being can have the cosmos as its object. (GW 9: 61; FB 93)

I submit that it is only in light of the above fuller picture that we can really appreciate what is in play in Feuerbach’s conception of the human being as Gattungswesen in the much-cited passages from the Introduction to The Essence of Christianity. We can now see, in particular, why Feuerbach claims there that a human being ‘can put himself in the place of another’, and why ‘science is the consciousness of genera’. There are at least four key ingredients to Feuerbach’s conception of Gattungswesen as set out here. One is the idea that there are different species of animals, but that

11 12

 Feuerbach, De ratione, §11 (GW 1: 52).  Feuerbach, Gedanken (GW 1: 277).

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there is one Gattung which stands at the apex of the hierarchy of animals (itself the top tier of an Aristotelian scala naturae), namely the human. This Gattung, since only it is a full realization of what it is to be a Gattung (by being that Gattung for-­ itself as well as in-itself), can properly be said to be the Gattung. Second, there are two sides to the Gattung, and thereby two sides to its universality. Both subject (us) and object (nature) are Gattung. Without this conception of the Gattung as two-sided, we would be unable to understand what Marx will go on to make of this idea: namely, that the totality of nature is our inorganic body. Third, it is only when we have a proper appreciation of Gattungswesen as expounded by the early Feuerbach that we can see why Marx takes universality to be prior to the individuals that bear it. Universality is not to be arrived at somehow through a process of recognition, or any other transaction carried out by individual bearers amongst themselves. Rather to understand what the human being is is already to understand it as universal (and free). Gattungswesen is a substance that is such as to be universal. Fourth, there is a feature prominent in the Feuerbachian exposition that marks it out from Hegel’s own presentation. This can serve as a reason for focusing on the early Feuerbach, rather than going back to Hegel’s texts, even though Marx knew these texts well, and it is unlikely that he ever read Feuerbach’s Thoughts on Death and Immortality (and still less likely that he read the dissertation). Feuerbach consistently interprets Hegel as claiming that what constitutes human universality is located in the realm of thought. Feuerbach thereby develops a thesis that is certainly present in Hegel, to the effect that reason or thought is the mark of the human and that it lifts us out of nature into the realm of universality, but emphasizes the idea of the independence of what constitutes the human Gattung from the material reality of the organism in a way that Hegel does not. (Hegel’s treatment of Geist in Encyclopaedia III spends a great deal of time reminding us of the material embodiment of geistig beings.) Feuerbach thereby prizes apart thought-like universality from embodied individuality in a manner that he subsequently has trouble repairing.13 It is clear that much of Marx’s gripes with Hegel in the Paris manuscripts get their sustenance from this Feuerbachian reading of Hegel, which thinks everything of importance happens in the Logic, so that the transition to Nature must be construed as jumping across to what is, after all, a positively known independent reality (something that in turn motivates Feuerbach’s notion that we can start with the positive). If we question this Feuerbachian reading, we thereby question Marx’s own sense of his distance from Hegel. And, arguably, we can read Marx’s development of a ‘materialist’ version of Gattungswesen, emphasizing the productive activity of living individuals, as prompted by the prizing apart of thought from life in

 Note John Edward Toews’s perceptive remark: ‘Feuerbach appears to have been self-consciously aware of his inability to provide an adequate account in his dissertation of the reconciliation of the individual and the universal. At least he noted in a letter to a Professor Harless at Erlangen that he failed to demonstrate clearly the necessary development from self-consciousness to the universality of thought’ (Toews 1980: 193). 13

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Feuerbach’s version of the Hegelian idea in a way that the Hegelian idea might not itself have suggested to him.14 I turn next to the Paris Manuscripts, in order to show that the Feuerbachian conception of Gattungswesen allows us to make better sense of Marx’s claims than have the interpreters discussed in Sect. 1. I will then examine a series of other texts from 1843–44 to show up the difficulties that this conception threatens in terms of a bifurcation between the Gattung and the individuals that are its bearers.

3 Marx’s Texts of 1843 and 1844: Universality and the Threat of Bifurcation Let us return to the passage from the Paris Manuscripts with which we began. It might seem difficult to understand why Marx says that the human is ‘a universal and therefore free being,’ if Marx took the universality in question to be merely that of membership of some species or other. But he goes on to say, importantly, that ‘man is more universal than animals.’ This reflects his understanding of Gattungswesen as involving a higher generality than that of mere animal species. It is this higher generality, a generality that is sui generis with respect to animal Gattungen, that brings with it freedom. As for Hegel and other German idealists, universality and freedom go together, as marks of rationally self-determining life. Note that Marx speaks of the Gattungsleben of animals, but never says that they are Gattungswesen.15 Again, Marx ascribes to other animal species ‘Gattung-character’ (MEGA2 I/2: 240; cf. EW 328: ‘species-character’), but never Gattungswesen. The human is the only Gattungswesen. Membership of an animal species does not bestow freedom, whatever other capacities it bestows. Again, it is impossible to understand Marx’s insistence that ‘the universality of man manifests itself in practice in that universality which makes the whole of nature his inorganic body’ unless it is recognized that the universality of the Gattung has two sides: both it as subject, and its object, are universal. ‘The practical creation of an objective world, the fashioning of inorganic nature, is proof that man is a conscious Gattungswesen’; and ‘it is […] in his fashioning of the objective that man really proves himself to be a Gattungswesen’ (MEGA2 I/2: 241; EW 328, 329). The

 Michael Quante has argued that Marx’s conception of gegenständliches Gattungswesen ‘represents a synthesis from three sources: the philosophical-anthropological conception of Feuerbach, Heß’s social vision of unity and the objectification-model of action taken from Hegel’ (Quante 2013: 75). This identification of the sources of the conception is not incorrect; however, where universality is concerned, I want to argue there is a single source in Hegel, filtered for Marx through Feuerbach. 15  Judith Butler draws attention to this usage in Marx. Butler writes: ‘When we speak about the life of the species, das Gattungsleben, we refer to that which commonly characterised both humans and animals’ (2019: 12). What Butler does not note is that, while humans and non-human animals alike participate in Gattungsleben, only the former are Gattungswesen. 14

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notion that the human, in virtue of their universality, produces a universal object, has perplexed many commentators. But if we take seriously the Feuerbachian conception of the Gattung, it follows immediately that both subject and object must be marked by universality. Marx does not, I submit, experience the difficulties around the way in which individual Gattungswesen are supposed to set themselves in relation to their universality, and even discover or construct that universality, that some commentators have wrestled with simply because, for him, universality is constitutive of what a Gattungswesen is. This universality raises the human above other Gattungen—who are not truly Gattungswesen, but remain confined within a Gattungsleben that they cannot themselves make their object. And so humans are not members of a species among other species: they are members of the Gattung, where this figures as the apex of all species-hood, as it does in Hegel and in the Feuerbachian texts considered in Sect. 2. This conception of the human as Gattungswesen brings with it an important difficulty, however. This difficulty results directly from Feuerbach’s uncompromising Hegelianism, according to which what marks the universality of the human is separated off from individual bearers of the life-form as one substance. This is the threat of a splitting off of the Gattung from its bearers, as a result of which the bearer experiences an internal bifurcation between their status as universal Gattung-bearer and as individual.16 This is an issue to which Marx shows himself to be alive in the texts of 1843 and 1844. The need to resolve this problem is a prominent concern of these texts (‘On the Jewish Question,’ published in 1843, and two unpublished texts from 1844, the ‘Notes on James Mill’ and the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’). Here Marx’s avowed concern is with the idea that it should be individuals who are universal (as opposed to universality being something, as it were, hovering over them, detachable from their individual being). Marx elaborates this issue particularly clearly, and with reference to concrete reality, in ‘On the Jewish Question’, the text in which he first makes widespread use of the term ‘Gattungswesen’.17 This comes at a moment of transition in Marx’s thinking. Prior to the composition of this text, Marx had still had liberal

 Arguably, as an anonymous reader pointed out, the problem of bifurcation is present already in Hegel. It would take more effort to show this; here I focus on Feuerbach’s Hegelianism since it exhibits the bifurcation in a particularly stark form. 17  Essential background to this discussion is provided by Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State. Here Marx (in one of his discussions of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right §307) speaks of the state, on Hegel’s view, as representing an abstract Gattungswesen. ‘It is here, in the sphere of the political state, that the individual moments of the state are related to themselves as to the being of the Gattung, the “Gattungswesen”, because the political state is the sphere of their universal character, i.e., their religious sphere. The political state is the mirror of truth for the various moments of the concrete state.’ (Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, MECW 3: 107). ‘Hier, in der Sphäre des politischen Staates, ist es, daß sich die einzelnen Staatsmomente zu sich als dem Wesen der Gattung, als dem “Gattungswesen” verhalten; weil der politische Staat die Sphäre ihrer allgemeinen Bestimmung, ihre religiöse Sphäre ist.’ (MEGA2 I/2: 116–17). For a detailed exposition of Marx’s critique of Hegel in this text, see Schuringa (2021). 16

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inclinations. He had thought that it was in the nature of humans to be free (although they are everywhere in chains), and that the means to achieve such freedom was through the recognition of universal human rights. The question of Jewish emancipation leads him to a decisive reassessment of this conception of the realization of human freedom. Part One of the essay is a lengthy response to Bruno Bauer’s Zur Judenfrage. (My comments here will be entirely about this part, although the second part, dealing with another text by Bauer on the ‘Jewish question’, also bears on the issue of forms of universality.) Bauer claims in that text that demands for Jewish emancipation cannot be met in a state such as Germany. Germany is a Christian state, and as such all it can offer to Jews are privileges (exemptions with respect to religious observance), and it already offers these to Jews. True emancipation, according to Bauer, would be emancipation from religion. But since Christianity is a higher religion than Judaism, Jews would need to become Christians first. Then everyone can be emancipated from religion, in an atheist state. Marx chooses to focus on a structural aspect of Bauer’s response that shows it to be fundamentally flawed. It is not merely a question, Marx says, of who is to be emancipated and who emancipates, but of what kind of emancipation is in question. Bauer’s concern, he takes it, has been with political emancipation. Now, the political emancipation of Jews or Christians, Marx says, would be the emancipation of the state from Judaism or Christianity; that would occur when the state no longer recognizes itself as a religious state, but as a political state. Marx shares with Bauer the assessment that this has not yet happened in Germany. Things are different, however, in France and the United States, where there is a political, non-religious state. (An effect of this, Marx points out, that can be seen very clearly in the United States is that religion thereby becomes a private matter, leading to a proliferation of different religious sects.) But Marx now offers a critique of political emancipation, in such a way, he says, as to make the Jewish question into ‘the general question of our time’. If we consider what political emancipation achieves in those countries, such as France and the United States, in which there is a political state, what we find is that the state becomes the locus of the Gattungsleben of the human in contrast to their material life. The individual leads two lives: a ‘heavenly’ political communal life, and an ‘earthly’ private, bourgeois life. The individual is thus bifurcated into a generalized entity as citoyen (as subject to the state), and a particular entity as bourgeois (as a private individual in pursuit of egoistic gain in a system of needs). This situation, Marx further shows, serves as an indictment of the conception that drives the various French bills of rights (1791, 1793, 1795). What appear in those bills of rights as the universal rights of man in fact turn out to apply to the private realm of the bourgeois. Now, political emancipation is a significant step forward, and in fact the highest form of emancipation possible, Marx thought, under the circumstances and arrangements then prevailing. Marx’s diagnosis of where it remains defective is highly instructive, however, in the way it underscores how keen he is to avert the threat of bifurcation. Political democracy, he points out, retains something religious in so far as it regards the human as such as the highest being, and not these individual humans

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here (‘der Mensch, wie er geht und steht’). What is needed is for the gap between the communal (manifested by the citoyen) and the individual (manifested by the bourgeois) to be closed. It is only then that human emancipation will appear on the horizon. Marx sets out the desideratum as follows in the closing paragraph of Part One of ‘On the Jewish Question’: Only when actual individual human being takes the abstract citizen [Staatsbürger] into himself and as an individual human being has become a Gattungswesen in his empirical life, his individual work and his individual relationships, only when the human being has recognized and organized his forces propres as social forces so that social force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation be accomplished.

It is crucial to Marx’s point about the way in which the French revolution falls short of this that there is the appearance there that l’homme (the universal human being) is on the scene. But what are presented as the droits de l’homme are actually only rights of the bourgeois (the rights of individuals to dispose of their property as they see fit, and so on). So the French revolution conception serves to camouflage that human emancipation has not yet come on the scene. It is only when citoyen and bourgeois are unified so as to constitute the true homme, Marx thinks, that there can be real human emancipation (and not human emancipation in name only). L’homme, as presented in the bills of rights, despite the appearance of universality is a mere individual bifurcated from their universality. This displaces what l’homme really is: the individual in their very universality. Marx’s insistence on the need to avert the threat of bifurcation in ‘On the Jewish Question’ is maintained in the ‘Notes on James Mill’, composed probably somewhat later than the Paris Manuscripts, in the summer–autumn of 1844.18 Here he speaks of the appropriate conception of Gattungstätigkeit and Gattungsgeist as being one on which individuals ‘by activating their own essence [Wesen] produce’ a ‘human community’ or ‘social being’ that is ‘no abstractly universal power confronting the single individual’ (‘keine abstrakt-allgemeine Macht gegenüber dem einzelnen Individuum’). Instead this ‘social being’ is to be conceived as ‘the essence of every individual, his own activity, his own life, his own spirit, his own wealth’ (‘Das Wesen eines jeden Individuums, nur eigne Thätigkeit, sein eignes Leben, sein eigner Genuß, sein eigner Reichthum’). And again: ‘Men, not as abstractions, but as real, living, particular individuals are this community. As they are, so it is too.’ (‘Die Menschen, nicht in einer Abstraktion, sondern als wirkliche, lebendige, besondre Individuen sind dieß Wesen. Wie sie sind, so ist daher es selbst.’ (MEGA2 IV/2: 452; EW 265) This is also how to understand the Sixth of the Theses on Feuerbach (which are largely to be read as a consolidation and recapitulation of points made in the Manuscripts and the Notes on Mill). Here Marx protests against Feuerbach: ‘the human essence [das menschliche Wesen] is no abstractum dwelling in the single individual. In its actuality it is the ensemble of social relations.’ Feuerbach’s

18

 This is the dating given in MEGA2 (IV/2: 758).

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mistaken conception means that he is ‘forced […] to abstract from the historical process’ and ‘to presuppose an abstract—isolated—human individual.’ Furthermore it means that the human essence ‘can only be conceived as “Gattung”, as an inner, dumb universality that binds the many individuals in a natural manner.’ (MEGA2 IV/3: 20–21; cf. MECW 5: 7–8) It is clear enough, then, that the problematic of bifurcation is to the fore in each of these texts. The shape of the solution that Marx envisages is also manifest: it must be that the universality in question reaches down (so to speak) into the character of the individual as individual. In this, he has now aligned himself with (a salient strand of) Max Stirner’s critique of Feuerbach. As Stirner writes, in a critique of the notion of Gattungswesen that includes as one of its targets (curiously enough) Marx in ‘On the Jewish Question’, ‘Man with a capital M is only an ideal, the Gattung only something thought of. To be a man is not to realize the ideal of man, but to present oneself, the individual.’ (Stirner 1995: 163) Stirner’s insistence on the moment of individuality is grist to Marx’s mill, and will from now on be deployed in polemics against Feuerbach that take place alongside polemics against Stirner himself (notably in The Holy Family).

4 Concrete Universality We have seen that Marx’s conception of Gattungswesen seems to involve (and require) the early-Feuerbachian conception of its universality. But we then also saw that this generates a bifurcation problem—one that Marx is, throughout his writings of 1843 and 1844, particularly keen to avoid. Whatever else may be in doubt about Marx’s developing project, it is clear that something that remains vital for him is a conception of humanity according to which individuals show up as universal through and through, in their very individuality. Such a conception is one that answers to the Hegelian demand for ‘concrete universality’: a universality that is not to be conceived in abstraction from its bearers, but through its bearers.19 This helps to illuminate the distinctiveness of Marx’s claim to equate ‘naturalism’ with ‘humanism’ and to possess the resources for the resolution of the conflict between the human and nature: This communism, as completed naturalism = humanism, and as completed humanism = naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between the human and nature, and between human and human, the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and Gattung. It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solution. (MEGA2 I/2: 263; EW 348).

19

 See Chitty 2009 for the suggestion that what Marx is after is concrete universality.

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Marx’s endorsement of ‘naturalism’, such as it is, is not a turn away from a conception of the human the Gattung, as if we could now begin from individuals rather than from the universality in which they share. Precisely not: such naturalism fully carried through is communism (a process, not an end-result, as Marx repeatedly insists), or the restoration of human beings to universality, through the individuality that figures, in each bearer, as articulation of that universality. Neither does Marx’s newfound insistence on ‘naturalism’ signal an abandonment of the Feuerbachian conception of Gattungswesen we have examined here, in favour of something that does, after all, answer to the biologistic conception of Gattung-membership we saw explicitly articulated in Schaff, and implicitly in play in other interpreters in Sect. 1. For Marx there was never any opposition between nature and spirit. Spirit is for him the apex of nature, as it is for Hegel. Hegel announces the ‘transition’ from nature to spirit as follows at Encyclopaedia II, §376: With this, nature has passed over into its truth, into the subjectivity of the concept whose objectivity is itself the sublated immediacy of singularity, is concrete universality; so that the concept is posited that has for its determinate being [Dasein] the reality which corresponds to it, namely, the concept – [i.e.] spirit. (TWA 9: 537; Enc2: 443).

For Marx, to insist on ‘naturalism’ is to insist that we human beings, qua the Gattung, are concretely universal. As such, we are limited, suffering, natural beings—but no less Geist for that. Marx’s intention, as he himself clearly states, is not, we must remember, to embrace ‘materialism’ in opposition to ‘idealism’, but to transcend this very opposition: Here we see how naturalism or humanism, fully carried through, differ both from idealism and materialism and is at the same time their unifying truth. (MEGA2 I/2: 295; EW 389).

References Brudney, Daniel. 1998. Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Butler, Judith. 2019. The inorganic body in the early Marx. A limit-concept of anthropocentrism. Radical Philosophy 2.06. Retrieved from www.radicalphilosophy.com, 5 February 2020. Chitty, Andrew. 2009. Species-being and capital. In Karl Marx and Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Andrew Chitty and Martin McIvor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Feuerbach, Ludwig. [GW] 1967–2007. Gesammelte Werke, ed. Werner Schuffenhauer. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. ———. [FB] 2012. The Fiery Brook, ed. Zawar Hanfi. London: Verso. Gould, Carol C. 1978. Marx’s social ontology: Individuality and community in Marx’s theory of social reality. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. [Enc2] 1970. Philosophy of nature: Part two of the encyclopaedia of the philosophical sciences (1830). Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. [TWA] 1986. Theorie Werkausgabe. Ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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———. [Enc3] 2007. Philosophy of mind. Trans. William Wallace and A. V. Miller, revised by Michael Inwood. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kamenka, Eugene. 1970. The philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Khurana, Thomas. 2022. Genus-Being. On Marx’s dialectical naturalism. In Nature and naturalism in classical German philosophy, ed. Luca Corti and Johannes-Georg Schülein. London: Routledge. Leopold, David. 2007. The young Karl Marx: German philosophy, modern politics, and human flourishing, 2007. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Karl. [EW] 1975. Early writings, ed. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton. London: Pelican. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. [MEGA2] 1975a–. Gesamtausgabe. Berlin: Dietz. ———. [MECW] 1975b–2004. Collected works. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Ng, Karen. 2020. Hegel’s concept of life: Self-consciousness, freedom, logic. New York: Oxford University Press. O’Malley, Joseph. 1970. Introduction. In Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, ed. Karl Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plamenatz, John. 1975. Karl Marx’s philosophy of man. Oxford: Clarendon. Quante, Michael. 2013. Das gegenständliche Gattungswesen. Bemerkungen zum intrinsischen Wert menschlicher Dependenz. In Nach Marx: Philosophie, Kritik, Praxis, ed. Rahel Jaeggi and Daniel Loick. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Rawidowicz, Simon. 1931. Ludwig Feuerbachs Philosophie: Ursprung und Schicksal. Berlin: De Gruyter. Schaff, Adam. 1970. Marxism and the human individual. Ed. R.  S. Cohen and Trans. O. Wojtasiewicz. New York: McGraw-Hill. Schuringa, Christoph. 2021. Marx’s critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right. Crisis and Critique 8 (2): 346–367. ———. 2022. Hegel on spirited animals. Philosophy 97: 485–508. Skempton, Simon. 2011. Alienation after Derrida. London: Continuum. Stirner, Max. 1995. The ego and its own. Trans. Steven Tracy Byington and Ed. David Leopold. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, Michael. 2008. Life and action. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Toàn, Trân vàn. 1971. Note sur le concept de ‘Gattungswesen’ dans la pensée de Karl Marx. Revue philosophique de Louvain, 4e série, tome 69 (4): 525–536. Toews, John Edward. 1980. Hegelianism: The path toward dialectical humanism, 1805–1841. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wartofsky, Marx W. 1977. Feuerbach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wood, Allen. 2004. Karl Marx. 2nd ed. London/New York: Routledge. Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Philosophie (1839). In GW vol. 9.

Part III

Naturalism and the Bounds of Nature

The Third Antinomy in the Age of Naturalism Mario DeCaro

1 The Persistence of an Antinomy In discussing the question of free will, Peter van Inwagen, one of the most authoritative contemporary experts on the subject, wrote: “Free will seems … to be impossible. But free will also seems to exist. The impossible therefore seems to exist” (van Inwagen 2000, 11). This statement clearly recalls the Third antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason,1 in which Kant noted that free will appears to us, at the same time, as real and as impossible. In doing so, he did not limit himself to noting that the problem of free will is difficult to solve, as many had done before him: for example, Hume (1748, 95) had defined it as “the most contentious question of metaphysics, the most contentious science”). In fact, Kant went much further, to the point of arguing that human freedom – which he considered essential for conceptualizing ourselves as moral entities – is impossible to conceive within the framework of the nomological-causal legality of the world of natural phenomena. According to Kant, freedom was impossible in a naturalistically-conceived world, which  – following Newton  – he conceived as deterministic.2 This was because Kant did not give any credit to the view (which is now called “compatibilism”) that sees freedom as compatible with determinism. That view was accepted by Leibniz, Wolff, and their followers, who conceived of the human being

 In 2017, during a conference in his honor in Warsaw, I asked van Inwagen whether he thought that his framing of the free will issue was close to the antinomic presentation that Kant offered in the Dialectic of Critique of Pure Reason, and he said that it certainly was. 2  Actually, we now know that Newton’s mechanics was not an entirely deterministic theory: cf Werndl (2016). 1

M. De Caro (*) Università Roma 3, Rome, Italy © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Corti, J.-G. Schülein (eds.), Life, Organisms, and Human Nature, Studies in German Idealism 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_15

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as a “spiritual automaton,” which allegedly could be both determined and free. Kant famously labeled such a view as a “wretched subterfuge”, since it reduces rational beings to mechanical roasters (Kant 1788, 78–79).3 For Kant, no automaton (not even a spiritual one) could be free: [E]ven if I assume that my whole existence is independent from any alien cause (such as God), so that the determining grounds of my causality and even of my whole existence are not outside me, this would not in the least transform that natural necessity into freedom. (Kant 1788, 77)

Moreover, Kant also denied the possibility of framing freedom in the ontological dualistic terms of traditional metaphysics, which had attempted to account for free will by substantializing the idea of a disembodied or extra-phenomenal mind that was causa sui. The explicit refusal of compatibilism and ontological dualism generated the antinomy of freedom. According to Kant (1788, 444, 448), on the one hand, we cannot but admit “a causality through freedom”, conceived as “the real ground” of the imputability of actions. It is impossible for us not to believe in our freedom, that is, in an original spontaneity that escapes the nomological network of natural causality. Freedom, in fact, is a necessary condition for any attribution of imputability (or, as we would say today, of moral responsibility): and this is the thesis of the Third antinomy. On the other hand, physics – which for Kant of course meant Newtonian physics – shows that human beings, as physical bodies, can only obey the ubiquitous and irrevocable deterministic laws of nature. Therefore, if free will existed in the phenomenal world and gave way to human beings to self-determine, it would appear as “a lawless faculty of freedom”, an intolerable rupture of the natural order, so that “would render the play of appearances, which in accordance with mere nature would be regular and uniform, confused and disconnected” (Kant 1781/1787, 489). And this proves the antithesis of the Third antinomy, that is, “[t]here is no freedom, but everything in the world happens solely in accordance with laws of nature” (Kant 1781/1787, 445). For Kant, as for van Inwagen, the problem of free will arises because freedom appears to us, at the same time, as real and as impossible.4 In the following, I will discuss the ways in which the antinomy of freedom reappears (consciously or, more often, unconsciously) in the naturalistically-oriented contemporary debate, showing analogies  with, and differences from, the original Kantian approach.

 In a different, more naturalistic spirit, also British philosophers such as Locke and Hume defended compatibilist views, which in turn influenced some philosophes such as Voltaire (see Rickless 2020; Russell 2020). 4  On Kant’s conception of freedom, and particularly on the Third antinomy, cf. Beck (1965), Allison (1990), Guyer (2000) (ch. 10), Pereboom (2006). 3

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2 Freedom and Nature Belonging to the original core around which Kant began to reflect on the grandiose project of the Critique of Pure Reason, the antinomy of freedom can also be read as the common thread that binds the three Critiques. If in the first Critique, in fact, the problem of freedom is presented in all its metaphysical complexity – complexity that is dissolved by means of a transcendental solution that shows the possibility of freedom –, in the second Critique the question is addressed from the point of view of pure practical reason, that is, in a perspective in which human freedom, as ratio essendi of the moral law, becomes a “fact of reason”. In the Critique of Judgment, finally, Kant indicates in the reflective judgment the solution of the persistent metaphysical conflict between natural necessity and freedom. If, however, as we will see, some of the most significant expressions of the contemporary discussion on free will – starting, in fact, with van Inwagen's view – can be interpreted as reformulations of the Third antinomy, much less resonance have today the positive solutions proposed by Kant to the problem that the antinomy clearly highlighted. As is well known, he conceived of free will transcendentally, in terms of the “absolute spontaneity of action” – i.e., the complete self-determination of the will. The main reason for this dismissal is that most contemporary discussions naturalize the question of free will: and this perspective tends to be interpreted as at odds with the transcendental approach of Kant’s proposal. In today’s perspective, then, neither the practical solution proposed in the Critique of Practical Reason, centered on the thesis that freedom is a fact of reason, nor the epistemological one, centered on the role of reflective versus determinative judgment, which Kant develops in the Critique of Judgment, are taken into account as promising. Nor, finally, does the modal solution to the problem of free will developed in the Critique of Pure Reason find many supporters today. There, it is well known, Kant argues that only in a transcendental perspective one can prove the possibility (not the reality!) of freedom as “free or unconditional causality”, that is, as the ability to act without being determined by antecedent causes. In that key, however, agents are not to be conceived as phenomenal subjects but as noumena: that is, as intelligible beings who, not being framed in space-time, are not determined by natural necessity, but freely self-­ determine themselves as causa sui. The proposal developed in the Critique of Pure Reason is summarized with masterly clarity in the Critique of Practical Reason: [T]he natural necessity which cannot coexist with the freedom of the subject attaches merely to the determinations of a thing which stands under conditions of time and so only to the determinations of the acting subject as appearance, and [...], accordingly, the determining grounds of every action of the subject so far lie in what belongs to past time and is no longer within his control (in which must be counted his past deeds and the character as a phenomenon thereby determinable for him in his own eyes). But the very same subject, being on the other side conscious of himself as a thing in itself, also views his existence insofar as it does not stand under conditions of time and himself as determinable only through laws that he gives himself by reason; and in this existence of his nothing is, for him, antecedent to the determination of his will, but every action  – and in general every

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d­ etermination of his existence changing conformably with inner sense, even the whole sequence of his existence as a sensible being – is to be regarded in the consciousness of his intelligible existence as nothing but the consequence and never as the determining ground of his causality as a noumenon. (Kant 1788, 79)

When, however – according to the realist tendency of much contemporary philosophy and against Kant’s intentions – this solution is detrascendentalized, two impervious theoretical problems immediately emerge. First, there is the problem of how the noumenal self, which by definition is timeless, can enter into a causal relationship: causal relationships, in fact, presuppose by definition a temporal asymmetry between the event-cause and the event-effect (or, at most, the temporal coincidence of the two events in the case, however problematic, of the so-called “instantaneous causation”). According to Thomas Nagel (1986, 119), one of the protagonists of the contemporary debate, for example, “the idea of intervening in the world from outside” – as it would happen, according to Kant, with the noumenal self that is outside time and causality – is an idea “literally unintelligible”. Second, Kant argues that, on the phenomenal plane, every human action has a cause (or, more correctly, a set of causes) that is its sufficient condition: that is, to put it in the language of contemporary metaphysics, every action is necessitated by the spatiotemporal events that cause it according to the laws of nature.5 Once granted, however, that on the phenomenal plane every action has a sufficient cause that necessitates it, what can ever be the additional causal role played by the noumenal self in the determination of that specific action? These two objections – which, as mentioned, emerge when one shifts the problem of freedom from the transcendental to the ontological plane – make it clear why the contemporary discussion is so unreceptive to the solutions of free will developed by Kant in the three Critiques. Very different is, instead, the fortune of the antinomian approach through which Kant introduces the problem in the Critique of Pure Reason: today, in fact, besides van Inwagen, several other influential authors decline the question in forms that closely recall the original Kantian approach. In his classic A View from Nowhere, for example, Nagel writes that, on the one hand, the idea of freedom appears incompatible with the order of nature, but on the other hand, it is indispensable for us: “something that we can’t rid of, either in relation to ourselves or in relation to others. We are apparently condemned to want something impossible” (Nagel 1986, 113). Analogously, the philosopher of science John Earman, who declines the problem of freedom in an epistemological perspective, shows its intrinsically antinomic character. According to him, if natural science were to succeed in its attempt to explain our nature, then the idea that we are the arbiters of our own destiny would be falsified; but if science were to fail in this attempt, it would follow that we are very mysterious entities within the universe (a conclusion unacceptable

 It should be noted that determinism does not imply that all events (including human actions) are necessary. It only means that, necessarily, given the past and the laws of nature, the events will happen. In this light, even given the past, in a world with different laws of nature some events that happen in our world do not happen since they are not necessary. 5

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to a naturalist like Earman). In short, freedom is incompatible with the scientific worldview: It seems that the attempt to locate human agents in nature either fails in a manner that reflects a limitation on what science can tell us about ourselves, or else it succeeds at the expense of undermining our cherished notion that we are free and autonomous agents. (Earman 1992, 262)

It is also important to note that in the contemporary discussion the antinomy of freedom can be seen as the most significant example of a more general antinomy (also deeply Kantian in spirit), which opposes the view of the natural sciences to the ordinary view of reality or, to use Nagel’s terminology, the “objective” viewpoint to the “subjective” viewpoint or, again, to quote Wilfrid Sellars, the “scientific image” to the “manifest image” of the world. Thus, for example, John Searle (2007, 4–5) expresses himself: How can we square a conception of ourselves as mindful, meaning-creating, free, rational, etc. agents with a universe that consists entirely of mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles?

This problem evidently generalizes the one set forth in the Third antinomy. The issue, in fact, is that we are unable to frame in the natural world our fundamental intuitions, not only about freedom, but also about normativity, intentionality, consciousness, and so on – that is, the fundamental categories through which we conceptualize the specificity of the human world. A renewed, very general antinomy, then. In this regard, taking up the terminology of Huw Price (2004), it is now common to speak of a “Placement problem”, that is, the problem generated by the apparent impossibility of making sense of the categories of the human world in the theoretical framework of the natural sciences. In what follows, however, I will focus specifically on the antinomy of freedom because it remains the main example of the general conflict between our most deeply held intuitions about ourselves and the scientific worldview.

3 The Indispensability of Freedom In the thesis of the Third antinomy, Kant developed an idea that he would later reiterate forcefully in the Critique of Practical Reason and that, using the terms of contemporary philosophy, can be put as follows. There are cases in which we simply cannot help but interpret other human beings – or at least some of them – as entities endowed with free will;  and this happens, in particular, when we regard them as morally responsible entities. What precisely does it mean, however, to attribute free will to a particular subject? According to most of the authors dealing with this question today, the possession of free will presupposes two requirements, individually necessary and jointly sufficient. The first – the “requirement of alternative possibilities” – requires that the agent is presented with several alternative courses of action (in other words: there is

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a sense in which, at the moment of performing a free action, an agent could perform at least one alternative). However, this is not enough: the notion of free will implies in fact that the choice between these alternative courses of action must not be the product only of factors independent of the agent’s will. Therefore, for free will to be exercised, another requirement is also required, the “self-determination requirement,” which requires that the subject participate in a causally relevant way, by means of their rational and conscious mental states, in the causal process leading to the realization of one of the possible courses of action – that is, that they exercise control over which  one, among the possible futures, will become actual. In this regard, it should be clear that different philosophical schools interpret these requirements differently: in particular, the tradition that roots free will in indeterminism holds that the requirement of alternative possibilities should be understood in a categorical sense, i.e., that the subject acting freely is presented hic et nunc with the possibility of acting differently from how he will in fact act; the tradition that instead holds that free will is compatible with determinism understands this requirement in a conditional sense, i.e., that the subject could act differently in the (counterfactual) case in which they wanted to act differently. Apart from this, however, most contemporary authors accept the idea that the requirement of alternative possibilities and the requirement of self-determination, taken together, define the extent of the concept of free will. With this definition in mind, in his personal reinterpretation of the Third antinomy, van Inwagen writes  – with analytical meticulousness  – that “some human beings are responsible for some of the consequences of some of the acts they perform”: a thesis that, in his opinion, “appears to be true beyond any possible discussion”. In the background of this thesis there is, of course, the idea (with an evident Kantian flavor) that it is legitimate to speak of the responsibility of human beings for the actions they perform only if these actions are freely performed. And in this regard, in fact, van Inwagen (2017, 79) clarifies: An agent cannot be blamed for a state of affairs unless there was a time at which he could so have arranged matters that that state of affairs not obtain.

And this is, obviously, a way of stressing the inseparable link (already emphasized  by Kant) between free will and moral responsibility: an agent is morally responsible for what he they have done only if it was in their power to change the course of things with respect to what actually happened, that is, if – according to the requirement of alternative possibilities – that subject could have exercised their free will differently from how they actually exercised it. Also Colin McGinn, in enunciating the question of free will, clearly echoes the intuition voiced by the thesis of the Third antinomy, going so far as to even involve the existentialists (which is remarkable for an arch-analytic like him): All human interaction, and self-reflection, is suffused with the idea of freedom [...]. Freedom is a property we take to be instantiated with enormous frequency. Not for nothing did the existentialists make freedom the essence of our nature. (McGinn 1993, 79–80)

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Finally, contemporary defenders of free will do not limit themselves to reaffirming its essential role in the constitution of moral responsibility, but they also insist on its centrality in justifying other fundamental aspects of human life, such as rationality, the dignity of life, and the justification of punitive systems as we know them today: and there is no doubt that Kant would have agreed with these claims. In this section we have seen how the thesis of the antinomy of freedom is defended today: in essence, the arguments are very similar to those made by Kant. In the next section, we will consider instead the ways in which the antithesis of the antinomy, which denies the possibility of free will, is developed today. As we will see, in addition to a powerful new argument against the conceptions that support the compatibility of free will with determinism, arguments against the possibility that free will is rooted in the indeterminism of the subatomic level are also being discussed today – a possibility that obviously Kant did not contemplate.

4 The Impossibility of Freedom In contemporary philosophical terms, the antithesis of the third Kantian antinomy could be presented as follows: since the natural world is deterministic – that is, as Newtonian mechanics shows, every event is necessitated by past events, according to the laws of nature – then there can be no room for freedom. Today (following the influential taxonomy proposed by van Inwagen) the point of view according to which the truth of determinism implies the impossibility of free will is called “incompatibilism” and this conception is divided in turn into two versions “libertarian incompatibilism” (or “libertarianism”), according to which we free will is real and is rooted in indeterminism, and “illusionistic incompatibilism” (or “illusionism”), according to which free will is impossible because it is incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism, which are logically exhaustive. The various versions of incompatibilism are then opposed by “compatibilism”, the conception that focuses on the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism. In recent decades, however, many new versions of compatibilism have been offered, and today this conception is the one with most advocates among philosophers who deal specifically with the question of free will.6 On the other hand, compatibilism has also been the subject of new critical arguments, the most relevant of which is the “Consequence argument”, developed, among others, by the already mentioned van Inwagen.7 According to this argument, if the world is deterministic, then we cannot exercise control over our actions and therefore we do not have free will. In fact, to have control over what we do, we should be able to control at least one of the two factors that causally determine our actions, necessitating them: the  On compatibilism, see McKenna and Coates (2019). According to an online poll by Bourget and Chalmers (2020), in regard to the free will issue, 59.2% of philosophers defend this view. 7  See van Inwagen 1981; Kapitan 2011; Other versions of this argument, but much less influential than van Inwagen’s, can be found in Wiggins (1973). 6

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events of the past, even the remote past, from which (according to the deterministic thesis) actions causally descend, and the laws of nature, which govern the causal connections from past events to future ones. Obviously, however, it is impossible for us to control either of these two factors: the past, in fact, is unchangeable and the laws of nature are inescapable. So, if determinism is true, agents are not able to exercise any control over their actions and therefore cannot in any way be said to be free. And so compatibilism – which affirms, instead, the compatibility of free will and determinism – proves to be false. It is interesting to note that in Kant we find arguments that anticipate, to some extent, the Consequence Argument. Kant, in particular, is clear both about the fundamental conceptual link between the notions of free will and control and about the importance of the fact that we are not able to control the past: [E]very event, and consequently every action that takes place at a point of time, is necessary under the condition of what was in the preceding time. Now, since time past is no longer within my control, every action that I perform must be necessary by determining grounds that are not within my control, that is, I am never free at the point of time in which I act […] and the series of events infinite a parte priori which I can only continue in accordance with a predetermined order would never begin of itself: it would be a continuous natural chain, and therefore my causality would never be freedom. (Kant 1788, 77)

The fact that Kant posed this question so clearly demonstrates once again his immense genius; however, it would not be correct to claim that this argument of his is an ante litteram formulation of the Consequence argument. First, as a crucial step of his argument, Kant assumes that we cannot be free in the phenomenal world because freedom requires being completely free from causal constraints: if determinism were true, as seen, “the series of events infinite a parte priori which I can only continue in accordance with a predetermined order would never begin of itself”. In essence, then, Kant objects to compatibilism that the only possible freedom is that of a causa sui, an initiator of new causal chains who is necessarily outside of time. Today, however, almost no philosopher moves from the assumption that an action can be said to be free only if it has an uncaused cause that is out of time. Libertarians, in particular, believe rather that a necessary condition of a free action is that it is caused in a probabilistic way (the so-called “indeterministic causation”): and this kind of causality is given in time (see Nozick 1981, 291–397). For this reason, van Inwagen does not make any reference to freedom out of time: his argument is rather limited to saying that control over our actions is a necessary condition for free will and that, to exercise it, we should be able to control the factors that make those actions unavoidable (the state of the universe in the past and the laws of nature), which are obviously beyond our control: but he leaves unaffected the question whether non-deterministic forms of control are possible in time (Kane 1996). In short, Kant’s fundamental objection against compatibilism is that the form of control that would make freedom possible cannot be given in time; van Inwagen’s objection is that this form of control is not possible if the world is deterministic. Second, unlike Kant, van Inwagen underlines that natural necessity – if determinism were true – would depend not only on the past, but also on our inability to

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control the laws of nature: and this is a very important aspect for the Consequence argument, as we will see shortly. Third, a fundamental polemical target of van Inwagen’s argument (but obviously not of Kant’s argument) is the conditional reading of the requirement of alternative possibilities – which, as said above, is typical of contemporary compatibilism –, according to which what matters for free will is that  we could do otherwise in case we wanted to do otherwise. In fact, the Consequence argument shows that according to this reading of the requirement of alternative possibilities, we could do something different from what we do only if we could change the past or the laws of nature: and this is certainly not the sense in which we understand the idea that free agents could act differently from how they actually act. Let us now  return to the contemporary discussion of the Consequence argument – the keystone of today’s antithesis of freedom antinomy with respect to the component of it that rejects the idea that compatibilism is a viable view. Proponents of compatibilism have attempted to counter this argument with a variety of strategies. David Lewis (1981), in particular, argued that there is a sense in which we can be said to control the laws of nature. This is not true, of course, in the strong sense of “control,” i.e., in the causal sense: we certainly cannot cause, say, the law of falling bodies to be different than it is. However, Lewis noted, in a weaker sense – a non-causal sense – we can exercise some form of control over our actions. This is the sense in which, if we had taken an action other than what we actually did, then the laws of nature would be different from what we know: if, for example, we created energy out of nothing, this would testify to the fact that the law of conservation of energy is false. In short: our actions “control” the laws of nature of the particular possible world in which we exist in the same sense (a non-causal sense) in which a thermometer “controls” the temperature, obviously without determining it (don’t we say “I have controlled the temperature?”). Lewis, in short, asks us to imagine another possible world (a world in which, for example, the law of falling bodies was different from ours) and in which we would “control” laws of nature that would be different from those of our world. In fact, we can imagine that alternative world and think that, if we were there, we would perform different actions in accordance to the laws of that world: and this, according to Lewis, is enough to argue that we “control” the laws of nature and that, therefore, the Consequence argument is not valid. However, we can ask ourselves if this is really the form of control we refer to when we discuss free will. When we think of controlling an action we perform, do not we think of the possibilitỳ of performing a different action here and now (and not in another world)? In short, the sense of the term “control” to which Lewis refers – a sense analogous to that of a thermometer measuring temperature – seems very different from the sense in which we use that term when discussing free will. So Lewis’s response to the Consequence argument doesn’t seem very convincing  and, consequently, compatibilism continues to have a big problem with that argument. Summarizing, those who interpret the problem of freedom in an antinomian sense, and in this perspective challenge  the plausibility of compatibilism, find a valuable tool in van Inwagen’s argument.

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Other contemporary defenders of free will defend instead libertarianism, but in versions that are very different from the Kantian one. Differently from Kant, in fact, these authors – including Roger Penrose (1989), Nobel Prize for Physics in 2020, and John Searle (2007) – believe that free will is rooted in indeterminism: but these authors think of an indeterminism that is present in the natural world, not that of the never-experienceable realm of noumena. These authors assume in fact the correctness of the indeterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics and so they do not need to postulate the obscure noumenal causality: indeterminism is in nature, and therefore in time. Even this conception, however, encounters considerable difficulties. In the first place, in fact, it may be that the conceptions of the minority of scientists who interpret quantum mechanics in a deterministic sense are correct: and therefore the indeterministic ontological substrate presupposed by libertarianism would be missing.8 Secondly, it is controversial whether quantum indeterminism has relevant repercussions at the mesoscopic level, which is the one in which human beings act. Moreover, beyond these empirical difficulties, against this conception we can take up an argument of purely conceptual character, already sketched by David Hume and then repeated countless times. According to Hume’s argument (which van Inwagen 1981 called “Mind argument”),9 indeterminism can never generate freedom because, in fact, it can produce only chance, which is the opposite of freedom: you cannot seriously think, in fact, that an action generated at random can be free. Here is a more detailed version of this argument. Imagine that an action a is performed by a subject S,  who is not deterministically caused to do it. This means that, in the causal chain of events preceding the fulfillment of a, there is at least one moment t, at which no specific course of action is necessitated (i.e., it is not determined which course of action among all possible ones will be actualized). Therefore, at time t, in addition to a, S could also actualize some other course of action. And this means that there is another possible world, W*, which is identical to ours until time t and has the same laws of (indeterministic) nature, but it is such that S* – Doppelganger of S molecule by molecule – at time t performs an action a*. Therefore, since S and S* are absolutely identical and – being subject to the same laws of nature and being in the same exact conditions – cause two different actions, we must conclude that the two agents are not causally relevant for the occurrence, respectively, of a and a*; nor, however, is causally relevant any other element of W and W*, because even these possible worlds are by definition completely identical until time t. Therefore nothing, if not chance, can explain why in one of the two worlds a happens and in the other a* happens. And this shows, concludes this argument, that indeterminism, far from producing freedom, can only generate the randomness, which is the negation of freedom.

 Among the deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics, one may remember Bohmian mechanics and Everett’s many-worlds conception (Maudlin 2019). 9  Van Inwagen used that name since in the course of time the philosophical journal Mind has published several important articles defending versions of this argument. 8

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In response to this powerful argument, some proponents of libertarianism have explored other directions, the most important of which is the resumption of the so-­ called “agent causation”, already defended in the eighteenth century by Thomas Reid (with ancient antecedents in Aristotle and Carneades) and revived in recent times by Roderick Chisholm (1964), Timothy O’Connor (2000, 2011), and Jonathan Lowe (2008). According to these authors, the problem of freedom can be solved only if we admit that, in addition to the usual causation between events, there is also another form of causation (called “agent causation”), proper of rational agents, who – when they act freely – are able to originate new causal chains without being determined to do so. Even this conception, however, is not widely accepted, both because it gives the impression of being based on an ad hoc stratagem to solve the problem of free will and because it seems to many people intolerably anti-­ naturalistic.10 Moreover, this proposal, although ingenious, does not seem really able to answer the difficulty, mentioned above, which traditionally afflicts the conceptions of freedom centered on indeterminism: i.e., that they are not able to explain in a convincing way how agents can exercise control over actions that conclude a process that has an indeterministic character. In a word, even this version of libertarianism fails to account for one of the two fundamental conditions of freedom, that of the agents’ self-determination, because it seems to collapse freedom onto chance. Therefore, argue the opponents of libertarianism, if the world of human action were truly indeterministic in character, it would be impossible to account for human freedom.11 Let us return then to the contemporary version of the antithesis of the Third antinomy of freedom, which denies the possibility of freedom. The strategy, as mentioned, is to put together the anti-compatibilist arguments with the anti-­ libertarian  arguments: that is, it is supposed to show that free will is impossible whether the world is deterministic or indeterministic. Thus, for example, McGinn writes: The problem with freedom is that it seems that this concept imposes requirements that cannot be reconciled with any of the available conceptions of how the world works. Whichever way we conceive of the course of events, there is no room for the idea free choice. Thus, on reflection, the concept seems inherently paradoxical to us. (1993, 79)

And then so he lays out in detail his own version of the antithesis of freedom antinomy: It seems that a simple argument proves that our precious freedom is nothing but an illusion. The argument is very familiar and has this structure. Either determinism is true or it is not. If it is true, then all the actions we choose to take are uniquely necessitated by prior states of the world, just as it is with any other event. But then it cannot be the case that we could have acted otherwise, because that would have implied a possibility that determinism  For a general presentation on agent causation, see O’Connor (2011).  On this issue, cf. De Caro and Putnam (2021). There is no space here to discuss the empirical arguments to which many deniers of free will appeal today. These arguments, however, are not very convincing: cf. Mele (2014). 10 11

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excludes. Once initial conditions are established and laws fixed, causality makes genuine freedom impossible. On the other hand, if indeterminism is true, then  – although things could have gone otherwise – we still could not have chosen otherwise, because a merely random event is not a type of free choice. For an event to be a free choice it is not sufficient that it happens without being caused or without being subject to any law or being subject only to a probabilistic law. Therefore, one horn of the dilemma represents choices as predetermined happenings in a predictable causal sequence, while the other conceives them as inexplicable motions to which the universe tends randomly. Neither of these alternatives provides what is required by the notion of free will, and no other option is seen. Therefore, freedom is not possible in any possible world. This concept contains within itself the germs of its destruction. (McGinn 1993, 80)

Van Inwagen expounds the thesis of the antinomy of freedom by also explicitly referring to moral responsibility. His most recent presentation of the question (van Inwagen 2017, 182) is developed in three steps: 1. If the antecedent conditions and laws of nature determine how a human being acts at a given time, then the act performed by that person is not free. 2. If the antecedent conditions and laws of nature do not determine how a human being acts at a particular time, then the act performed by that person is not free. 3. If the acts of a human being are never free, then the consequences of those acts are not the responsibility of that human being. The first step of this argument challenges the correctness of compatibilism: freedom is not possible in a deterministic context (as the Consequence argument shows). The second step challenges the correctness of libertarianism: freedom is not possible in an indeterministic context (as shown by the Mind argument). Taken together, these two premises are equivalent to the antithesis of the Kantian antinomy: since the conjunction of determinism and indeterminism is logically exhaustive and free will is incompatible with both, it follows that free will is impossible. With the third step of his argumentation, finally, van Inwagen draws the consequences regarding the idea of responsibility, by joining the first two steps of the argument with the thesis (here left implicit) that responsibility requires free will: a thesis that, as said, also Kant shared. And so, van Inwagen concludes, responsibility, like free will, is impossible in a deterministic world as well as in an indeterministic one. Thus, we have seen how the antinomy of freedom is argued today, by challenging the two families of conceptions that attempt to show the reality of free will. The similarities with the Kantian arguments for the antinomy are striking, but some differences also emerge: first, the arguments against compatibilism are more articulate than the Kantian one; second, the arguments against libertarianism must take into account that, contrary to what Kant thought, the natural world seems to leave room for indeterminism. That said, the substance of the contemporary antinomy of freedom is the same as the Kantian one: freedom appears to us, at the same time, as necessary and as impossible.

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5 Beyond the Antinomy? Many of the authors who conceive of the problem of free will in an antinomic way believe that it is impossible to take a further theoretical step that was fundamental for Kant: the dissolution of the antinomy. These authors, in fact, share the view that to solve philosophical problems, including that of free will, it is not permissible to go beyond the scientific view of the world. And, in this light, all the theoretical proposals that presuppose such a step – including obviously the Kantian transcendental solution – are illegitimate. More specifically, van Inwagen, Noam Chomsky and Colin McGinn believe that it is extremely probable that, due to its own insurmountable biological limits, the human species is unable to solve the free will problem with the explanatory modalities of science, which in their opinion are the only epistemically legitimate ones. In this perspective, therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that for us this problem will always remain an insoluble mystery. It is not that this “mystery” does not have a naturalistic explanation: it is just that we are not intelligent enough to formulate it – and most likely we never will be. Chomsky writes: It is not excluded that human science-forming capacities simply do not extend to [the domain of linguistic performance], or any domain involving the exercise of will, so that for humans, these questions will always be shrouded in mystery. (Chomsky 1975, 25) One possible reason for the lack of success in solving [the problem of free will] or even presenting sensible ideas about it, it is that is not within the range of human intellectual capacities. It is either ‘too difficult’, given the nature of our capacities, or beyond their limits altogether. (Chomsky 1986, 151–2)

Likewise, Nagel – even if from a position different from the scientific naturalism defended by  Chomsky, van Inwagen and McGinn  – considers indispensable that every presumed solution of the problem of free will must pass the screening of the scientific vision of the world: which is, according to him, impossible. To all these positions of epistemic skepticism, however, some considerations can be opposed. First, if it is certainly true that we are not able to give a truly convincing solution to the problem of free will, it is also true that this happens with every genuinely philosophical problem: it is not that, although we have been talking about them for centuries, the mind-body problem or the enigma of consciousness or the question of the universals, to give just a few examples, have found answers universally considered satisfactory or at least promising. Even McGinn, however, makes this consideration, but on its basis he goes so far as to argue that – precisely because it does not solve the issues it addresses  – philosophy clearly is a futile activity. However, this statement is untenable: in the course of the centuries, in fact, philosophy has made considerable progress in clarifying the problems it faces, even if it has not solved them. In particular, to return to our theme, today we have much clearer ideas about free will than we had in antiquity, in the Middle Ages, or even just a few decades ago: conceptions that were thought plausible have been refuted, other conceptually more refined have been developed, various facets of the problems have

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been clarified, fecund  links between philosophical and scientific reflection have been drawn, and so on. Philosophy, in short, progresses conceptually. And if in philosophy there is conceptual progress, this means that it is not at all a futile activity, as McGinn instead claims. Second, it is intellectually arrogant to set limits to the cognitive progress of our species based on what we now think of our epistemic limits: Aristotle (perhaps the greatest genius of all human history), for example, did not have the intellectual tools to conceive the possibility of sending probes to Mars, to prove that no sufficiently expressive formal system has the resources to prove its completeness, to calculate the speed of light or to explain how hereditary traits are transmitted. The answers to these problems (and in some cases the problems themselves) were inconceivable in Aristotle’s time, but with the passage of generations the epistemic situation of human beings has dramatically evolved. It cannot be ruled out, then, that in the future the question of free will may be illuminated in ways that today are unthinkable. The key point, however, is that many authors who claim that the antinomy of free will is irresolvable presuppose a very controversial thesis: namely, that any solution to the problem of free will must be incorporated into the scientific worldview. This thesis is strongly contested by other philosophers – the most influential of whom are arguably those who defend versions of the so-called “liberal naturalism”. These authors defend pluralism in ontology and epistemology,  as long as these fields do  not collide with the scientific view of the world. In this way, it is possible to preserve the most important insights of naturalism without abandoning our most cherished beliefs about ourselves. This is not the place to get into details regarding liberal naturalism (but see De Caro and Macarthur 2004, 2010, 2022). However, one can certainly say that – differently from other forms of naturalism – this view passes the compelling methodological criterion proposed by the late Lynn Baker: “We should not lend faith to metaphysics that render ordinary but significant phenomena unintelligible.”

References Allison, Henry. 1990. Kant’s Theory of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beck, Lewis White. 1965. The Fact of Reason: An Essay on Justification in Ethics. In Studies in the Philosophy of Kant, ed. L.W. Beck, 200–214. Indianapolis: Bobbs-​Merill. Bourget, David, and David Chalmers. 2020. The 2020 PhilPapers Survey. https://survey2020.philpeople.org/ Chisholm, Roderick. 1964. Human Freedom and the Self (The Lindley Lecture), 3–15. Lawrence (KS): University of Kansas Press. Chomsky, Noam. 1975. Reflections on Language. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1986. Language and the Problems of Knowledge. The Managua Lectures. Cambridge: MIT Press. De Caro, Mario, and David Macarthur. 2004. Naturalism in Question. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2010. Naturalism and Normativity. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2022. Routledge Handbook of Liberal Naturalism. London/New York: Routledge.

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De Caro, Mario, and Hilary Putnam. 2021. Free Will and Quantum Mechanics. The Monist 103: 415–426. Earman, John. 1992. Determinism in the physical science. In Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, eds. M.H. Salmon, John Earman, Clark Glymour et al., 232–268. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Guyer, Paul. 2000. Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Hume, D. 1748. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; reprinted, 2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kane, Robert. 1996. The Significance of Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1781/1787. Critique of Pure Reason. Engl. transl. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. 1788. Critique of Practical Reason. Engl. transl. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Kapitan, Tomis. 2011. A Master Argument for Incompatibilism. In The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, ed. R. Kane, 127–157. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Lewis, David. 1981. Are We Free To Break Laws? Theoria 47: 113–121. Lowe, E.J. 2008. Personal Agency: The Metaphysics of Mind and Action. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Maudlin, Tim. 2019. Philosophy of Physics: Quantum Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McGinn, Colin. 1993. The Problems of Philosophy, 79–80. Oxford/Malden: Blackwell. McKenna, Michael, and D.  Justin Coates. 2019. Compatibilism. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/. Mele, Alfred. 2014. Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Nagel, Thomas. 1986. The View from Nowhere. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Nozick, Robert. 1981. Philosophical Explanations, 291–397. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. O’Connor, Tim. 2000. Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Connor, Tim. 2011. ‘Agent-Causal Theories of Freedom’, in The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (2nd edition), ed. R. Kane, 309–328. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Penrose, Roger. 1989. The Emperor’s New Mind. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Pereboom, Derk. 2006. Kant on Transcendental Freedom. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73: 537–567. Price, Huw. 2004. Naturalism without Representationalism. In Naturalism in Question, ed. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, 71–88. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rickless, Samuel. 2020. Locke on Freedom. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-­freedom/. Russell, Paul. 2020. Hume on Freedom. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E.  Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-­freewill/. Searle, John. 2007. Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power. New York: Columbia University Press. Van Inwagen, Peter. 1981. An Essay on Free Will. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2000. Free Will Remains a Mistery. Philosophical Perspectives 12: 1–19. ———. 2017. Thinking about Free Will. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Werndl, Charlotte. 2016. Determinism and Indeterminism. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science, ed. P. Humphrey, 210–232. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wiggins, D. (1973). ‘Towards a Reasonable Libertarianism.’ In Essays on Fredom and Action. Edited by T. Wiggins, 33–61. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ginet, C. ‘Might We Have No Choice?’ In Freedom and Determinism. Edited by K. Lehrer, 87–104. Atlantica Highlands: Humanities Press.

Post-Bonnetian Naturalism Daniel Whistler

You will see with pleasure how your ideas spread throughout Germany and bear fruit there. (Jean Trembley to Charles Bonnet, 14 July 1777, quoted in Marx [1976, 420].

1 The Natural History of Perfectibility In Spring 1842, Pierre Leroux penned a series of articles in response to the news of F. W. J. Schelling’s inaugural Berlin lectures, the ‘most important’ recent event ‘for the advancement of science in general and for each of the sciences’ (Leroux 1982, 25; see Abensour 1991, Fedi 2018). The aim of these articles was, primarily, neither to laud nor to censure the late Schelling’s feted arrival in Berlin, but rather they took the form of a more wide-ranging intervention into the legacy of the German Idealist movement as a whole. Leroux’s intervention comprises a series of claims: 1. Hegel was nothing but a ‘disciple’ of Schelling who ‘with all his logic and all his categories, added nothing properly robust to the concepts he received from Schelling’ (1982, 66, 43). Equally, Kant and Fichte were just Schelling’s ‘precursors and merely prepared the movement’ of German Idealism proper (1982, 25). 2. Schellingian philosophy of nature thus stands as the ‘great oak out of which all of current scientific Germany forms the branches’, such that ‘for the last thirty years, the most famous names of German science have belonged to Schelling’s school’ (1982, 14). That is, Schelling stands as the ‘patriarch’ to classical German philosophy (1982, 65). 3. Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophies find their analogues in Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s contemporaneous research into D. Whistler (*) Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Corti, J.-G. Schülein (eds.), Life, Organisms, and Human Nature, Studies in German Idealism 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_16

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structures of organic life—testament to a Franco-German ‘synchronism of the same ideas hidden within different husks’ (1982, 63). However, Leroux’s most controversial claim in this rewriting of German Idealism is that: 4. German Idealism said nothing new, but rather elaborated the very same thought that had already structured eighteenth-century Francophone philosophy—the idea of ‘progress in nature as in humanity’ (1982, 61), i.e., perfectibility. Leroux writes, ‘Entering philosophy by way of France, by way of the eighteenth century, by way of revolution, we have been accustomed to regard the doctrine of perfectibility as exclusively French. We see today with joy that Germany has secretly been nourished by it… We rejoice and we thank God to see that the doctrine of perfectibility is a common good in Germany and in France’ (1982, 78). The above claim involves a triple affirmation: eighteenth-century French thinking and contemporaneous French philosophy and Hegel’s and Schelling’s systems all say the same thing—perfectibility. Their ‘glory’ is to have ‘transposed’ into their differing national contexts, ‘the doctrine of indefinite perfectibility in nature and in humanity’ (1982, 63–4). To demonstrate this, Leroux traces this principle of perfectibility back from Schelling through the works of ‘all thinkers of nature since Buffon and Linnaeus’—and, in this vein, he specifically picks out Charles Bonnet’s philosophy. According to Leroux, in Bonnet’s philosophy (which—as Genevan— neatly mediates between Leibnizian Germany and sensualist Paris), the Franco-­ German idea of perfectibility ‘was already transposed into temporality’ and structured historical development in both nature and the human (1982, 62). In what follows, I want to suggest that—whatever the merits of his more general intervention into the legacy of German Idealism—Leroux has a point when it comes to the connection he makes between Bonnet’s philosophy and later German philosophy. On the cusp of romanticism and idealism, a distinctively post-Bonnetian form of naturalism was transposed into German thinking via Lessing, Jacobi and Herder, among others: Bonnetism became a live option for the era. In other words, in this chapter I defend a deflated version of Leroux’s thesis: there is something about the way Bonnet identifies a principle of perfectibility in both nature and humanity that was significant for later German philosophers. More precisely, my claim is not so much about whether the content of the doctrine of perfectibility lived on in German philosophies, but rather the specific operation to which it is submitted. That is, many scholars have trod the same path as Leroux in charting a substantial migration of the concept of perfectibilité into German Idealist and Romantic uses of Bildung (e.g. Behler 1989, Vosskamp 1992); however, my interest is less in the transfer of conceptual content itself than in an operation Bonnet and his readers perform on the concept: perfectibility is naturalized as part of an anti-materialist project. As such, this essay sketches a three stage argument: (a) Bonnet’s naturalization of the principle of perfectibility is one example of a more general philosophical operation to be found in his writings: to naturalize the metaphysical while insisting upon its minimal difference from the material and so to generate an immaterialism

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that looks like a materialism; (b) this operation structures Bonnet’s entire palingenetic project which can be defined as an ‘anomalous naturalism’; (c) variants of this anomalous naturalism were available to German philosophers during the last decades of the eighteenth century. To make such an argument is, first, to resist (in one small way) the tendency in some anglophone scholarship to seek the immediate sources of classical German philosophy within Germany alone and, more generally, to make sense of eighteenthand nineteenth-century philosophies within a framework of separate, isolated national traditions. Rather, what follows highlights transnational lineages of philosophizing at the period. Secondly, such a recovery of Bonnet as a key source for classical German philosophy resists a further scholarly tendency to downplay the influences of the various ‘Enlightenment supernaturalisms’ of Lavater, Swedenborg and Bonnet on romanticisms and idealisms. That is, the entrance of Herder, Jacobi, Novalis, Schelling, etc., into the philosophical mainstream has come at the price of a certain bowdlerization—and Bonnet’s late ‘physics of the Resurrection’ (2002, 206) is one philosophical source typically excised from sight as ‘obviously crude and regressive’ (Lovejoy 1936, 286). Even di Giovanni’s disclaimer that ‘Bonnet was no charlatan’ (in Jacobi 1994, 39) is damning for the very fact it needs saying. One of the aims of the following, therefore, is to return to a source of German philosophy that is not merely non-canonical, but hard to stomach for many historians of philosophy.1 To begin, Leroux’s provocation will supply the clue I follow. I insist that Bonnet’s naturalist recuperation of the principle of perfectibility reveals much about the structure of his project as a whole, as well as why it was to prove so intriguing to a later generation of philosophers in Germany. Any cursory glance at the state of the life sciences during the late eighteenth century is sufficient to put paid to one dominant historiographical narrative in which ‘natural history’ only became ‘historical’ (in the temporal sense) at the moment of its supersession into nineteenth-century ‘biology’, i.e., ‘while natural history had not been at all historical in the temporal sense, evolutionary biology was’ (Harrison 2016, 13). Long ago, Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being already identified the becoming-temporal of the life sciences as a key achievement of late eighteenth-­ century naturalisms like Charles Bonnet’s history of organic metamorphoses (1936, 283–6)—accomplishing a shift ‘from a static to a dynamic concept of nature’ (Bowler 1973, 160).2 In this section, I want to go one step further to argue, more specifically, that Bonnet’s historicization of natural history occurs (precisely as Leroux conjectures) as part of a debate over the principle of perfectibility. Bonnet  Such a project builds on Bonnet’s partial rehabilitation among historians of science—see, e.g., Duchesneau (2006), Cheung (2010), Gaukroger (2022). 2  Despite their obvious differences, Lovejoy’s thesis converges in key respects with Leroux’s: both see Bonnet’s developmental approach to the integrated natural and human worlds as an intellectual landmark that determines nineteenth-century thinking. 1

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gives nature a history, in part, because Jean-Jacques Rousseau—when coining the term ‘perfectibility’—had taken historicity away from nature. In the 1755 Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, Rousseau coins the term ‘perfectibility’ as a means to distinguish the human from nature, such that the human subject (unlike the rest of the natural world) has the potential for historical change. In other words, in the wake of Rousseau, natural history is no longer permitted to tell narratives about nature’s evolution. And it is in opposition to Rousseau’s prohibition that Bonnet sets himself the task of saving nature from the eradication of its history—that is, of reinserting historicity back into nature. With Bonnet, the principle of perfectibility is naturalized. There are four pertinent features to Rousseau’s 1755 definition of human perfectibility: 1. Historicist Perfectibility names the human subject’s historicity. That is, it designates ‘the faculty which, by dint of time, draws him out of that original condition in which he would spend tranquil and innocent days; it is the faculty which, over the centuries, causes his enlightenment and his errors, his vices and his virtues to flourish’ (Rousseau 2018, 145). Perfectibility makes history possible as a distinctly human experience; however, it does not necessitate human progress: it gives humans a history, but not one particular history. There is no teleological backdrop to Rousseau’s account. 2. Fragile Rousseau’s principle of perfectibility is merely an anthropological ‘potentiality, rather than an essence’ (Lotterie 2006, xxii)—a regulative tendency, rather than a constitutive movement. It is a fragile and volatile condition of human development that may or may not be actualized at any given moment. In other words, perfectibility does not exclude corruptibility, but entails it as an ineffaceable danger. In Rousseau’s words, it causes both human ‘enlightenment’ and ‘all man’s miseries’; it raises the subject ‘above nature’, but can also lead her to ‘relapse lower than the beast itself’ (2018, 144–5). 3. Anti-Naturalist Perfectibility marks the point at which the human transcends the natural. By dint of the principle of perfectibility, the ‘spirituality of soul exhibits itself’—and it is for this reason that ‘very specific property distinguishes… man and animal’. Perfectibility ‘raises’ man ‘far above nature’ (2018, 144–5) and provides the warrant for ‘those who are convinced that the divine voice called all mankind to the happiness of the celestial intelligences’ (2018, 209). This principle thus anchors Rousseau’s anti-naturalistic project, i.e., his identification of a specifically anthropological a priori that cannot be located anywhere else in the natural world, and so constitutes proof of ‘the irreducibility of thought to matter’ (Salaün 2004, 205). As Salaün (2004, 202) puts it, Rousseau uses perfectibility ‘as a weapon, a proof capable of shoring up a dualist thesis, to resist the “scientific” philosophy of the time and re-spiritualize “the operations of the mind” at the very moment when the philosophes were trying to materialize them.’

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4. Organological The principle of perfectibility acts as a ‘metafaculty’ (Binoche 2004, 14) or ‘the condition of possibility of the other faculties’ (Salaün 2004, 208). That is, it plays a decisive organological role in facilitating the development of human psychological faculties and sense organs. It is ‘a faculty which… successively develops all the others’ and actualizes ‘the other faculties which natural man had received in potentiality’ (Rousseau 2018, 163). Perfectibility gives a history to human knowing, imagining and sensing, and, as such, explains the historical changes undergone by philosophy and the natural sciences themselves. After its originary Rousseauean formulation, the principle of perfectibility was subject to a rapid process of contestation and fragmentation. For example, the materialist riposte was to reduce perfectibility to a kind of biological health, transforming it from an a priori condition of human history to a derivative physiological product of it (Salaün 2004, 211–7). For the materialists, perfectibility was to be explained by history, rather than explaining it. For my purposes, though, it is Charles Bonnet’s very different intervention into this debate that is significant. In his immediate response to Rousseau’s Second Discourse (his 1756 Letter on Rousseau’s Discourse signed under the pseudonym, ‘Philopolis’), as well as, more implicitly, in his later metaphysics, Bonnet contests, develops and mutates the doctrine of perfectibility with respect to all four of its above Rousseauean properties: 1. Teleological Bonnet’s doctrine of perfectibility is representative of a more widespread appropriation of perfectibility into teleological narratives—what Binoche dubs, ‘the reabsorption of perfectibility into becoming-perfect’ (2004, 17). Perfectibility comes to be reimagined as a unilateral process of attaining always-greater perfections, a process based on rational faith in the fact that ‘by continual progress’ I will attain ‘another state where all my faculties will be perfected’ (Bonnet 2002, 431). It expresses, in short, ‘a natural determinism’—an organic logic that necessarily propels beings through higher and higher forms (Lotterie 2006, 31–3). This constitutes Bonnet’s distinctive vision of the chain of being: not all links in the chain are manifest at any one moment; rather, they exist across a historical series. Perfectibility propels nature onwards to populate temporarily missing links in the chain. 2. Optimist Bonnet writes in his ‘Philopolis Letter’, ‘This perfectibility, which, for Rousseau, comprises the characteristic that essentially distinguishes man from animal, must— by the author’s own logic—lead man to the point where we see him today. To wish that this weren’t the outcome is to wish that man weren’t man.’ (1779–83, 8.333) The attack is here directed towards Rousseau’s distinction between what perfectibility effects (i.e., corrupt and perverse states of affairs) and its origin innate within the human, which is characterized as good. According to Bonnet, such a distinction is artificial: ‘Must not all that results immediately from the faculties of man be said to result from his nature?’ (1779–83, 8.333) That is, he is suggesting that to take perfectibility seriously as a ‘metafaculty’ entails thinking through all of its effects as ultimately good (or tending towards perfection). And such a gesture further

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entails a discarding of Rousseau’s tempered pessimism in favor of a Leibnizian teleological optimism, based on the fundamental principle: ‘Let the world proceed as it does and let us be sure that it proceeds as well as it can.’ (1779–83, 8.335) The possibility of corruption, so integral to Rousseau’s principle of perfectibility, is thereby lost. 3. Naturalist Bonnet also disputes the Rousseauean use of perfectibility to sharply distinguish the human from the animal. Bonnet naturalizes perfectibility, such that it is the structuring feature of the entire organic world, i.e., nature has a history too. In La palingénésie philosophique, for example, he is clear: ‘An animal is a perfectible being, perfectible to an indefinite degree’ (2002, 137) and there is ‘a continual progress… of all species towards a superior perfection’ (2002, 155). The human still remains ‘the most perfectible of all terrestrial beings’ according to Bonnet (2002, 227), but this is now a distinction of degree (not of kind) based on various amounts of energy or forcefulness manifest in a species’ innate principle of perfectibility. And yet, such a claim does not collapse Bonnet’s position into the materialist one: he refuses to reduce perfectibility to some more fundamental organic structure. On the contrary, for Bonnet, perfectibility is a prius of organic activity—an immaterial and irreducible principle that determines the organic world as a whole (2002, 393). 4. Organological When it comes to the perfectibility of epistemic organs, Bonnet does not so much dispute Rousseau as radicalize him. Perfectibility is the condition of not only ‘the simple increase in the perfections of [existing] organs’, but also the emergence of ‘new organs which perfect, develop and ennoble’ organic life (2002, 163–4). The becoming-perfect of an organism necessarily entails the development of ‘a greater number of senses and more perfected senses’ (2002, 353)—and so the evolution of all organisms is ‘principally’ a matter of ‘more exquisite senses and new senses’ (2002, 621). Even the freshwater polyp will, by the workings of the principle of perfectibility that dwells within, ‘experience new sensations and sensations of a new order.’ (2002, 175) Just as it does for Rousseau, the principle of perfectibility acts as a metafaculty that structures the evolution of an organism’s epistemic instruments. These are four fundamental ways in which Bonnet reacts to Rousseau’s 1755 provocation. What unites Bonnet with Rousseau—and what distinguishes both their positions from the emergent materialist one—is commitment to perfectibility as an a priori condition of historical existence. In other words, Bonnet is trenchantly anti-­ materialist as well: he preserves Rousseau’s dualism of spirit and matter, but, for him, such a dualism no longer structures the human alone. The dualism is universalized throughout organic nature. And this reveals some of the distinctiveness to Bonnet’s anomalous naturalism: a metaphysical principle is embedded within nature, but some minimal distance from material nature nevertheless remains. Everything appears in nature, but not necessarily as material. The principle of perfectibility is the exemplary instance of this operation of naturalization without materialization.

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Ultimately, for Bonnet, the history that perfectibility makes possible is very different from Rousseau’s history, for it is a teleological history of progress inscribed within nature as well as within the human—to return to Leroux’s phrasing: ‘continuous perfectibility in nature and in humanity’ (1982, 47). And this provides Bonnet’s warrant for the making historical of natural history: the natural historian watches as ‘another order of things succeeds the first—the world is repeopled and takes on a new face’ (Bonnet 2002, 189). All of nature is subject to historical transformation: species change (‘after this metamorphosis will appear a new animal which resemble the first less than the butterfly resembles a caterpillar.’ [2002, 358]), humans change (future transformations will ‘make man a very different being from what we know under the name man’ [2002, 592]) and the earth as such is subject to revolutionary change (‘new revolutions [occur] that are still hidden in the abyss of the future’ [2002, 132]). All organic being is ‘from period to period clothed in new forms or new modalities’ (2002, 189). Indeed, the historical change observed in the late Bonnet’s refiguring of natural history is so radical that one must not imagine that animals will have in their future state the same form, the same structure, the same parts, the same consistency, the same size as we see in their current state. They will thus be as different from what they are today as the state of our globe will differ from its present state. If we were permitted to contemplate at present this delightful scene of metamorphosis, I am convinced that we could recognize no species of animal which are today the most familiar: they too would be changed to our eyes. (2002, 139)

Bonnet dubs this developmental logic of the organic world: ‘palingenesis’. The human is not exempt from palingenetic history, but embedded, even subsumed within it.

2 Anomalous Naturalism and the Post-Bonnetian Tradition The three quotations below provide some initial evidence for a Bonnetian tradition operative into late eighteenth-century Germany. Bonnet: I have tried to study man as I have studied insects and plants. (1779–83, 6.vii) Jacobi to Hamann: We are both naturalists and we both do not try to explain, but to exhibit facts. To this extent, we pursue the same path, but afterwards our two paths separate. You have shown how the body affects the soul… But I, who have personally experienced the fact that our higher being can free itself from the lower one, intend now to reveal what the spirit possesses in the human being that is independent of the flesh. (1981–2018, 3.258) Herder: Palingenesis is therefore correct: only [it is] not so miraculous as you suppose, but rather very natural. (1985–2000, 4.434–5)

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Bonnet’s philosophy entered Germany in myriad ways: in theories of fiber-­ physiology, in the epigenesis-preformationism debates waged by Haller, Wolff and their successors, in post-Blumenbachian controversies over the use of teleological principles in the natural sciences. However, my interest—as the above quotations attest—is in a palingenetic tradition that runs directly from Bonnet to Herder. And in the present section I will contend that much of this tradition is defined by its anomalous naturalism. Jacobi, Herder, Lessing and others follow Bonnet in developing a non-materialist naturalism, one that ‘exhibits’, rather than ‘explains’ away (in Jacobi’s terms) non-material principles (like perfectibility) within nature. The second half of this paper makes some suggestions concerning this post-­ Bonnetian tradition by way of a provisional conceptual delineation of anomalous naturalism. As mentioned above, what is at stake is less the transmission of the principle of perfectibility itself than what Bonnet and his German readers do with it and similar metaphysical concepts. To put it another way: my thesis in the second half of this essay is intended to solve a problem—the problem of how some German philosophers on the cusp of romanticisms and idealisms, on the one hand, rejected the natural sciences in their reductive forms as an explanatory model and pushed their research into the realm of the immaterial, while, on the other hand, still labelled themselves naturalists and drew extensively on the natural sciences. This is expressed most clearly in Jacobi’s characterization of himself and Hamann as naturalists of the supernatural. Elsewhere, Jacobi will repeatedly insist that naturalist and particularly mechanical explanations ‘blind us’ (1994, 195) and impede scientific progress, at the same time as valorizing ‘the great service of the scientist’ in ‘unveiling existence’ (1994, 194). In other words, according to Jacobi, the work of the naturalist manages—despite itself, almost—to contribute to the ‘mysterious… way to knowledge’ (1994, 249). My contention is that reference back to Bonnet helps make sense of these kinds of German naturalisms of the supernatural: he provides one model for an anti-materialist naturalism that was a live option for some German philosophers in the 1780s. Anomalous naturalism possesses the following three features in Bonnet’s initial elaboration of it: 1. Polypic The term ‘palingenesis’ refers to the fact that everything has already been generated again, that everything is a recapitulation. A palingenetic logic of the organic considers all organisms to exist in the middle of a long series of metamorphoses governed by a principle of perfectibility. And this palingenetic framework is modelled on the parthenogenetic properties Bonnet had observed, at the very beginning of his career, in the earthworm and freshwater polyp. Whenever these organisms are subject to mutilation (i.e., to the incision of the researcher’s knife), the mutilated parts form new wholes—the polyp is immortal to the extent that its material parts will forever keep on regenerating anew: ‘If one cuts off these heads and tails, they will give just as many perfect polyps. Ovid’s fecund imagination did not go so far!’ (Bonnet 2002, 171–2) Bonnet generalizes from this: all organic matter—whether as polyp or as human—forms part of a series of unending metamorphoses. It will never stop taking on new forms.

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This is why Bonnet frequently describes his late metaphysics as an extension of his natural history—as ‘a metaphysics that is nearly all physics’ (1779–83, 1.x). Palingenesis is an elaboration of the logic of the polyp writ large (see Azadpour and Whistler 2021): the early framework of Bonnet’s natural history carries on determining his late palingenetic speculation. All Bonnet’s writings without exception contribute to a cumulative attempt ‘to perfect the logic of the naturalist’ (2002, 371). 2. Naturalist Palingenesis is therefore still a naturalism, understood broadly as a unitary discourse in which everything is articulated in reference to biological and physical frameworks. As late as 1769, Bonnet describes himself as a ‘naturalist… analyzing, anatomizing and comparing facts’ (2002, 61). He is, as Savioz puts it, ‘always Réaumur’s disciple’ (1948, 11; my emphasis). In this vein, Bonnet’s claim (quoted above) ‘to study man as I have studied insects and plants’ cements such a commitment to naturalism: to treat humans like ‘insects and plants’ is not solely a mid-­ eighteenth-­century riposte to Spinoza’s credo to treat the human ‘as though I were concerned with lines, planes and solids’ (2003, 278), but also a contribution to autobiography. Bonnet is here insisting on the continuity of his intellectual trajectory between his early observational research and his later palingenetic metaphysics. This continuity-thesis runs counter to most reconstructions of Bonnet’s philosophy, from Daubenton and Cuvier onwards, which posit a rupture—symbolized by his fading eyesight3—in order to condemn his later palingenetic speculations in the name of the superiority of the experimental (see McCalla 1994, 429). This standard interpretation reads Bonnet fleeing naturalism into supernaturalism. On the contrary, I am trying to suggest—in line with Anderson’s dictum that he ‘came to metaphysics by way of insects’ (1982, 10)—that it is possible to take Bonnet at his word and to read his as a trajectory from a naturalism of the real to a naturalism of the ideal. 3. Immaterialist What marks Bonnet’s naturalism apart and proved influential is that it is a naturalism irreducible to materialism. The human soul is exhibited within nature, but not as a material object. Hence, on the one hand, Bonnet claims that ‘it is always by way of physics that one must travel to arrive at the soul’ (2002, 28). But, on the other hand, this is not to reduce the soul itself to something material—Bonnet is clear: ‘The being of my soul resembles nothing at all of what matter offers me’ (1779–83, 00). His project revolves around ‘the hypothesis of a sensible and active

 Bonnet’s epiphanic and supposedly transformational reading of Leibniz in 1747 is also often presented as a moment of rupture in his philosophical trajectory. Bonnet himself comments that it was ‘something I have always regarded as one of the principal moments of my thinking life… that marvellously increased my field of vision’ (1948, 100; see Anderson 1982, 7–12). It is also important to underline the significance of the reference to Leibniz for this whole tradition of anomalous naturalism being described in the present essay—not just in Bonnet, but in Lessing and in Herder too (for example). 3

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principle distinct from matter to explain all phenomena’ (2002, 363). Such a project, he continues, might seem confusing, for it contains ‘lots of physics and only a bit of metaphysics’ but still gives ‘perhaps the best proofs of the immortality of the soul.’ (2002, 49) The distinctiveness of Bonnetian naturalism can therefore be identified as a natural history of the human as non-material. This is a physics of the ideal, but one which is quite different from that found in Schellingian philosophy of nature (for example). 4. Negligibly Immaterialist Rousseau’s response to Bonnet’s natural history of perfectibility was swift and brutal. He attacks Bonnet’s teleological refiguring of it as a process of becoming perfect, the consequent loss of any potential for human corruption and so, in sum, Bonnet’s Leibnizian optimism, in which perfectibility motors a unilateral ascent up the chain of being. Moreover, Rousseau also takes aim at Bonnet’s naturalism, labelling him ‘a materialist’ (2018, 395). If nothing else, this is testament to the delicacy of Bonnet’s operation: as Rousseau’s example shows, anomalous naturalism demands a sensitivity, even charity from its readers that has not always been forthcoming. Just like Rousseau, David Gaub in 1761 worried that Bonnet’s philosophy ‘risked confirming some people in their materialism of the soul’ (quoted in Marx 1976, 409) and, far more recently, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl calls Bonnet ‘a La Mettrie who would be Christian’ (quoted in Marx 1976, 442). Similarly, in the German context, despite Kant’s fulsome praise for Bonnet (1929, A668/B696), he still repeatedly identifies palingenesis with materialism (2013, 440, 458). And this is understandable: Bonnet is fond of using materialist models for psychology, speaking of ‘the mechanics of the faculties’ (2002, 25) and ‘the physics of the imagination’ (2002, 29). As he writes of his detractors, ‘They have seen that I often speak of fibers and the movements of fiber; and there is nothing more needed to persuade them that I am a materialist’ (2002, 361). In this vein, the late Bonnet is forever bemoaning misunderstandings of palingenesis as materialist: ‘No, I am not a materialist’ (2002, 50) is his constant refrain, and he goes to the lengths of adding asterisks to those paragraphs in his publications ‘which are the most directly contrary to the language of the materialist’ in order to combat ‘inattentive or badly disposed readers’ like Rousseau (2002, 49). François Hemsterhuis’ dictum that Bonnet ‘works more for the materialists than the materialists themselves’ is apt (2011–18, 3.120): Bonnet’s naturalism seems so close to materialism as to be almost indistinguishable from it; his anti-materialism appears so minimal as to almost vanish entirely.4

 Gaukroger puzzles over precisely this feature: Bonnet is a naturalist who manages nevertheless not to commit himself to reductive materialism. Quoting Bonnet, Gaukroger characterises him as “transferring to the body those things that are commonly attributed to the soul [without] diminishing the soul” (2022, xvi). Despite Bonnet’s “physiology of the mind”, his project “has no necessary connection with materialism and… materialism is not the direction in which he wants to go.” (2022, xxx). 4

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There are a number of ways in which this minimalization of the immaterial operates in Bonnet’s writings. First, physical explanation becomes the sole means by which the reader can access a fleeting glimpse of the immaterial. To repeat: ‘it is always by physics that one must pass to arrive at the soul’ (2002, 28), such that ‘physics’ dominates his texts at the expense of any manifestation of the soul as immaterial, which is reduced to a vanishing point. The immateriality of the soul appears as a topological anomaly that is both enveloped in the plane of nature, but also escapes it. Secondly, this minimalization of the immaterial also results from the regulative, ‘as-if’ status ascribed to naturalist treatments of the immaterial— ‘as a kind of representation of the corresponding modifications of my soul’ (2002, 24). Bonnet’s use of natural scientific models takes on a quasi-fictional, even ironic status, as a heuristic to explain the unexplainable. Thirdly, Bonnet distinguishes the fact that the soul appears as immaterial in his natural history from any explanation of how it so appears—and while the former is within the compass of his philosophy, the latter is not. He writes, ‘The philosopher does not inquire how the movement of a nerve gives rise in the soul to an idea. He simply admits the fact and renounces without effort any knowledge of its cause: he knows that it pertains to the mystery of the union of the two substances and that this mystery is impenetrable for him.’ (2002, 22) Ultimately, we return to Jacobi’s distinction between ‘exhibiting’ in nature and ‘explaining’ by nature: the immaterial is ‘exhibited’ in natural history without thereby being explained materialistically. ‘Three principal figures, Lessing, Hemsterhuis and Jacobi, preceded Kant in their philosophical career. They had no school, since they did not found a system; but they began the attack on the doctrine of the materialists.’ So wrote Germaine de Staël in De l’Allemagne (1814, 431). According to de Staël, these three thinkers— Jacobi, Hemsterhuis and Lessing—stand on the cusp of German idealisms and romanticisms. To employ A. W. Schlegel’s correlate phrase, they were ‘prophets of transcendental idealism’ (1964, 3.83). And what they share, she specifies, is an antimaterialist project. If one were to (plausibly) add J. G. Herder to this list, then these four thinkers could additionally be identified as four of the most avid readers of Charles Bonnet in the late eighteenth century. Their ‘attack on the doctrine of the materialists’ was forged in detailed conversation with Bonnet’s palingenesis. And this suggests, if nothing else, that (although not dominant) Bonnetian naturalism held a minoritarian position in German intellectual life at the period. It is worth rehearsing how more specifically each of the four thinkers relates to Bonnetian anomalous naturalism: (a) Lessing In Wolfenbüttel in June 1780, Lessing admits to Jacobi his avid interest in Bonnet’s La palingénésie philosophique, and this bore fruit in Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (completed that year). From Dilthey onwards, the text has been read as the high point of German Bonnet-reception. This is true not only of its educational theory and its invocation of a palingenetic form of metempsychosis, but also in its very wording: §4, for instance, is a close paraphrase of La palingénésie philosophique (Bohnen 1981, 362). As Friedrich Schlegel went on to put it,

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Lessing’s text undertakes ‘a vast palingenesis of religion’ (1958–2002, 32.00). Indeed, Lessing had previously been one of the first to transpose the concept of perfectibility into German thought along Bonnetian lines: his early translation of the principle as ‘Vermögen sich vollkommener zu machen’ bears the hallmarks of a palingenetic mutation of Rousseau’s original principle (Binoche 2004, 26–7). As in Bonnet, perfectibility is interpreted eschatologically as the becoming-perfect of the human through a metamorphic series of future forms. The late fragment, Daß mehr als fünf Sinne für den Menschen sein können further develops this Bonnetian line of thought with its emphasis on the organological implications of a teleological natural history of the human. Lessing frames the future transformation of the subject in terms of a gradual unfolding of ‘further senses’ which unveil ‘a whole new world… full of the most splendid phenomena’ (2005, 183). As Marx (1976, 439) summarizes, ‘[t]here is no doubt that Lessing followed Bonnet to the extent that he linked future states of being with the acquisition of new senses: nature makes no jumps, our soul has progressively acquired its current senses and will thus be able to obtain new ones in the future.’ (b) Hemsterhuis François Hemsterhuis’ appreciation of ‘the great Bonnet’ (2011–18, 3.118) rests, in part, on the latter’s naturalist approach to the human—a sentiment best articulated in his characterization of Bonnet’ project as the psychological analogue to Swammerdam’s microscopic investigations: ‘He is for ideas what Swammerdam was for insects’ (2011–18, 1.252). Although Hemsterhuis is sometimes critical of Bonnet’s perceived flirtation with materialism (see above), he is nevertheless clear that he philosophizes in Bonnet’s shadow: Bonnet’s ‘philosophy and mine meet each other at the end of the day, and the only difference [between them] is that he began with the tail and I with the head.’ (2011–18, 3.118, 11.40; see Ayrault 1961, 1.489, Whistler 2023) Just like Lessing, moreover, what Hemsterhuis takes most from Bonnetian philosophy is an organological rendering of perfectibility. For Hemsterhuis, ‘the most beautiful property of man is that of being able to correct and perfect himself’ (2015, 486)—and this faculty of self-perfection is interpreted in Bonnet’s wake as the condition for the emergence of new sense organs and the enhancement of existing ones. Souls scale ‘degrees of perfection’ owing to the ‘continual pull’ they experience towards ‘another state’ (2011–18, 1.19), thereby ‘acquiring more organs… or developing other organs’ (Hemsterhuis 2014, 680; see Whistler 2021).5 (c) Jacobi In Vernière’s phrase, Jacobi was a ‘disciple of Bonnet’ (1954, 665). His philosophy draws on Bonnetian sources in its historical vision of increasingly spiritualized striving, in its fiber physiology, in its recourse to an intimate feeling of personality 5

 On this treatment of Hemsterhuis as a thinker in the German tradition, see further Whistler (2022).

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and, most pertinently, in its naturalistic approach to the supernatural. Bonnetian palingenesis plays a significant role in Jacobi’s conversations in the Spinoza-Briefe: for example, when Lessing admits to reading Bonnet’s La palingénésie philosophique (see above), Jacobi responds that he had learned Bonnet’s ‘collected works… by heart’ (1994, 197; see Israel 2013, 690). And, in the conclusion, Bonnetian palingenesis returns: not just in Jacobi’s invocation of a youthful hero who resists the ‘whispers’ of secular reason to embrace palingenesis, genius and spirit (1994, 242), but also in the overall attempt to demonstrate the progress of perfectibility in the human subject. Jacobi’s remark to Hamann (quoted above) that ‘we are both naturalists’ has traditionally been interpreted along these Bonnetian lines (see Isenberg 1906, 49–50), and, as I have suggested, such an appeal to naturalism here recapitulates Bonnet’s conception of a naturalism of the ideal free from materialism. That is, it is Bonnetian in inspiration insofar as it allows both for Jacobi’s suspicion of mechanical explanations of human existence and for a methodology that draws extensively on the models of the natural sciences. Jacobi sees himself, like Bonnet, as a naturalist of the immaterial soul: the soul is exhibited in nature without thereby being explained materially. It is no wonder, then, that Jacobi will write in messianic hope of a ‘a future Bonnet’ to complete the physics of the ideal, i.e. ‘lay out a mechanics of the human spirit for us that is just as all-encompassing, intelligible, and enlightening as the Newtonian mechanics of the heavens’ (1994, 560). (d) Herder Unsurprisingly, considering the fact that Herder entitled a 1797 essay Palingenesie, his debt to Bonnet has frequently been acknowledged in the literature (e.g., Nisbet 1970, 233–4, Kurth-Voigt 1999, Markworth 2005, 69–73, Barry 2006, Colbert 2017). Herder uses the concept of palingenesis to describe processes in the natural world, in the afterlife and within human development. The last instance is particularly significant, because it highlights Herder’s endeavor to radically naturalize palingenetic structures—in line with the above quotation: ‘Palingenesis is… rather very natural’. Herder goes further than Bonnet who, for the most part, had articulated palingenetic processes as pertaining to the transition ‘between’ organic states (i.e., between forms separated by some kind of extinction); instead, Herder stresses palingenetic processes that occur within the growth of one organism. For example, in a creative mutation of Bonnet’s doctrine, the relation between childhood and adulthood comes to be structured palingenetically, as an organic Bildung— as Barry writes, ‘“Palingenesis” thus names a natural operation of memory through which we recover the earliest impressions of our childhood that… so powerfully shape our subsequent development.’ (2006, 4) Or, in Herder’s own words, ‘Palingenesis is man’s share’ (1977–2016, 1.141)—it constitutes a natural law. To put it bluntly: Herder insists on a naturalization of palingenesis that is far more radical than Bonnet’s own. The above vignettes do little but scratch the surface. The list of Germanophone post-Bonnetians could easily be expanded to include, for example, Lavater and Wieland. At most, this essay has given a few indications what it might look like to

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start reading some classical German philosophy as post-Bonnetian.6 ‘The significant role that Bonnet played in the intellectual life of his time’ (Bohnen 1981, 363) has occasionally been noted in the scholarship, but references are particularly sparse to his German reception. Over the past century, the number of works that attend to the German afterlives of Bonnet’s palingenesis can be counted on one hand: Ungar’s intellectual history of palingenesis (1924), Isenberg’s reading of Jacobi as Bonnetian (1906), Savioz’s cursory summary of the German context (1948) and Marx’s more detailed reconstructions of the German post-Bonnetian landscape (1976). There is, therefore, much work still to be done on the various ways in which what Voltaire aptly named ‘the strange imagination of Charles Bonnet’ (see Savioz 1948, 47) came to determine and stimulate the equally ‘strange imaginations’ of many German philosophers in the last decades of the eighteenth century. And what I have tried to suggest in this essay—however preliminarily—is that a concept of anomalous naturalism is central to any further research on this topic.

References Abensour, Miguel. 1991. L’affaire Schelling: Une controverse entre Pierre Leroux et les jeunes hégéliens. Corpus: Revue de philosophie 18/19: 117–142. Anderson, Lorin. 1982. Charles Bonnet and the Order of the Known. Dordrecht: Reidel. Ayrault, Roger. 1961. La genèse du romantisme allemand. Vol. 2. Paris: Aubier. Azadpour, Lydia, and Daniel Whistler. 2021. Polyp-Thinking in the Eighteenth Century. In Thought: A Philosophical History, ed. P. Vassilopoulou and D. Whistler, 148–161. London: Routledge. Barry, Kelly. 2006. Natural Palingenesis: Childhood, Memory and Self-Experience in Herder and Jean Paul. Goethe Yearbook 14: 1–25. Behler, Ernst. 1989. Unendliche Perfektibilität: Europäische Romantik und Französische Revolution. Paderborn: Schöningh. Binoche, Bertrand. 2004. Perfection, Perfectibilité et Perfectionnement. In L’homme perfectible, ed. B. Binoche, 14–23. Seyssel: Editions Champ Vallon. Bohnen, Klaus. 1981. Lessings Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (§4) und Bonnets Palingenesie: Ein Zitat-Hinweis. Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 31: 362–365. Bonnet, Charles. 1948. Memoirs autobiographiques, edited by Raymond Savioz. Paris: Vrin. ———. 1779–83. Œuvres d’histoire naturelle et de philosophie. 8 vols. Neuchatel: Fauche. ———. 2002. La palingénésie philosophique. Edited by Christiane Frémont. Paris: Fayard. Bowler, Peter L. 1973. Bonnet and Buffon: Theories of Generation and the Problem of Species. Journal of the History of Biology 6 (2): 259–281. Cheung, Tobias. 2010. Omnis Fibra Ex Fibra: Fibre Economies in Bonnet’s and Diderot’s Models of Organic Order. Early Science and Medicine 15 (1–2): 66–104. Colbert, Benjamin. 2017. Romantic Palingenesis, or History from the Ashes. European Romantic Review 28 (3): 369–378. Duchesneau, François. 2006. Charles Bonnet’s Neo-Leibnizian Theory of Organic Bodies. In The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. J.E.H. Smith, 285–314. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 For a further attempt to sketch the contours of a post-Bonnetian tradition in Germany, see Whistler (2023). 6

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Unger, Rudolf. 1924. Zur Geschichte des Palingenesiegedankens im 18. Jahrhundert. Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 2: 257–274. Vernière, Paul. 1954. Spinoza et la pensée française avant la révolution. Paris: PUF. Vosskamp, Wilhelm. 1992. Perfectibilité und Bildung: Zu den Besonderheiten des deutschen Bildungskonzepts im Kontext der europäischen Utopie- und Fortschrittsdiskussion. In Europäische Aufkläruing(en): Einheit and nationale Vielfalt, ed. S. Jüttner and J. Schlobach, 117–126. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Whistler, Daniel. 2021. François Hemsterhuis and the Writing of Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2022. Hemsterhuis in Germany. Symphilosophie 4:47–87. ———. 2023. Jacobi and Hemsterhuis. In Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and the Ends of the Enlightenment, ed. A. Hampton, 155–175. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Romantic Empiricism in the Anthropocene: Unlocking A. v. Humboldt’s and F. W. J. Schelling’s Potential for the Environmental Humanities Christina Pinsdorf

With the proclamation of a new geochronological earth age called the ‘Anthropocene’, it is now abundantly clear that humankind has become the most powerful factor of influence on planet Earth. The interdependence of nature and culture is more obvious than ever, and the – essentially man-made – ecological crisis along with climate change and massive species extinction has turned into an encompassing threat. Against this background, a realignment of the prevalent human-nature-relationship on the part of the philosophy of nature and ethics is overdue. In the last decade, the academic landscape has reacted to pressing ecological challenges by promoting the interdisciplinary research field of the Environmental Humanities, which seeks to combine the expertise of various nature-related subdisciplines of the humanities. With the same aim they strive to build bridges between the traditionally separated natural sciences and humanities.1 In the spirit of this research orientation, the following remarks will highlight two outstanding historical figures of the late eighteenth century  – the natural scientist (Naturforscher) Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and the natural philosopher (Naturphilosoph) Friedrich Wilhelm Josef Schelling (1775–1854) – and examine their relevance in the context of the Environmental Humanities and for the discussion of current problems of ecological ethics and ethics of nature. On the one hand, this endeavor is

For a more comprehensive study of the relationship between Humboldt and Schelling see Pinsdorf 2020. All translations of the Humboldt quotes and the Schelling quotes are own translations. The original German quotations can be found in the corresponding footnotes.  For an extensive presentation of the Environmental Humanities cf. e.g. Oppermann and Iovino 2017; Heise et al. 2017. 1

C. Pinsdorf (*) Institute for Science and Ethics (IWE), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Corti, J.-G. Schülein (eds.), Life, Organisms, and Human Nature, Studies in German Idealism 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_17

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guided by the assumption that both scientists have – however only at certain times of their careers – represented the position of a Romantic Empiricism. On the other hand, both scientists generated multi-angle insights that can be made fruitful for a revision of the ethically unjustifiable human-nature-relationship of our time.

1 Natural Science Versus Philosophy of Nature? In sparsely differentiated scholarly literature, natural science and philosophy of nature are played off against each other and Humboldt and Schelling are most often characterized as opponents from hostile camps:2 As an unshakable empiricist, Humboldt is said to despise the abstract method of natural philosophy, because of its remoteness from reality, and to reject it altogether – in the sense of a “Chemistry where you didn’t get your hands wet”3 (Assing 1860, 90). Humboldt is further meant to criticize philosophy in general for hiding behind opaque phrases instead of creating clarity (cf. Humboldt 1845, 5). As a resolute idealist, Schelling in turn is said to hold the empirical method in low esteem because of its naïve, unreflective work that fails to recognize the big picture. In part, this narrative is combined with a polemic and undifferentiated criticism of Romantic natural science and philosophy of nature as a whole.4 Indeed, the relationship between Humboldt and Schelling developed from mutual euphoria in the initial phase to a one-sided rejection on the part of Humboldt.5

 Cf. amongst others Muthmann 1955; Bunge 1969; Beck 1976; von Engelhardt 2003; Reill 2005; Dettelbach 1999, 474, 503; Werner 2000. While Petra Werner believes it to be only possible that Humboldt was inspired by Romantic nature philosophy (cf. Werner 2000, 98), it is more than obvious to Mary Louise Pratt that “Humboldt in his writing is simply being a Romantic, simply doing Romanticism” and that “[t]o the extent that Humboldt ‘is’ a Romantic, Romanticism ‘is’ Humboldt” (Pratt 1992, 137). 3  “Chemie, in der man sich die Hände nicht naß machte”, Letter A. v. Humboldt to Karl August Varnhagen von Ense on April 28th 1841, cited from Assing 1860, 90. However, Humboldt is not attacking the abstract philosophical method and Romantic philosophy of nature in toto here, but only certain forms of it. Cf. further his letter to Schelling on February 1st 1805, cited from Fuhrmans 1975, 181, as well as various letters to different correspondents, where Humboldt differentiates his criticism in a similar way (cf. also Jahn 1969, 148; Werner 2000, 86). 4  The following judgement on the period of Romantic natural science and philosophy of nature by the chemist Justus von Liebig can be rated as a polemic typical since the nineteenth century: “Auch ich habe diese an Worten und Ideen so reiche, an wahrem Wissen und gediegenen Studien so arme Periode durchlebt, die mich um zwei kostbare Jahre meines Lebens gebracht; ich kann den Schreck und das Entsetzen nicht schildern, als ich aus diesem Taumel zum Bewusstsein erwachte” (Justus von Liebig 1840, cited from Tilliette 1974, 276 f.). In a similar way, contemporary physicist and philosopher Mario Bunge sums up that “das meiste, was die romantischen Naturphilosophen sagten, reiner Unsinn war und die Entwicklung der Naturwissenschaft und der Mathematik in Deutschland bremste” (Bunge 1969, 19). 5  Cf. e. g. Humboldt 1862, Vol. V, 21; letter by A. v. Humboldt to Carl Ludwig Michelet on March 31st 1841 (Michelet 1884, 48). 2

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However, this does not serve as a justification for the thesis that Humboldt despised Schelling and natural philosophy throughout his life.6 The interpretation of Romantic natural philosophy as purely a priori spiritual-idealistic7 does not at all apply to the early phase of its founder Schelling. Additionally, to portray Alexander von Humboldt as a concrete counterexample8 for the Romantic philosophy of nature is misleading. That is why numerous passages from the works of Humboldt and the early Schelling (ca. 1797–1809)9 will be adduced here with the aim of painting a more differentiated picture than the view that both were fundamentally disparaging of the other scientific discipline. Moreover, the thesis is put forward that by means of a joint holistic program Humboldt and the early Schelling were striving to oppose the thinking fragmented into individual disciplines and mechanistically objectifying nature. In his research, Humboldt usually considers the enrichment of his studies for other disciplines as well as the enrichment of other disciplines for his studies. In particular, he would like to see the results of his research taken up by philosophy of nature, in order to mutually advance towards a knowledge of the unity of nature. In his Ideen zu einer Geographie der Pflanzen and concerning the painting of nature (tableau physique) so momentous to him, Humboldt pinpoints that “a complete

 Here I do not agree with Peter Hanns Reill who interprets Humboldt’s appreciative remarks about Schelling and other Romantic natural philosophers as a “smokescreen designed both to confuse the enemy and to condemn them with praise” (Reill 2005, 240). This interpretation seems to be supported, for example, by a letter from Humboldt to August Böckh from 1842, in which Humboldt explains his tactical approach to Schelling and Hegel as “[s]o I come to my purposes without love for either, but with more respect for Hegel”; “[s]o komme ich zu meinen Zwecken ohne Liebe für beide, aber mit mehr Achtung für Hegel” (cf. Tilliette 1974, 487). However, this letter stems from the later period in question, by which time the turning away had long been obvious, and it is confronted with a significantly larger number of seriously appreciative statements by Humboldt about Schelling and natural philosophy, namely in letters to Schelling, letters to third parties, and especially within Humboldt’s publications. 7  Cf. Reill 2005, 14, 201. Rather, almost the opposite applies: “If it is the task of transcendental philosophy to subordinate the real to the ideal, it is, on the other hand, the task of natural philosophy to explain the ideal from the real: both sciences are therefore One science, differing only in the opposite directions of their tasks; since both directions are not only equally possible, but equally necessary, both have the same necessity in the system of knowledge.”; „Wenn es nun Aufgabe der Transcendentalphilosophie ist, das Reelle dem Ideellen unterzuordnen, so ist es dagegen Aufgabe der Naturphilosophie, das Ideelle aus dem Reellen zu erklären: beide Wissenschaften sind also Eine, nur durch die entgegengesetzten Richtungen ihrer Aufgaben sich unterscheidende Wissenschaft; da ferner beide Richtungen nicht nur gleich möglich, sondern gleich nothwendig sind, so kommt auch beiden im System des Wissens gleiche Nothwendigkeit zu” (Schelling 1799b, Vol. III, 272 f.). 8  Cf. Reill 2005, 200. Much rather Humboldt advocates: “Natural philosophy can never be harmful to the progress of empirical sciences.”; “Naturphilosophie kann den Fortschritten der empirischen Wissenschaften nie schädlich sein” (Letter A. v. Humboldt to F. W. J. Schelling on February 1st 1805, cited from Fuhrmans 1975, 181). 9  Schelling’s early philosophy of nature is generally located in the somewhat narrower time frame between 1797 and 1801. 6

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survey of nature, the ultimate purpose of all physical study, can only be achieved by not neglecting any force, any formation, and thereby preparing for the philosophy of nature a wide and promisingly fruitful field”10 (Humboldt 1807, 39f.). And further he says here – most likely with reference to Schelling: I may flatter myself that even to the natural philosopher, who ascribes all diversity of nature to the elementary actions of A matter, and who sees the world organism founded by the never decided struggle of opposing forces, such a compilation of facts must be important. The empiric counts and measures what the phenomena present directly: the philosophy of nature is to grasp what is common to all and to trace it back to principles.11 (Ibid., 89f.)

But even in the context of such multi-perspective research, the external world presents itself “gradually to the inquiring sense of nature” as “general interlinkage, not in a simple linear direction, but in a net-like intertwined fabric”12 (Humboldt 1845, 33), and remains not entirely comprehensible for Humboldt. Epistemically, this insight corresponds to the fundamental structure of all ecological thinking, which is expressed in the polarity between potentially infinite connectivity and potentially infinite diversity (cf. Dürbeck et al. 2017, xiv). The unmanageable connectivity of all natural phenomena and their irreducible diversity, the unity connected in and with everything, in combination with the interminably manifold separation of things in the compilation of his great life’s work – the title of which contains the aforementioned tension itself: Kosmos. Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung – prompted him to epistemological modesty. Due to the infinity of the empirical sphere of observation, all descriptions and their explanations must necessarily remain incomplete. Humboldt must admit that the physical description of the world cannot be completed in principle, for “[i]n the wonderful tissue of the organism, in the eternal drive and working of the living forces [...] every deeper research leads to the entrance of new labyrinths”13 (1845, 21). Thus, the universal system aimed at by the natural scientist, the empirical approach to a physical description of the world, is reaching its limits. Against the background of the diversity of phenomena, Schelling does not even formulate the intention of developing a comprehensive system,

 „ein vollständiger Überblick der Natur, der letzte Zweck alles physikalischen Studiums, kann nur dadurch erreicht werden, daß keine Kraft, keine Formbildung vernachläßigt, und dadurch der Philosophie der Natur ein weites, fruchtversprechendes Feld vorbereitet wird“. 11  „Ich darf mir schmeicheln, daß selbst dem Naturphilosophen, der alle Mannigfaltigkeit der Natur den Elementaractionen Einer Materie zuschreibt, und der den Weltorganismus durch den nie entschiedenen Kampf widerstrebender Kräfte begründet sieht, eine solche Zusammenstellung von Thatsachen wichtig seyn muß. Der Empyriker zählt und mißt, was die Erscheinungen unmittelbar darbieten: der Philosophie der Natur ist es aufbehalten, das allen Gemeinsame aufzufassen und auf Principien zurückzuführen.“ 12  “allmälig dem forschenden Natursinn […] allgemeine Verkettung, nicht in einfacher linearer Richtung, sondern in netzartig verschlungenem Gewebe“. 13  “[i]n dem wundervollen Gewebe des Organismus, in dem ewigen Treiben und Wirken der lebendigen Kräfte führt […] jedes tiefere Forschen an den Eingang neuer Labyrinthe”. Cf. as well Humboldt, 1847, Vol. II, 389f. 10

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since [...] every new discovery throws us back into a new ignorance, and while one knot is loosened, a new one is tightened, it is understandable that the complete discovery of all intermediate links in the nexus of nature, that therefore also our science itself is an infinite task.14 (Schelling 1799b, 279)

Rather, in accordance with his own aspirations and also on behalf of Humboldt’s expectations towards him,15 he sees himself confronted with the challenge of developing a metaphysical system that is nevertheless able to preserve the diversity of the phenomena and their complex interplay in unity. Frederick Beiser explains the extent to which Schelling helps the new metaphysics of Romanticism, the so-called Weltanschauung,16 to a more systematic formulation in his System des transcendentalen Idealismus of 1800 as well as in his Darstellung meines Systems of 1801. Schelling and his allies of German Romanticism are confronted with a seemingly inevitable dilemma regarding metaphysical dualism and mechanistic materialism. If one adopts this paradigm, one has to choose between two inadequate alternatives: Either one must locate the phenomenon of life outside nature and thus become a dualist, or one must reduce the same phenomenon to moving matter and thus become a mechanist. While the mechanist maintains the principles of naturalism, she ignores the qualities characteristic of life phenomena. The dualist, on the other hand, acknowledges these qualities, but transports them into a mysterious sui generis realm where they can no longer be explained by scientific methods (cf. Beiser 2006, 224).17 In Beiser’s opinion, Schelling’s organic concept of nature succeeds in resolving this very dilemma as it avoids the extremes of both subjectivism and dogmatism and combines the virtues of a critical epistemology with a naturalistic ontology (cf. Ibid., 218). Schelling first developed his organic concept of nature for which the principle of natural purpose is fundamental in 1798  in Von der Weltseele and in 1799  in Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (cf. Ibid., 222). If, as argued by Schelling, nature is an organic wholeness, one could neither in the sense of idealism say that it is completely within consciousness, nor in the sense of realism argue that it is completely outside consciousness: “Rather, it is both and neither.” (Ibid., 232).18 Because this mixture is hardly conceivable and even less clearly expressible, Schelling uses metaphors such as that of the secret bond (geheimes Band) to express the way nature and spirit are connected as otherness in unity. The striving for wholeness and unity shared by Schelling and Humboldt thus in no way aims at levelling out multi-perspective views or individual distinctions. On  “da […] jede neue Entdeckung uns in eine neue Unwissenheit zurückwirft, und indem der eine Knoten sich löst, ein neuer sich schürzt, so ist begreiflich, daß die vollständige Entdeckung aller Zwischenglieder im Zusammenhang der Natur, daß also auch unsere Wissenschaft selbst eine unendliche Aufgabe ist”. 15  Cf. e.g. letter A. v. Humboldt to F. W. J. Schelling on February 1st 1805, cited from Fuhrmans 1975, 181; Humboldt 1807, Vf.; Humboldt 1845, Vol. I, 171. 16  On the notion of ‘Weltanschauung’, cf. also Meyer-Abich 1948, 371f. 17  Cf. also Schelling 1798, Vol. II, 496–505 as well as Schelling 1799a, Vol. III, 74–78. 18  Cf. Schelling 1804, Vol. VI, 141–145. In Schelling’s work, philosophy of nature precedes his transcendental philosophy as a condition of possibility: nature is preconscious mind. Cf. also Poser 1981, 129. 14

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the contrary, their aim is to cross disciplinary boundaries to bring together as many different perspectives on the one world as possible in a complementary way.19 Because for Schelling it holds true: “Idealism is the soul of philosophy; realism its body; only the two together make a living whole”20 (Schelling 1809, 356). Humboldt likewise advocates “the movements of the mind [...] in two directions at the same time: in the research of speculative philosophy and in the philosophical treatment of the empirical knowledge of nature”21 (Humboldt 1847, 281). They agree that neither an empirical nor a metaphysical approach to nature is sufficient in itself to grasp and explain nature as a unity or wholeness. As a philosopher of nature, Schelling emphasizes first and foremost the inadequacy of an exclusively empirical method: “Experience would be good, if only it could always be determined immediately, what the experience actually says. This can only be done by theory”22 (Schelling 1800b, 534). For, “who has no proper theory, cannot possibly [...] have a proper experience. [...] The fact in itself is nothing”23 (Ibid., 532). Theory is in this respect already the necessary prerequisite for making experiences and not just having unrelated sensory impressions. If one wants to establish more general principles that go beyond experience, also in order to advance the empirical investigation of nature, it is in principle necessary to transcend the level of experience: “It is therefore understandable that speculative physics (the soul of true experiment) has always been the mother of all great discoveries in nature”24 (Schelling 1799b, 280). But for Humboldt, too, science only begins “where the spirit seizes the material, where an attempt is made to subject the mass of experiences to a rational cognition; it is the spirit, turned towards nature”25 (Humboldt 1845, 69). In Kosmos he adds: “Resisting the tendency of endless fragmentation of the recognized and collected, the organizing thinker should strive to avoid the danger of empirical abundance”26 (Ibid., 81). A purely speculative method, which he finds with some Schellingians as well as with Hegel and then with the late Schelling himself, is however just as insufficient. Of course, as a natural scientist Humboldt resolutely rejects such a method  Cf. also Meyer-Abich 1948, 28 f.; Köchy 1996, 319 ff.  “Idealismus ist Seele der Philosophie; Realismus ihr Leib; nur beide zusammen machen ein lebendiges Ganzes aus.” 21  “die Bewegungen des Geistes […] in zwei Richtungen zugleich: in den Forschungen der speculativen Philosophie und in der philosophischen Bearbeitung des empirischen Naturwissens”. 22  “Die Erfahrung wäre wohl gut, wenn nur immer sogleich ausgemittelt werden könnte, was denn die Erfahrung eigentlich sagt. Dies kann nur durch Theorie geschehen.” 23  “wer keine rechte Theorie hat, kann unmöglich […] eine rechte Erfahrung haben. […] Die Thatsache an sich ist nichts”. Cf. also Schelling 1803, Vol. V, 322. 24  “Es ist daher begreiflich, daß speculative Physik (die Seele des wahren Experiments) von jeher die Mutter aller großen Entdeckungen in der Natur gewesen ist.” Cf. also Köchy 1997, 264 ff.; Poser 1981, 131, 135. 25  “wo der Geist sich des Stoffes bemächtigt, wo versucht wird, die Masse der Erfahrungen einer Vernunfterkenntniß zu unterwerfen; sie ist der Geist, zugewandt zu der Natur”. 26  “Der Tendenz endloser Zersplitterung des Erkannten und Gesammelten widerstrebend, soll der ordnende Denker trachten, der Gefahr der empirischen Fülle zu entgehen.” 19 20

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(cf. Ibid., 68f.). From a reflective standpoint, Humboldt thus criticizes pure speculation and mere empiricism in equal measure: The epitome of experiential knowledge and a philosophy of nature formed in all its parts [...] cannot contradict each other, if the philosophy of nature, according to its promise, is the rational comprehension of the real phenomena in the universe. Where the contradiction appears, the fault lies either in the hollowness of speculation or in the hubris of empiricism, which believes more to be proven by experience than has been founded by it.27 (Ibid., 69)

Schelling (1799b, 284) indeed differentiates the relevant areas of responsibility – “Nature as mere product (natura naturata) we call nature as object (to this alone all empiricism goes). Nature as productivity (natura naturans) we call nature as subject (to this alone goes all theory)”28 – but makes unmistakably clear that both expertises must come together. For an idealistic approach taken by itself would remain blind, dead and incapable of integrating the world of the senses (cf. Schelling 1799a, 20).29 At the time around 1800 it was quite common for philosophers to be scientifically versed and knowledgeable of the current scientific state of the art. Some philosophers, including Schelling, had quite extensive scientific knowledge, attended scientific lectures and even participated in scientific experiments themselves. With his philosophy of nature resp. speculative physics, Schelling even claimed to significantly promote future scientific research.30 Despite the a priori principles determining Schelling’s philosophy of nature, to him concrete sensual experience is essential for the recognition of laws: “We originally know nothing at all but through experience, and by means of experience, and to that extent all our knowledge consists of empirical propositions”31 (Schelling 1799b, 278). Humboldt and Schelling, Naturforscher and Naturphilosoph, both plead for an approach to nature that is at once empirical and speculative. Together they stand for the model of a research direction that Dalia Nassar aptly describes as Romantic Empiricism (cf. Nassar 2014, 300).32 With their call for a necessary collaboration

 „Der Inbegriff von Erfahrungskenntnissen und eine in allen ihren Theilen ausgebildete Philosophie der Natur […] können nicht in Widerspruch treten, wenn die Philosophie der Natur, ihrem Versprechen gemäß, das vernunftmäßige Begreifen der wirklichen Erscheinungen im Weltall ist. Wo der Widerspruch sich zeigt, liegt die Schuld entweder in der Hohlheit der Speculation oder in der Anmaßung der Empirie, die mehr durch die Erfahrung erwiesen glaubt, als durch dieselbe begründet ward.“ 28  “Die Natur als bloßes Produkt (natura naturata) nennen wir Natur als Objekt (auf diese allein geht alle Empirie). Die Natur als Produktivität (natura naturans) nennen wir Natur als Subjekt (auf diese allein geht alle Theorie).” 29  This reference and the following quotations from Schelling are also directed against Reill’s interpretation of the subordination of experience to philosophy of nature (Cf. Reill 2005, 202, 210). 30  Cf. Meyer-Abich 1968, 43; Poser 1981, 129; Werner 2000, 77; von Engelhardt 2003, 152 f. Even Humboldt expresses appreciation for some of Schelling’s astute scientific observations (cf. Humboldt 1807, 108). 31  “Wir wissen ursprünglich überhaupt nichts als durch Erfahrung, und mittelst der Erfahrung, und insofern besteht unser ganzes Wissen aus Erfahrungssätzen.” Cf. also Schelling 1799b, Vol. III, 277 and for an adversarial statement Schelling 1801, Vol. IV, 115. Cf. on this also Poser 1981, 135f. 32  Cf. also Dettelbach 2001, 137f. 27

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between science and philosophy of nature as an alternative to both a vitalist dualism and a mechanistic monism, they promote an interdisciplinary approach integrating empiricism and theory as well as ethics and aesthetics.33 In this sense, the Environmental Humanities today and once again intend to overcome the still established division between the natural sciences and the humanities.

2 Characteristics of a Romantic Empiricism after Humboldt and Schelling 2.1 Critique of Dualism and Mechanism Schelling judged the nature-mind dualism prevailing in his time as an evil of philosophy that necessarily had to be passed through on the way to a higher goal. To him, the original nature-philosophical starting point for a dualistic intermediate step presents itself as follows: As soon as man puts himself in contradiction with the outer world [...] the first step to philosophy has happened. With that separation first begins reflection; from now on he [man (C.P.)] separates what nature had united forever, separates the object from the idea, the concept from the image, finally (by becoming his own object) himself from himself. But this separation is only a means, not an end.34 (Schelling 1797, 13)

The actual purpose of natural philosophy is to start from that first distance or foreignness through separation, which is necessary for gaining knowledge, and arriving at a reflected connection, higher unity resp. reunion through freedom.35 But the  For a corresponding evaluation of Humboldt’s research approach cf. also Nicolson 1987, 167, 180. 34  „Sobald der Mensch sich selbst mit der äußeren Welt in Widerspruch setzt […] ist der erste Schritt zur Philosophie geschehen. Mit jener Trennung zuerst beginnt Reflexion; von nun an trennt er [der Mensch (C.P.)] was die Natur auf immer vereinigt hatte, trennt den Gegenstand von der Anschauung, den Begriff vom Bilde, endlich (indem er sein eigenes Objekt wird) sich selbst von sich selbst. Aber diese Trennung ist nur Mittel, nicht Zweck.” Cf. also Humboldt 1845, Vol. I, 70: “The intellectual activity is then practiced on the material that is accessible to us through sensual perception. Therefore, already in the youthful age of mankind, in the simplest observation of nature, in the first recognition and comprehension, there is a stimulation to natural philosophical views.”; „Die intellectuelle Thätigkeit übt sich dann an dem durch die sinnliche Wahrnehmung überkommenen Stoffe. Es liegt daher schon im Jugendalter der Menschheit, in der einfachsten Betrachtung der Natur, in dem ersten Erkennen und Auffassen eine Anregung zu naturphilosophischen Ansichten.“ 35  Cf. Schelling 1797, Vol. II, 14: “It starts from that original separation in order to reunite through freedom what was originally and necessarily united in the human spirit, i.e. to abolish that separation forever.”; “Sie geht von jener ursprünglichen Trennung aus, um durch Freiheit wieder zu vereinigen, was im menschlichen Geiste ursprünglich und nothwendig vereinigt war, d. h. um jene Trennung auf immer aufzuheben.” Schelling accuses Immanuel Kant of wanting to cement the separation between man and world through the conception of the non-intelligible Ding an sich, which eludes all knowledge. This kind of philosophy would be a ‘Plagegeist’ leading to the 33

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path leading to reunification is not being taken. On the contrary, Schelling records a movement in the opposite direction. Philosophy and natural science cement the separation of subject and object that actually should be overcome, thus contributing to man’s ever deeper alienation from nature and hence also from himself.36 Reinhard Heckmann trenchantly sums up this alienation, which through forced separation progresses on a new level: Diese erneut sich einstellende Fremdheit ist von der ursprünglichen verschieden: Sie ist die Fremdheit nicht einer potentiell gefahrbringenden, weil undurchschauten Natur, sondern vielmehr die der transparent und berechenbar gewordenen Natur, welche in dem Maße ihrer ‚Entzauberung‘ durch den Fortschritt der Wissenschaften ihrer subjekt-analogen […] Züge entledigt wurde, bis zuletzt nur mehr das nackte Schema einer abstrakten, für sich genommen wert- und bedeutungslosen und somit im Prinzip unbegrenzt verfügbaren Objektivität von ihr übrig geblieben ist, aus der jede ‚[verborgene] Spur der Freiheit’ (Entwurf, III, 13) getilgt ist. (Heckmann 1983, 300)

In the course of the first separation, man juxtaposes herself in opposition to nature and distances herself from it, in order to be able to observe it from afar and reflect on it. Within this framework, nature, as the uncontrollable other, appears quite threatening and alien. At the same time, however, untamed and unavailable nature has a magic, it functions as a psychological projection for human longing, and refers to primordial structures and a formerly deep connection. The second separation or wave of alienation is, in contrast, of a completely different quality. On the basis of various technical and civilizational achievements, with the onset of modernity, through industrialization and into the twenty-first century, nature appears less and less as a threat to which we are defenselessly exposed. In fact, in the Anthropocene, hardly any nature that is not dominated by man has remained. Man distanced himself from nature and researched it until he was able to appropriate it according to his wants and needs. The fact that the unavailability of nature has shrunk to a minimum can be noticed today in phenomena as diverse as synthetic biology or the queueing climbers on Mount Everest. At the end of the eighteenth century, such scenarios were still a long way off, but the mechanistic paradigm of the mastery of nature that underlies them was already shaping the zeitgeist back then and concurrently fuelled the opposing endeavors of German Romanticism to expand the horizon for a re-­ enchantment of nature. It is in this melange that Humboldt and Schelling are pursuing their research with different emphases. The juxtaposition of subject and object, nature and culture or nature and freedom, which is inherent in the mechanistic paradigm, is rejected resolutely by both. For Humboldt applies: “One may now oppose nature to the realm of the spiritual, as if the spiritual was not also contained in the natural whole, or one may oppose nature to art,” such a radical “separation of the physical from the intellectual”37 (1845, 69) is not to be endorsed. ‘Geisteskrankheit des Menschen’ (cf. Schelling 1797, Vol. II 13f.). Cf. also Köchy 1997, 92ff.; Pinsdorf 2016, 44ff. 36  Cf. also Heckmann 1983, 309. 37  “Man mag nun die Natur dem Bereich des Geistigen entgegensetzen, als wäre das Geistige nicht auch in dem Naturganzen enthalten, oder man mag die Natur der Kunst entgegenstellen […] Trennung des Physischen vom Intellectuellen”.

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For there is no dichotomous opposition between a causally determined natural history and an independent cultural history shaped solely by human purposes. Accordingly, Humboldt neither locates freedom exclusively within the human form of life: “Nature however is the realm of freedom” (Ibid., 4) and “[c]omplete flourishing and freedom are inseparable ideas in nature as well”38 (Humboldt 1847, 98). Both Humboldt and Schelling, one each, passionately and with epistemological optimism represent their – at least from today’s perspective complementary – methods of a holistic approach to nature.

2.2 Wholeness and Unity of Nature On fifth June 1799, the day he set out on his great journey to America, Humboldt already announced: I will collect plants and fossils, with an excellent sextant by Ramsden, a quadrant by Bird, and a chronometer by Louis Berthoud I will be able to make useful astronomical observations; I will chemically decompose the air, – but all this is not the main focus of my journey. My eyes shall always be directed to the interaction of forces, the influence of the inanimate creation on the animate animal and plant world; on this harmony shall always be my eyes.39 (Jahn and Lange 1973, 682)

And also in his oeuvre Kosmos, which was published only a long time later, he once again places this main purpose first (cf. Humboldt 1845, VI). For Humboldt it is the noblest goal of every natural science and of his own efforts of a physical description of the world to track down the unity of the whole of nature: The most important result of apt physical research is therefore this: to recognize unity in diversity, to encompass everything of the individual that the discoveries of the latter ages offer us, to examine the details but not to succumb to their mass [...]. In this way, our endeavor reaches beyond the narrow limits of the sensory world, and we can succeed in grasping nature to master the raw material of empirical observation, as it were, through ideas.40 (Ibid., 5f.)  “Die Natur aber ist das Reich der Freiheit”; “[v]ollkommenes Gedeihen und Freiheit sind unzertrennliche Ideen auch in der Natur”. 39  “Ich werde Pflanzen und Foßilien sammeln, mit einem vortreflichen Sextanten von Ramsden, einem Quadrant von Bird, und einem Chronometer von Louis Berthoud werde ich nüzliche astronomische Beobachtungen machen können; ich werde die Luft chemisch zerlegen, − dieß alles ist aber nicht Hauptzwek meiner Reise. Auf das Zusammenwirken der Kräfte, den Einfluß der unbelebten Schöpfung auf die belebte Thier- und Pflanzenwelt; auf diese Harmonie sollen stäts meine Augen gerichtet seyn”, Letter A. v. Humboldt to Karl Ehrenbert von Moll on June 5th 1799, cited from Jahn and Lange 1973, 682. 40   “Das wichtigste Resultat des sinnigen physischen Forschens ist daher dieses: in der Mannigfaltigkeit die Einheit zu erkennen, von dem Individuellen alles zu umfassen, was die Entdeckungen der letzteren Zeitalter uns darbieten, die Einzelheiten prüfend zu sondern und doch nicht ihrer Masse zu unterliegen […]. Auf diesem Wege reicht unser Bestreben über die enge Grenze der Sinnenwelt hinaus, und es kann uns gelingen, die Natur begreifend, den rohen Stoff empirischer Anschauung gleichsam durch Ideen zu beherrschen.” 38

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By ‘master’, Humboldt means getting closer to the understanding of the basic unity by way of a “thinking observation of the phenomena given by empiricism, as a whole of nature”41 (Humboldt 1845, 31). In a very similar way, Schelling sees the meaning of nature philosophy in its contribution to a holistic view of nature and conscious restoration of the unity of nature and spirit. Against this background, Adolf Meyer-Abich, for example, describes Schelling as the first great representative of a universal theory of wholeness (cf. Meyer-Abich 1948, 104f.). Without relating them, Meyer-Abich characterizes both Schelling’s and Humboldt’s position as holistic.42 Although Humboldt acknowledges the insurmountable unfinishability of the natural sciences, for the purpose of a holistic view of nature he strives for a “book of nature, worthy of its sublime title”, in which “both spheres of the united cosmos (the outer, perceptible through the senses, as well as the inner, reflective, spiritual world) equally gain in lightful clarity”43 (Humboldt 1850, 8). Man is only able to write this reflective-abstract book about nature because she has an original, intuitively-­direct access to it. Humboldt can tell a physical world history, “[s]ince there is a vivid and true reflection of the physical world in the innermost, receptive sense [...]: everything is in ancient, mysterious intercourse with the emotional life [mood (C.P.)] of man”44 (1849, 252f.). At first glance, it may appear to be man, who writes, measures and maps, but it is nature itself that makes these processes possible in the first place, guarantees that scientific results are in congruence with the outside world and ultimately helps to produce them. The exploration of a physiognomy of nature inspired by Humboldt in his Ansichten der Natur stands for a very special form of nature-writing, as it gives nature a human face and refers to an original identity of nature and spirit: That nature had a physiognomy demonstrated the deep and unspeakable identity between nature […] and the human mind. A natural physiognomy guaranteed the global legibility of nature, ensured that nature and the mind spoke the same language. (Dettelbach 1999, 490)

In this sense Schelling regards nature as “a poem that lies locked in secret wonderful writing”45 (1800a, 628), which, however, man is able to decipher in so far as she traces the history of the human spirit in nature and in the course of the conscious  “denkende[n] Betrachtung der durch Empirie gegebenen Erscheinungen, als eines Naturganzen”. Cf. also Hegel, for whom philosophy of nature has to be ‘begreifende’ resp. ‘denkende Erkenntnis’ of nature, which under the ‘Betrachtungsweise des Begriffs’ determines the universal of nature (Hegel 1978, Zusatz 11f., 13, 15). Cf. also Pinsdorf 2016, 67ff. 42  In view of Schelling cf. Meyer-Abich 1948, 149, in view of Humboldt cf. Meyer-Abich 1949, 181ff. and Nicolson 1987, 176ff. 43  „Buch von der Natur, seines erhabenen Titels würdig […] beide Sphären des einigen Kosmos (die äußere, durch die Sinne wahrnehmbare, wie die innere, reflectirte, geistige Welt) gleichmäßig an lichtvoller Klarheit gewinnen“. 44  „[d]enn in dem innersten, empfänglichen Sinne spiegelt lebendig und wahr sich die physische Welt […]: alles steht in altem, geheimnißvollem Verkehr mit dem gemüthlichen Leben [Gemüthsleben (C.P.)] des Menschen“. 45  „ein Gedicht, das in geheimer wunderbarer Schrift verschlossen liegt“. 41

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reunification of nature and spirit through the joint efforts of natural research and natural philosophy (cf. Schelling 1796/97, 383).46

2.3 Becoming or Dynamic Stepladder of Nature Schelling intends to explain the unity of nature and spirit epistemologically out of man’s own nature: “For in me is that necessary union of the ideal and the real [...], originally, without my doing, there, and precisely therein consists my nature”47 (Schelling 1797, 37). In the same way there is the necessity, that due to the inner laws of her individual nature man is forced to think non-human organisms as purposeful. In the course of the great synthesis of nature and spirit, philosophy becomes genetic and no longer contemplates the system of ideas “in its being, but in its becoming”48 (Schelling 1797, 39). Schelling understands nature as an infinite activity, as a unity of natura naturans and natura naturata, production and product (cf. Pinsdorf 2016, 51). Similarly, Humboldt does not understand nature as static, but sees in the overall fabric of nature description and natural history an eternal becoming, a never-ending movement in both cosmic and telluric nature (cf. 1845, 63, 155).49 In this respect Humboldt (1845, 18) criticizes pure empiricism for its inclination, “to think that the chain of natural events is broken, to misjudge in the present the analogy with the past”50 and in comparison welcomes the efforts of “philosophical natural history [...], to line up the present with the past in the alternation of phenomena”51 (1849, 266). For both authors, the concept of the organism is essential to their understanding of holism, which Schelling characterizes through the idea of absolute productivity and Humboldt through the vision of an all-animation: “In the forests of the Amazon River, as on the back of the high Andes, I recognized how, animated by One breath, from pole to pole only one life is poured out, in stones, plants, animals, and in man’s swelling breast”52 (Bruhns 1872, 417).

 Cf. also Schelling 1797, Vol. II, 47f.  “Denn in mir ist jene nothwendige Vereinigung des Idealen und Realen [...], ursprünglich, ohne mein Zuthun, da, und eben darin besteht meine Natur.” Cf. also Pinsdorf 2016, 45f. 48  „in seinem Seyn, sondern in seinem Werden“. 49  Cf. also Reill 2005, 249. 50  „die Kette der Naturbegebenheiten zerrissen zu wähnen, in der Gegenwart die Analogie mit der Vergangenheit zu verkennen“. 51  “philosophische[n] Naturkunde […], in dem Wechsel der Erscheinungen die Gegenwart an die Vergangenheit anzureihen”. Cf. also ibid., 289. 52  “In den Wäldern des Amazonenflusses wie auf dem Rücken der hohen Anden erkannte ich, wie von Einem Hauch beseelt von Pol zu Pol nur ein Leben ausgegossen ist, in Steinen, Pflanzen, Tieren und in des Menschen schwellender Brust”, Letter A. v. Humboldt to Caroline von Wolzogen 46 47

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For Schelling, the development of nature is ipso facto also developing spirit and he considers the entire course of nature’s development, which can only begin to catch up with itself in man’s thinking. For spirit – in pervading nature – is already present in the basic structures of inorganic matter, in the organic structures of plant life and in more differentiated forms of non-human animal life, before it finally becomes aware of itself in man.53 Against the background of this insight Humboldt (1845, 6) claims, “mindful of man’s sublime destiny to grasp the spirit of nature, which lies veiled under the cover of appearances”54 and Schelling (1797, 56) creates the wonderful formula: “Nature is to be the visible spirit, spirit the invisible nature.”55

2.4 Secret Bond or Natural History of the Spirit The difficulty of the infinite variety of phenomena and their interrelationships is compounded by the problem to grasp their unity with scientific instruments. Where Schelling reaches a limit via philosophically established concepts, he uses a metaphor to refer to the unified structural principle, which he assumes underlies nature as a total organism or cosmos. With the metaphor of the secret bond, he seeks to depict the intrinsic identity of nature and spirit. The connection between nature and spirit is precisely not contingent: For we do not want nature to coincidentally […] match with the laws of our spirit, but that it itself necessarily and originally – not only expresses the laws of our spirit, but also itself realizes them, and that it is nature and is called nature only in so far as it does so.56 (Schelling 1797, 55f.)

Moreover, Schelling understands the general principle of life described by Humboldt, the consubstantiality or evolutionary isomorphy, epistemologically as the reason for the congruence of thing and idea, which he ultimately designates as absolute identity of nature and spirit: “Here, then, in the absolute identity of the spirit in us and of nature outside of us,” the problem, “how a nature outside of us is possible”57 (Ibid., 56) dissolves. In this way it becomes accountable why nature is on May 14th 1806, cited from Bruhns 1872, 417. Cf. Mislin 1976, 34. Cf. for the thesis of organic wholeness resp. a live world organism also Meyer-Abich 1948, 43 f.; Köchy 1997, 116, 188. 53  Cf. Schelling 1799a, Vol. III, 196 and Schelling 1799b, Vol. III, 307. Cf. also Pinsdorf 2016, 49 f. 54  „der erhabenen Bestimmung des Menschen eingedenk, den Geist der Natur zu ergreifen, welcher unter der Decke der Erscheinungen verhüllt liegt“. 55  „Die Natur soll der sichtbare Geist, der Geist die unsichtbare Natur seyn.“ 56  „Denn wir wollen, nicht daß die Natur mit den Gesetzen unsers Geistes zufällig […] zusammentreffe, sondern daß sie selbst nothwendig und ursprünglich die Gesetze unsers Geistes — nicht nur ausdrücke, sondern selbst realisire, und daß sie nur in so fern Natur seye und Natur heiße, als sie dies thut.“ 57  „Hier also, in der absoluten Identität des Geistes in uns und der Natur außer uns“; „wie eine Natur außer uns möglich sey“.

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not only coincidentally consistent with the epistemological principles of man and any natural science, but rather because it is based on the same principle as man and all other organisms alike (cf. Pinsdorf 2016, 49). Nature and spirit are connected by a secret bond, a kind of structurally isomorphic unity resp. a form of identity of essence of the real and the ideal. In the Einleitenden Betrachtungen über die Verschiedenartigkeit des Naturgenusses in the first volume of Kosmos Humboldt adopts the bond metaphor: Thus, dark feelings and the interlinkage of sensual perceptions, as later the activity of the combining reason, lead to the realization, which permeates all stages of education of mankind, that a common, lawful and therefore eternal bond encompasses the whole of living nature.58 (1845, 9)

Humboldt primarily investigates the bond of interrelations between inorganic matter, plants and animals (cf. Humboldt 1991 [1814], 15). Nevertheless, he also expands his perspective on the inanimate and animated non-human nature and describes its deep connection with the human life form as an “intimacy of the bond linking both spheres, the physical and the sphere of intelligence and feelings”59 (Humboldt 1845, 385). For Schelling “that secret bond that links our spirit with nature”60 (1797, 55) is characterized by the conjuncture that it puts both of them in a historic developmental context, thus avouching an “in reality [...] indissolubly interlinked whole”61 (1798, 370f.). With the secret bond or Copula, which guarantees “the allness, the unity and the identity”62 (1798, 371) of things, Schelling, however, does not express that everything is the same, monotonous, or can only be located in the spiritual sphere (cf. 1809, 342), but rather stresses  – as Humboldt always does – that everything is “not isolated in real nature” (Schelling 1798, 372).63 Humboldt finds the intellectually more adept notion of the unity of nature and spirit in a less elaborate form also in the indigenous world: A vague, shuddering feeling of the unity of the forces of nature, of the mysterious bond that links the sensual and the supersensual, is [...] common even to wild peoples. The world that reveals itself to man through the senses melts, almost unconsciously for him, together with the world that he, following inner appeals, builds up in his bosom as a great wonderland. (Humboldt 1845, 16)64

 „So leiten dunkle Gefühle und die Verkettung sinnlicher Anschauungen, wie später die Thätigkeit der combinirenden Vernunft, zu der Erkenntniß, welche alle Bildungsstufen der Menschheit durchdringt, daß ein gemeinsames, gesetzliches und darum ewiges Band die ganze lebendige Natur umschlinge.“ 59  „Innigkeit des Bandes, welches beide Sphären, die physische und die Sphäre der Intelligenz und der Gefühle, mit einander verknüpft“. 60  „jenes geheime Band, das unsern Geist mit der Natur verknüpft“. 61  “in der Wirklichkeit […] unauflöslich verkettetes Ganzes”. Cf. also 1798, Vol. II, 375. 62  “die Allheit, die Einheit und die Identität“. 63  “in der wirklichen Natur nicht vereinzelt”. Cf. eg. Humboldt 1807, 39f. 64  “Ein dumpfes, schauervolles Gefühl von der Einheit der Naturgewalten, von dem geheimnißvollen Bande, welches das Sinnliche und Uebersinnliche verknüpft, ist […] selbst wilden Völkern eigen. Die Welt, die sich dem Menschen durch die Sinne offenbart, schmilzt, ihm selbst fast unbe58

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With the metaphor of the secret resp. a mysterious or eternal bond, Schelling and Humboldt refer to something that eludes the ability to be transported by language or even captured by measuring instruments. Here both scientists reach a limit which they acknowledge, and which prompts – each in a different way – to turn towards an aesthetic-artistic approach to nature.

2.5 Nature Painting or Aesthetic Epistemology While Humboldt is mainly engaged in nature research and Schelling is predominantly engaged with thinking knowledge of nature, both attribute to art, as an aesthetic approach to nature, a significance that must be emphasized and is decisive for the reunification of nature and spirit. In the System des transcendentalen Idealismus (1800) Schelling comes to the conclusion that “[t]he nature, as a whole as well as in its individual products, will have to appear as a work produced with consciousness, and yet at the same time as the product of the most blind mechanism”, “as the product of an activity that is at the same time conscious and unconscious” (1800a, 349).65 While transcendental philosophy, in accordance with its field of activity, is only able to emphasize the conditions of the possibility of knowledge of nature, Schelling ascribes further potential to the fine arts, which he calls a producing (werkthätige) or creating (schaffende) science. For it is in the artistic activity of man that the active bond (thätiges Band) (cf. Schelling 1807, 292) between man and nature, which remains largely inaccessible to the path of knowledge of the natural sciences and also of philosophy, becomes expressible for the first time (cf. Beiser 2006, 231). Within the framework of human artistic activity, a comparable union of unconscious and conscious production could succeed, which would be able to express the live system of mediations and thus make nature apperceptive as reality from within itself. Art makes visible what can hardly be grasped by thinking, thus revealing nature as unconscious poetry (bewusstlose Poesie) and art as self-conscious activity of nature (selbstbewusste Naturthätigkeit).66 Again, with direct reference to Schelling, Humboldt positions himself to the aforementioned description: wußt, zusammen mit der Welt, welche er, inneren Anklängen folgend, als ein großes Wunderland, in seinem Busen aufbaut.” Cf. on the mysterious connection between the physical and the spiritual also Humboldt 1845, Vol. I, 383; Humboldt 1849, Vol. II, 20. For an interpretation according to which Humboldt understands access to the “secret community of mind and nature” as a privilege of civilized peoples, see Dettelbach 1999, 493. 65  „[d]ie Natur, als Ganzes sowohl, als in ihren einzelnen Produkten, wird als ein mit Bewußtseyn hervorgebrachtes Werk, und doch zugleich als Produkt des blindesten Mechanismus erscheinen müssen“, „als Produkt einer zugleich bewußten und bewußtlosen Thätigkeit“. Cf. also SchmiedKowarzik 1985, 379. 66  Cf. Schelling 1800a, Vol. III, 349 and Schelling 1807, Vol. VII, 293, 300, 316. Cf. also Angehrn 1996, 90 f.; Schmied-Kowarzik 1985, 380; Dürbeck et al. 2017, xvi.

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Nature is not a dead aggregate: it is ‘for the enthusiastic researcher (as Schelling expresses himself in the excellent speech on the fine arts) the sacred, eternally creating elemental force of the world, which spawns all things from itself and actively produces them’.67 (Humboldt 1845, 39)

Humboldt, for his part, regards art as a tried and tested means of cognitive criticism as well as a gateway to dimensions that are no longer representable in language: “With all the richness and flexibility of our native language, it is nevertheless a difficult undertaking to describe with words what actually only befits the imitative art of the painter to depict”68 (1849, 26). In a letter to Goethe in 1810, he describes his desire to achieve “a fortunate blend of the individual, the sensed and the abstract”69 and demands: Nature must be sensed; he who only sees and abstracts can dissect plants and animals for a human age, in the hustle and bustle of life in the glowing tropics; he will believe to describe nature, but will himself be eternally alien to it.70 (Geiger 1909, 305)

Against this backdrop Humboldt considers it important to reinvigorate the “ancient alliance of the knowledge of nature with poetry and the feeling of art”71 (1849, 239), which is why he gives great praise to Goethe’s undertaking, “to renew the alliance which in the youth of mankind encompassed philosophy, physics and poetry with a Single bond”72 (1847, 75). On Humboldt’s promotion of an aesthetic natural history and sensual method of cognition could be reported at length. He integrates art and science as complementary approaches to nature, deals with the concept of the sublime in Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, writes various internationally effective contributions to landscape painting, creates the genre of the tableau physique, and much more. At this point though, only the relationship between Humboldt’s and Schelling’s nature painting (tableau physique/ Naturgemälde) is outlined.

 “Nicht ein todtes Aggregat ist die Natur: sie ist ‚dem begeisterten Forscher (wie Schelling in der trefflichen Rede über die bildenden Künste sich ausdrückt) die heilige, ewig schaffende Urkraft der Welt, die alle Dinge aus sich selbst erzeugt und werkthätig hervorbringt’.” 68  “Bei allem Reichthum und aller Biegsamkeit unserer vaterländischen Sprache, ist es doch ein schwieriges Unternehmen, mit Worten zu bezeichnen, was eigentlich nur der nachahmenden Kunst des Malers darzustellen geziemt.” 69  “eine glückliche Mischung des Einzelnbeachtenden, des Empfundenen und des Abstrakten”. 70  “Die Natur muss gefühlt werden; wer nur sieht und abstrahiert, kann ein Menschenalter, im Lebensgedränge der glühenden Tropenwelt, Pflanzen und Tiere zergliedern, er wird die Natur zu beschreiben glauben, ihr selbst aber ewig fremd sein”, Letter A. v. Humboldt to J. W. v. Goethe on January 3rd 1810, cited from Geiger 1909, 305. But again, Humboldt warns against a development in the wrong direction, because: “In the ability to feel the nature lies salvation and disaster paired. If the feelings roam wildly, nature dreams arise, the plague of these last times!”; “In der Fähigkeit die Natur zu fühlen liegen Heil und Unheil gepaart. Schweifen die Gefühle wild umher, so entstehen Naturträume, die Pest dieser letzten Zeiten!” 71  „alten Bund des Naturwissens mit der Poesie und dem Kunstgefühl”. 72  „das Bündniß zu erneuern, welches im Jugendalter der Menschheit Philosophie, Physik und Dichtung mit Einem Bande umschlang”. 67

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The conception of Humboldt’s tableau physique, like the unity of the landscape transported by it, is strongly associated with depictions of holistic structures of German Romanticism (cf. Nicolson 1987, 178). With the tableau physique Humboldt does not intend to create an image of the present being of physical reality, but rather attempts an abstract representation of the genealogical becoming of nature, otherwise only indirectly perceptible to the senses (cf. Dettelbach 1999, 481). In the nature painting of Kosmos Humboldt again refers to the necessary complementation of his natural science by natural philosophy  – “I only designate the empirical way [...], expectant that someone will for us, as once, according to Plato’s saying, Socrates demanded it, ‘interpret nature according to reason’”73 (1845, 171). Already decades earlier he had hoped that this expectation would be fulfilled by Schelling, from whom he expected a nature-philosophical nature painting of an entirely different, somewhat elevated cast: True to the field of empirical natural research, to which my life has been dedicated so far, I have also in this work listed the manifold phenomena more next to each other than, penetrating into the nature of things, described them in their inner interaction. This confession [...] shall at the same time also indicate that it will be possible to present a nature painting of a completely different and, as it were, higher kind in terms of natural philosophy. Such a possibility, about which I have been almost dubious myself before my return to Europe; such a reduction of all natural phenomena, of all activity and formations, to the never-­ ending dispute of opposing basic forces of matter, has been founded by the bold enterprise of one of the most profound men of our century. Not entirely unfamiliar with the spirit of Schelling’s system, I am far from the opinion that the genuine study of natural philosophy could harm empirical investigations, and that empirics and natural philosophers should always repel each other as contending poles.74 (Humboldt 1807, IVf.)

That Schelling did not further elaborate his painting of nature in accordance with his early philosophy of nature and Humboldt’s concomitant expectations, but instead devoted himself to an increasingly nebulous philosophy, remains a regrettable historical fact. Fortunately, Humboldt remained true to his research interests and his transdisciplinary methodology, and compiled in the course of his nature research extensive observations of anthropogenic influences on non-human nature as well as interactions between nature and culture that are still relevant to us today.  „Ich bezeichne nur den empirischen Weg […], erwartungsvoll, daß man uns, wie einst, nach Plato’s Ausspruch, Sokrates es forderte, ‚die Natur nach der Vernunft auslege‘.“ 74  „Dem Felde der empirischen Naturforschung getreu, dem mein bisheriges Leben gewidmet gewesen ist, habe ich auch in diesem Werk die mannichfaltigen Erscheinungen mehr nebeneinander aufgezählt, als, eindringend in die Natur der Dinge, sie in ihrem innern Zusammenwirken geschildert. Dieses Geständniß […] soll zugleich auch darauf hinweisen, daß es möglich seyn wird, einst ein Naturgemälde ganz anderer und gleichsam höherer Art naturphilosophisch darzustellen. Eine solche Möglichkeit nähmlich, an der ich vor meiner Rückkunft nach Europa fast selbst gezweifelt; eine solche Reduction aller Naturerscheinungen, aller Thätigkeit und Gebilde, auf den nie beendigten Streit entgegengesetzter Grundkräfte der Materie, ist durch das kühne Unternehmen eines der tiefsinnigsten Männer unseres Jahrhunderts begründet worden. Nicht völlig unbekannt mit dem Geiste des Schellingschen Systems, bin ich weit von der Meynung entfernt, als könne das ächte naturphilosophische Studium den empirischen Untersuchungen schaden, und als sollten ewig Empiriker und Naturphilosophen als streitende Pole sich einander abstoßen.“ 73

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2.6 World Painting or Nature-Ethics A normatively essential aspect, which is emphasized within contemporary natureand environmental- ethics, concerns the purpose-rational calculus of utility introduced at the beginning, which in the western world emerged from a scientifically and philosophically manifested separation between man and nature and which characterizes man’s attitude towards nature since modernity. It is in this attitude that man still carries out his dominant and exploitative behavior towards nature. For a new adjustment of the position of man in the holistic overall structure, Humboldt points beyond his nature painting and makes use of the image of a world painting: Nature, in the multiple interpretation of the word [...] reveals itself to the simple sense and feeling of man preferably as something earthly, closer related to him. Only in the life circles of the organic formation we recognize quite actually our home. [...] the glittering carpet of stars, the vast celestial spaces belong to a world-painting, in which the size of the masses, the number of crowded suns or dawning light mists excite our admiration and our astonishment, but from which we feel as if alienated, with apparent desolation, with complete lack of the immediate impression of an organic life.75 (1845, 84)

From the much larger perspective of the world painting, which makes man appear to be negligible, a critique of man’s claim to power over his earthly homeland, with whom he is in an existential relationship of dependency, becomes comprehensible. With current vocabulary, Humboldt’s following statement could be interpreted as a critique of a normative anthropocentrism and as an advocacy of a nature-ethically holistic position: Here [in Kosmos (C.P.)] the subjective point of view, the human interest is no longer taken as a starting point. The earthly may appear only as a part of the whole, as subordinated to it. The view of nature should be general, it should be large and free, not restricted by motives of affinity, of the more comfortable part, of relative usefulness. A physical description of the world, a world-painting, therefore does not begin with the telluric, it begins with that which fills the celestial spaces.76 (1845, 85)

On closer inspection, a normative dimension also becomes apparent in Schelling’s analysis of the relationship between man and nature. Man, who towers himself  „Natur, in der vielfachen Deutung des Wortes […] offenbart sich dem einfachen Sinn und Gefühle des Menschen vorzugsweise als etwas Irdisches, ihm näher Verwandtes. Erst in den Lebenskreisen der organischen Bildung erkennen wir recht eigentlich unsere Heimath. […] der glanzvolle Sternenteppich, die weiten Himmelsräume gehören einem Weltgemälde an, in dem die Größe der Massen, die Zahl zusammengedrängter Sonnen oder aufdämmernder Lichtnebel unsere Bewunderung und unser Staunen erregen, dem wir uns aber, bei scheinbarer Verödung, bei völligem Mangel an dem unmittelbaren Eindruck eines organischen Lebens, wie entfremdet fühlen.“ 76  „Hier [im Kosmos (C.P.)] wird nicht mehr von dem subjectiven Standpunkte, von dem menschlichen Interesse ausgegangen. Das Irdische darf nur als ein Theil des Ganzen, als diesem untergeordnet erscheinen. Die Naturansicht soll allgemein, sie soll groß und frei, nicht durch Motive der Nähe, des gemüthlicheren Antheils, der relativen Nützlichkeit beengt sein. Eine physische Weltbeschreibung, ein Weltgemälde beginnt daher nicht mit dem Tellurischen, sie beginnt mit dem, was die Himmelsräume erfüllt.“ 75

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above nature, seems to succeed in marginalizing it to be the mere object of his cognition as well as to be mere material for the attainment of her purposes. But in the end, this attitude only endangers man’s own existence:77 Thus, the beginning of sin is that man passes from actual being over into non-being [...] in order to become a self-creating cause and to rule over all things with the power of the Centri, which he has in himself. […] From this arises the hunger of selfishness, which, to the extent that it renounces the whole and the unity, becomes ever more meager, poorer, but for that very reason more greedy, more voracious, more poisonous. It is in evil the self-­ consuming and ever-destroying contradiction that it strives to become creaturely, precisely by destroying the bond of creatureliness, and falls into non-being out of arrogance to be everything.78 (Schelling 1809, 390f.)

With regard to current ecological problem formulations of nature-ethics, Schelling’s description can indeed be understood as a warning not to selfishly cut oneself off from the unconscious productivity of nature in one’s conscious activity as a human being, if one wishes to prevent one’s own destruction. What is more, the nature-philosophical position of Schelling holds the potential to point beyond an anthropocentrically founded nature protection. Schelling concedes, for example, that man does not shy away from destroying nature, because “as far as ever nature serves human purposes, it is killed”79 (1806, 18). Based on this, the claim can be made on man to consciously face his being defined by nature and freedom and to realize the latter in accordance with nature surrounding her as well as in responsibility for it. According to Schelling (1806, 62), however, this would require a special attitude, as a real recognition of the living can “not be noticed in that foolish or even arrogant sliding over things; to this belongs the trait of inner love and kinship of one’s own spirit with the living things of nature.”80 According to Schelling’s view described above, man contraposes herself to nature for the first time through philosophical speculation. This state of rupture is an unsatisfactory one, but nevertheless a necessary step towards reaching the higher state of a conscious reunion. A ‘healthy’ philosophy uses the separation resulting from speculation only as a means for reaching a higher, conscious unity through freedom.81 Just as the dissolution of the equilibrium became possible only by freedom, so is also its overcoming and the restoration of the equilibrium to be achieved  Cf. Pinsdorf 2016, 57 ff. and Schmied-Kowarzik 1985, 386.  „So ist denn der Anfang der Sünde, daß der Mensch aus dem eigentlichen Sein in das Nichtsein [...] übertritt, um selbstschaffender Grund zu werden, und mit der Macht des Centri, das er in sich hat, über alle Dinge zu herrschen. […] Hieraus entsteht der Hunger der Selbstsucht, die in dem Maß, als sie vom Ganzen und von der Einheit sich lossagt, immer dürftiger, ärmer, aber eben darum begieriger, hungriger, giftiger wird. Es ist im Bösen der sich selbst aufzehrende und immer vernichtende Widerspruch, daß es kreatürlich zu werden strebt, eben indem es das Band der Kreatürlichkeit vernichtet, und aus Übermut, Alles zu sein, ins Nichtsein fällt.“ 79  „soweit nur immer die Natur menschlichen Zwecken dient, wird sie getödtet“. 80  „nicht bemerkt werden in jenem tölpischen oder auch hochmüthigen Wegfahren über Dinge; es gehört dazu der Zug innerer Liebe und Verwandtschaft des eignen Geistes mit dem Lebendigen der Natur“. 81  Cf. Schelling 1797, Vol. II, 13; Pinsdorf 2016. 77 78

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by freedom only. If, therefore, man would succeed – in a certain sense, in spite of his freedom, which could lead him astray, but also just as well only because of her freedom, which renders a higher (re)union with nature potentially possible in the first place – in conceiving his thinking and acting not as separated from nature and environment, a united human-nature-relationship, in the framework of which man finds an appropriate way of dealing with nature and an adequate place in nature, would at least not be excluded. Through the awareness of his own freedom, man is at any rate provided with the necessary conditions for this. Humboldt’s ethical concerns towards nature are primarily anthropocentric in motivation. He complains about violent interventions in nature first and foremost because of their negative effects on man. At times, however, he also criticizes fundamental cultural transformations of nature as such: “Culture blurs something of the original character of nature: it disturbs the free development of the parts in the constrained organization”82 (Humboldt 1849, 98). In the further development of Humboldtian thoughts, a human way of existence is nevertheless to be conceived on the basis of anthropocentric considerations, which is, if not for the good, then at least not for the existential damage of the flourishing of the living community as a whole. According to Humboldt, it finally even leads to a process that harmonizes in some unintentional way the good (in the sense of the true, sublime and beautiful) with the useful.83 Ipso facto is quite inclined to think of an alliance between man and nature, as is currently being striven for, supposedly, within the concept of bioeconomy as an ecologically sustainable circular economy, in order to ensure the future survival of man and his environment (cf. Pinsdorf 2021). Certainly, immense technological and, above all, behavioral efforts are necessary to prevent Humboldt’s dystopian vision from becoming the reality of our natural as well as cultural history: “Moon and Venus mountains! When will we undertake this journey, spread our culture, [i.e.] the mixture of our vices and prejudices over other planets and make them desolate […]”84 (Humboldt 1982, 313).

3 Conclusion Even though Humboldt’s physical description of the world is primarily natural history and Schelling’s philosophy of nature is primarily epistemology, both approaches develop ideas that are able to counter the objectifying and exploitative

 “Die Cultur verwischt etwas von dem ursprünglichen Naturcharakter: sie stört in der gefesselten Organisation die freie Entwickelung der Theile.” Cf. also Humboldt 1829, 192. 83  Cf. Humboldt 1845, Vol. I, 37. Cf. also Meyer-Abich 1968, 22. 84  “Mond und Venusberge! Wann werden wir diese Reise unternehmen, unsere Kultur, d[as] h[eißt] das Gemisch unserer Laster und Vorurtheile über andere Planeten verbreiten und sie veröden […]”. I thank Andrea Wulf very much for tracking down this quote and for kindly sharing its source with me. 82

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human-­nature-­relationship as well as the alienation of man from nature all-pervasive in the Anthropocene. Both researchers not only challenge mechanistic constrictions of positivistic natural science and idealistic imbalances of natural philosophy, but also provide an alternative. Romantic empiricism presented here offers a philosophically and historically well-founded source for the research program of the Environmental Humanities with a far from exhausted potential concerning the engagement in major challenges mankind is now confronted with. From where we stand, Humboldt and the early Schelling can be described as representatives of a Romantic empiricism that represents an appreciative as well as critical collaboration of the natural sciences with the humanities, and provides alternative ideas for a revision of the inadequate relationship between man and nature. In particular, their insights can be made fruitful for no less than the elaboration of a scientifically sound, empirically phenomena-saturated, nature-ethically justifiable, and aesthetically rich human-­ nature-­ relationship. In this respect, Humboldt and the early Schelling can be regarded as an extraordinary dyad of their time with great potential for our time in terms of dealing with urgent ecological questions and problems of the Anthropocene.

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Beyond Naturalism, Spiritualism and Finite Idealism: Hegel on the Relationship Between Metaphysical Truth, Nature and Mind Sebastian Stein

That which always was, and is, and will be everliving fire, the same for all the cosmos, made neither by god nor man, replenishes in measure as it burns away. (Heraclitus)

In recent years, several kinds of naturalism in their natural-scientific and metaphysical forms have been equated with anti-religious, anti-mystical and anti-transcendent projects that are committed to the metaphysical explicability of all reality and thought. In this context, some interpreters have suggested that Hegel’s philosophical project is naturalist in at least this one (most) relevant sense (cf. Pinkard 2012; Knappik 2016; Kreines 2015; McDowell 1994): in principle, all of reality is determined and thus natural in some sense. It can therefore be known and there exist no unknowable, supernatural entities or realms. However, the tradition of (post-)Kantian idealism that Hegel is part of not only champions ‘supernatural’ notions of radically undetermined and thus autonomous consciousness and spontaneity. It also argues that there are entities and realms that escape empirical and even philosophical reason. For example, Kant argues that the content of the undeterminable, noumenal realm (Kant 1998, 360) that guarantees the indeterminacy-based spontaneity and the freedom of consciousness is beyond empirical experience and conceptual knowledge. Meanwhile, Hegel’s more immediate idealist predecessor Fichte follows Kant in championing a notion of a radically undetermined, supernatural, self-positing consciousness. And while Fichte rejects the notion of a noumenal realm, he grounds the free activity of consciousness in an unknowable “Anstoß” (Fichte 1986, 128) while arguing that an unknowable “god” (Fichte 1971, 696) functions as ultimate origin of free consciousness and of its determined world. In both cases, supernatural, undetermined and unknowable S. Stein (*) University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Corti, J.-G. Schülein (eds.), Life, Organisms, and Human Nature, Studies in German Idealism 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_18

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entities and realms guarantee the same supernatural freedom of consciousness that also Hegel endorses. It might thus seem that one has to choose: either naturalism is right and all of reality is explicable as it is determined in some sense. In that case, consciousness forms part of this reality and is not defined by supernatural, radically undetermined spontaneity and freedom. Or, one defends a notion of a radically undetermined, self-­ referential and thus supernatural consciousness but anchors it within an unknowable source. And yet, it appears that Hegel rejects this dichotomy. He instead subscribes to an idealist notion of a radically undetermined, independent and self-positing consciousness whilst arguing for the philosophical explicability of all reality in its logical, natural and mind-related1 (geistige) forms. (cf. Gabriel 2016; Taylor 1975; Halfwassen 2005, 106) To Hegel, consciousness is thus undetermined, spontaneous and self-determining in the idealist sense. And yet, its structure as well as its origins are transparent to philosophical reason. In the following, it will be argued that equating the label naturalism with universal explicability and then applying it to Hegel is problematic for several reasons. For one, it contradicts his own terminology: he first argues that the supernatural domain of Geist is established through a transformation into and absorption of (‘sublation’) nature. He then strictly differentiates between the irreducible realm of objective nature and the irreducible realm of subjective (Hegel 2010a, 40) Geist. Calling him a ‘naturalist’ is thus at best confusing due to his post-Kantian commitment to the idealist and thus supernatural subjectivity that he argues the domain of Geist manifests. Furthermore, the label ‘naturalism’ runs the danger of failing to capture the distinctness of Hegel’s idealism as he departs from Kant’s and Fichte’s ‘finite idealist’ focus on consciousness and instead grounds the intelligibility of the three onto-­ logical domains he associates with (metaphysical) truth, nature and Geist in what he calls the metaphysical-logical ‘idea’. He is thus not an idealist because he grounds his system in the structure of a finite, undetermined and subjective consciousness that confronts an objective world. Instead, he is an ‘absolute idealist’ because he grounds metaphysical truth, nature and consciousness-grounding Geist in his notion of the ‘infinite’, that is eternal and thus self-referential, metaphysical idea as an ontological principle. He thus not only grounds consciousness in one of the idea’s three domains called Geist but also explains Geist as a form of the onto-logical, metaphysical idea.2 This idea is based on his unique concept-metaphysics that include a commitment to a notion of supernatural, undetermined universality that Kant and Fichte associate with finite, supernatural consciousness and that the domain of nature fails to accommodate. Hegel’s metaphysical notions of undetermined universality and of indeterminacy-explicating Geist thus ground his absolute idealist rejection of naturalist substance-metaphysics as well as his reservations

 Or mind-related reality, what he calls Geist.  For an alternative take on the idea cf. Gabriel 2016.

1 2

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about naturalist monist and naturalist essentialist metaphysics whilst placing him beyond the consciousness-based confines of the finite idealisms of Kant and Fichte. The chapter is structured as follows: Via the puzzle of Hegel’s account of philosophical knowledge of nature, part 1 introduces Hegel as a defender of universal explicability: he maintains that metaphysical, natural and mind-related (geistige) reality are transparent to philosophical thought because all of reality is structured by the intelligible, concept-based idea. However, as part 2’s analysis of Hegel’s three syllogisms of philosophy shows, he first defines Geist as accommodating and superseding (‘sublating’) nature to then establish that from the overarching perspective of the entire system, the domains of nature and of nature-sublating Geist are irreducibly distinct and mutually determine and mediate. This prepares part 3’s argument that Hegel’s concept-metaphysics— along with their notion of undetermined, self-­referential universality —motivate him to reject all pre-Kantian naturalisms that champion universal explicability as well as to reject Kant’s and Fichte’s consciousness-­based idealisms. Hegel thus relies on what he calls the concept’s radically undetermined universality to (1) differentiate the domain of Geist as universality-explicating and thus as ‘subjective’ while the domain of nature is ‘objective’ because it only implies universality, (2) defend the individual mind‘s supernatural, undetermined autonomy. Ultimately, it is thus Hegel’s commitment to concept-metaphysics that grounds his account of the absolute idea as origin of nature and Geist and that justifies the rejection of the labels ‘naturalism’ and ‘spiritualism’ in favour of ‘idealism’ as least misleading description of his philosophical project.

1 Hegel and Universal Explicability Like most naturalists, Hegel is fundamentally committed to a version of the notion of the unity of being and thought that grounds universal explicability and seems similar to the ones some pre-Kantian philosophers champion: to Hegel, there is no being beyond thought and all thought is (Hegel 1991, 24ff, 28ff).3 All being is thus inherently structured in a thinkable, rational way while all thought has some kind of ontological status. Crucially, this entails explicability in principle so that philosophical comprehension does not directly extend to all particular, empirical reality. For example, while philosophy might be able to categorise plants and animals, it does not need to explain the particularities of all plants and animals, leaving this matter to the natural sciences. From a philosophical point of view, there might thus be

 Against this view cf. Gabriel 2016, 197: “Hegel’s absolute idealism is not intended as a direct contribution to the discipline of first-order metaphysics” 3

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nothing more to know about any given animal or plant than that it is a form of organic life.4 Hegel then argues that essential, principled reality and philosophy’s truth-­ tracking thought are defined by what he calls the metaphysical-logical ‘absolute idea’ (Hegel 1991, 307). It defines the realms of logic, nature and Geist as most basic aspects of reality and thought: since all three of these are defined by ‘the (absolute) idea’, they are intelligible. However, since nature and Geist are irreducibly differentiated forms of the idea, they can also be clearly distinguished: the Logic’s absolute idea remains immaterial, while the idea as nature defines externally manifest reality and is objective but lacks explicitly universal self-reference while the idea as Geist is subjective and thus explicates universality-based self-reference (Hegel 1991, 42). While nature’s and Geist’s common origin in the idea guarantees their intelligibility, the idea itself is based on ’the concept’ (Hegel 1991, 236). The concept accordingly also structures the domain of Geist, the particular subjects that instantiate Geist and thus also the philosophical thinker’s mind: both the world and subjects’ minds originate in the concept that has taken its most concrete form as Geist and thus as unconditioned principle of all mental life (Hegel 1986a, 229). The Geist-based identity-relationship between finite mind and its world explains their compatibility: the subject can experience, learn about and act in the objective world and relate to its own freedom through the world because both world and mind are Geist (Hegel 2007, 173). The same applies to the finite philosopher and the object of his enquiry: his mind is just as geistig and thus concept-structured as the conceptual, philosophical truth that it comprehends (Hegel 2007, 267). However, while the (empirically) cognising subject learns about Geist in form of a presupposed objective world, the finite, geistige philosopher comprehends the concept and its determinations as they categorically are. In doing philosophy, the concept-posited, finite thinker comprehends the unconditioned concept and its categorial shapes in their distinctly non-material form (Hegel 2007, 267). Philosophy is thus something undertaken by finite, geistige thinkers: they comprehend the concept at work within themselves and within reality by having an intellectual or “[geistige] intuition” (Hegel 2007, 267), that is a unified comprehension of the concept’s unconditioned, conceptual truth (Hegel 2007, 267; 2010b, 28).

1.1 A Geistige Philosophy of Nature? This raises the following question: “Why is the geistige thinker able to comprehend the ontological realm of ‘nature as such’ if Hegel describes nature as strictly distinct from the domain of Geist and as independent of finite thinkers’ minds?” On the one

 In this context, philosophy functions as its own criterion. It is thus up to philosophical thought to decide how far into the empirical world’s particularity its categorial claims and deductions should go. 4

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hand, Hegel’s philosophy of nature describes how the domain of ‘nature as such’ differs from the domain of ‘Geist as such’ and that nature has an objectivity that is independent from finite, geistige thinkers. At the same time, his definition of philosophy implies that the subject of philosophical thought is a geistige thinker. It thus remains inexplicable how the geistige philosopher and nature can be compatible: how can Geist in its form as finite but autonomous philosopher comprehend nature if the entire domain of nature is defined as the negation of the entire domain of Geist?

1.2 Nature and Philosophy as the Idea’s Self-Thinking Part of the answer to this question can be found by way of an analysis of Hegel’s description of philosophy. He thus argues that defining philosophy as the activity of finite geistige subjects is neither the only nor the ultimate way to go about it (Hegel 2010b, 45 §17). In his philosophy of philosophy in the final paragraphs of the Encyclopedia, he accordingly argues that the philosophical thinking undertaken by particular thinkers is the manifestation of unconditioned Geist’s self-­comprehension (Hegel 2007, 267). Given Hegel’s commitment to the universal explicability-­ grounding unity of thought and being, this is thus also the place where he describes how his system’s three domains, that is the metaphysical domain of the idea, the domain of nature5 and the domain of Geist, relate to each other and thus how all possible reality and thought is structured: philosophical thought comprehends true thought and thus describes how reality truly is. Insofar as nature is one dimension of true thought and reality, Hegel’s account of the architecture of true thought thus informs his readers about how nature relates to reality’s other dimensions, to the metaphysical idea and to Geist. By giving his ultimate definition of philosophy in this manner, Hegel argues that finite thinkers grasp that finite, geistige subjects who think philosophically are the unconditioned and universal Geist that knows itself (Hegel 2007, 259). This makes philosophy ‘absolute Geist’: it is universal and unconditioned Geist that is self-­ comprehending (Hegel 2007, 276) and the particular, autonomous acts of philosophical thinking undertaken by finite, mind-possessing subjects qualify as the ‘appearance’ (Hegel 2007, 276) of Geist’s absolute comprehension (cf. Hegel 2008, §8, 33). However, even on this definition, the same question seems to arise: Geist might be the knower and the known of philosophy but if Geist can only know itself, and pure logic and nature are not Geist, how is it possible that philosophy includes knowledge about them? This is especially puzzling as Hegel seems to reject Fichte’s Kant-inspired notion that it is impossible to think nature without always already implying thinking consciousness. To Hegel, nature’s objectivity can be thought as it is, as its own realm of being and thus without implying finite, mind-possessing

 Against this, cf. Gabriel 2016, 198: “Nature is what it is regardless of how we take it to be, which does not mean that nature might be entirely different from what we find out about it by employing the appropriate means.” 5

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thinkers (Hegel 1991, 42). What enables Hegel to argue this? One answer seems to be already given: logic and nature are accessible to Hegel’s geistige philosopher because they are sublated, that is replaced by but accommodated within Geist, so that they are Geist. In knowing logic and nature, the philosopher truly knows Geist, albeit seemingly un-geistige forms of it. The logic would then describe Geist’s most abstract determinations or ‘pure essence’ (Hegel 2010a, 7) while the philosophy of nature describes an aspect of Geist’s objectivity as if it were not itself.

2 Hegel’s Three Syllogisms of Philosophy 2.1 The First Syllogism Hegel argues that this notion of philosophy and its onto-logical truth informs the first of three attempts at answering the question of how philosophical knowledge of logic and nature is possible for geistige philosophers. Each of the three attempts takes the form of a syllogism so that each of these ‘syllogisms of philosophy’ uniquely explains how the system’s three parts relate and thus how the metaphysical idea differs from the domain of nature and how nature differs from the domain of Geist within the overarching unity that is guaranteed by their common origin in the metaphysical idea. The first syllogism then corresponds to the linear reading of Hegel’s encyclopaedic system and defines philosophy as the conceptual tracing of the transition of the logical idea into the idea as nature and from nature into the idea as Geist: The logical idea becomes the idea as nature, the idea as nature becomes the idea as Geist. These transitions are described as conceptually necessary by means of speculative deduction so that the first syllogism argues that the logical idea changes into, is thus replaced by but is also accommodated within (‘is sublated into’) nature. The same applies to the transition from nature into Geist. Overall, nature thus mediates the logico-metaphysical idea and Geist: Syllogism1: Philosophy shows that… 1. The logical idea becomes nature 2. Nature becomes Geist ------------------------------------------C. All is Geist

This linear reading is supported by Hegel’s presentation of the idea’s three moments in the Encyclopedia’s beginning: But the Idea shows itself as the thinking that is strictly identical with itself, and this at once shows itself to be the activity of positing itself over against itself, in order to be for-itself, and to be, in this other, only at home with itself. Hence, […] science falls into three parts: I. The Logic, the science of the Idea in and for itself.

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II. The Philosophy of Nature, as the science of the Idea in its otherness. III. The Philosophy of Spirit, as the Idea that returns into itself out of its otherness. (Hegel 1991, 42)

The first syllogism corresponds to what Hegel calls ‘understanding’ the system and which he differentiates from reflecting or comprehending it (Hegel 1991, 133). It is thus according to the understanding that the transitions between the system’s parts are instances of a ‘passing into’ (‘Übergehen’) from one category into another: the subsequent determination replaces the previous one. The logic’s absolute idea becomes nature and nature becomes Geist.

2.2 From Idea to Nature According to Hegel’s description of the linear transition from Logic into nature, the Logic’s absolute, metaphysical idea thus negates itself and freely turns itself in nature as its own opposite. It thereby reveals that its seemingly perfect self-­reference is not final: the absolute idea ‘freely judges’ and thereby externalises itself to be nature so that the truth is nature and the logic is sublated into it: The absolute freedom of the Idea, however, is that it does not merely pass over into life, nor that it lets life shine within itself as finite cognition, but that, in the absolute truth of itself, it resolves to release out of itself into freedom the moment of its particularity or of the initial determining and otherness, [i. e.,] the immediate Idea as its reflexion, or itself as Nature. (Hegel 1991, 307)

Nature is thus the truth of the logic: the logic’s merely abstract and internal truth is now concrete and defines the externally manifest, objective reality of space, time, mechanics, physics and organic life. According to the understanding, the logical idea has transitioned into something else. Nature was the point of the logic all along: the idea is required to provide nature with its internal, conceptual structure but since nature is more concrete and contains the dimension of external, objective presence, it is superior to the logic: by sublating itself, the absolute idea renders itself concrete. What does this mean for the relationship between nature and Geist? According to the first syllogism, same applies to the transition from the domain of nature to the domain of Geist: Geist as a determination of the idea is more concrete than the logic’s ‘absolute idea’ and than the idea as nature. Nature transitions into Geist so that Geist replaces nature: [Geist] is the truth of nature, and is thus absolutely first with respect to it. In this truth nature has vanished, and [Geist] has emerged as the Idea that has reached its being-for-­itself. (Hegel 1986b, 9)

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2.3 From Nature to Geist This linear, understanding-based reading of the Encyclopedia is supported by a philosophical deduction of the category of Geist out of the idea of nature—what amounts to Hegel’s philosophical refutation of naturalism—in the philosophy of nature’s §376. Concluding his categorial analysis of organic nature, Hegel there argues that conceptually, nature’s most concrete categorial determination ‘organic physics’ culminates in the category of ‘the death of the individual animal’ (Hegel 1986b, 535):6 natural death is categorially rooted in the inadequacy of the individual animal in the face of the universal species that it carries within itself as an animating principle. While the animal-immanent universal enables life, it also demands of the individual to be as universal as itself. However, the individual animal is particular: as instantiation of the universal species, the individual animal ought to be like the animating universal, but it is not. This contradiction entails a conflict that the individual can only lose: its particularity cannot resist the negative judgement of the all-engendering universal. The particular animal’s body thus slowly fails to an ever greater degree to satisfy the universal’s demand until the latter’s self-referential indeterminacy dissolves the animal body’s particularity. It is thus the same universal that animates the particular body that inevitably brings about its demise. The same principle that enables life also destroys it (Hegel 1986b, 535).7 However, while the particular animal’s inadequacy to its universal leads to its death, this category of death entails the conceptual liberation of the universal species from its immediate relation to particular individuality: by revealing itself to be the ultimate power over the individual’s organic, physical body and life, the formerly particularity-bound universal emancipates itself. It has been shown to ontologically enable and dominate the individual body. Now, the self-referential universal is not tied to the determined particular but the particular becomes a function of the universal. This gives rise to a category according to which the universal refers to itself via particularity. The body and the world thus becomes an aspect of the universal’s selfreference. As it ceases to be bound by the animal’s unconscious particularity and its world, body and world thus become integrated vessels for and aspects of the universal’s self-reference. The world, the body and its ‘death’ are now (part and expression of) the self-reference of the universal. The category that emerges out of the particular animal’s death thus describes a universality that uses its internalised, particular world and body and as an immediate means for its own self-reference. While the universal was unaware of itself in the animal body and in its natural surrounding, it now becomes self-referential within the geistige, human body (Hegel 2007, 29) and its world. Thus, the category of Geist is defined: the particular, geistige individual and its world are now carriers of universality’s all-encompassing, explicit 6 7

 See also Houlgate 2006: 171, 172.  Cf. Houlgate 2006, 172.

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self-reference. The universal is with itself and thus free in the geistige [spiritual, mind-possessing] individual and in the objectivity of its body and world (Hegel 2007, 9). While organic nature thus locates the universal as a non-reflective, passively reactive and unconscious soul within a particular animal’s body that stands in relationship to its world, Geist places the particular individual, including its body, drives, emotions etc. and the world that the particular individual’s inner dimension confronts within Geist’s universality: in the mind of the geistige individual, Geist’s universality explicitly refers to itself while taking into account bodily and external world-related influences onto itself. These are now part of Geist as Geist rather than representing a radically external, non-mental ‘nature’. Geist thus internalises everything seemingly objective and external by uniting it with the mind as its inwardsubjective dimension. This takes place within Geist’s own overarching, self-referential, universality-based ‘subjectivity’: the subjective mind and its body and its objective world are all aspects of Geist.8 From Geist’s perspective, all geistige objectivity, and thus also nature, as well as all geistige subjectivity is itself Geist. This makes Geist the unity of mind and world and a wholly independent, allaccommodating, subjective universal that is ‘for itself’ (Hegel 1986b, 535): Geist remains with itself when it sublates the difference between its subjective and objective dimensions. This includes also the seemingly natural objectivity so that the individual’s physical birth, existence, death and world are as Geist-internal as is the mind’s subjectivity. Conceptually, Geist thus accommodates death: death happens within Geist, not to Geist. While nature’s organic individual is only implicitly eternal and ‘immortal’ in virtue of its participation in life as such so that death is a seemingly overwhelming, superior force to it as individual, Geist is explicitly ‘eternal’ in the sense of self-referential: since death’s negativity is part of Geist like all negativity, Geist’s subjective self-reference has no externally overpowering ‘other’. There is no seemingly externally extinguishing force to confront Geist because all its particularity is known to be an instantiation of its universality. All negativity is an aspect of and thus instrumentalised by Geist:  birth and death are aspects of Geist’s self-­relation, the geistige individual’s ‘death’ truly is the life of Geist itself. Since Geist has replaced, absorbed and preserved, that is, has sublated nature— including individual death—its manifestation in individual form also contains a seemingly natural dimension that includes the mortality tied to non-universal particularity. The mismatch between individual and universal species that marked natural life thus remains present within Geist: the finite, geistige individual still has a mortal organic body, confronts an external world and stands in connection with the sublated natural world as part of its Geistigkeit. In the sense that the particular, geistige individual is not Geist as such, Geist’s particularity is ‘inadequate’ to Geist’s universality. This also renders it deficient in the face of the equally present

 Against this cf. Gabriel 2016, 198: „Facts to be studied from the theoretical stance, for Hegel, are unified by belonging to ‘nature’ whereas facts to be studied from the practical stance, in his division of labour, belong to ‘Geist’ or ‘spirit’.” 8

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universality of Geist and entails the individual’s mortality (Hegel 1986b, 538).9 However, from the conceptual and thus philosophical perspective onto Geist as such, it is known that Geist incorporates and thus overcomes death and that the particular individual is aspect and expression of eternal Geist as such. As finite, geistige beings, ‘we’ are particular and thus mortal instances of the immortal, universal, self-referential Geist, and nature’s sublated presence finds expression in our objective, physical dimension: we have a spatio-temporally situated, organic body, desires, drives etc. and interact with an external, seemingly natural but truly geistige reality that is mechanical, physical and organic. Whatever is determined about us and our world is the carrier of Geist’s universality as Geist refers to itself in us and in our world. As the mind-related body and its world are Geist that presents itself in the form of ‘non-Geist’, they are permeated by Geist: Geist as body is always already imbued by Geist as soul that stands in a relationship to the geistige, external world and it is carrier of Geist as cognising, acting and self-relating mind while the world is accessible to and interacts with the subjective Geist in all its forms because the world itself is an aspect of Geist. Tautologically, from the perspective of Geist, there is no nature or any reality that is not of and for Geist (Hegel 2007, 9). According to Hegel, there is thus no geistiges individual without a body-mind interaction that includes the external world, without self-consciousness and mind’s cognition, action and without relation to its own freedom through art, religion or philosophy. For the philosophical understanding and its linear transitions, this entails that from Geist’s perspective, Geist is the condition for nature’s existence because nature is sublated within Geist: since Geist is ontologically fundamental and thus defines all objectivity, including nature, nature is a function of Geist. However, Hegel argues that this might not be how it seems to ‘us’ as finite, geistige beings: “For us, [Geist] has nature as its presupposition” (Hegel 1986b, 9). From an individual’s historical or natural scientific point of view—for example that of Darwinism— nature thus appears to be the condition for Geist’s existence: first, there have to be a natural world including organic life and suitable mechanical, physical and biological circumstances so that there can be geistige beings. Nature seems to have brought Geist forth out of itself: millennia of adaptive natural change have resulted in the existence of geistige beings. However, this empirical, appearance-centred perspective is not philosophy’s insofar as philosophy is concerned with the concept-based, unconditioned truth of categorial determination rather than with empirical explanations that assume a difference between the explainer and the explained. Parallel to how the understanding described the transition from logic into nature, so the transition from nature into Geist entails that Geist replaces nature: Geist is the point of nature, nature is categorically instrumental to the emergence of Geist: nature only exists so that Geist may be. The purpose of nature is Geist and since Geist sublates nature, there is no ‘nature as such’ within the domain of Geist: what  (Suhrkamp, author’s own translation) [Original: “Das Denken, als dies für sich selbst seiende Allgemeine, ist das Unsterbliche; das Sterbliche ist, daß die Idee, das Allgemeine sich nicht angemessen ist.”] 9

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seems to be nature from the perspective of Geist is truly Geist in objective form: to Geist, all is Geist. This is also the result of the understanding-based transitions within the system: Geist is all and always has been since the Logic’s absolute idea has turned into nature and nature has turned into Geist. The minds of geistige beings are structured by the logic’s categories and enable their feeling, cognition, intuition, representation and thinking while what seems to be nature but truly is Geist’s objectivity is what geistige beings relate to, fight against, use, manipulate, consume etc. The understanding-based approach to the system’s three moments is thus able to explain the moments’ identity: logic, nature and Geist are immediately united and sublated within Geist: logic describes the essential, abstract structure of Geist and nature while nature is sublated in Geist’s objectivity. The moments’ relation is explained with reference to Geist as their underlying, unifying principle of identity. The first syllogism of philosophy thus concludes that Geist is the idea’s most concrete and thus true, and ultimately, only form: Geist contains the logical idea and nature as it has sublated them. The logical idea is an abstract aspect of Geist and nature is ‘unconscious’ Geist that is confronted by self-referential Geist. This syllogism also concludes that Geist is the only form of the idea in which the idea concretely refers to itself: it is the idea that has returned to itself from its natural otherness so that Geist is the idea in active, or ‘subjective’ (Hegel 2007, 276), self-­ referring form. As such, it contains philosophy as the idea’s self-comprehension in and through Geist’s finite thinkers (Hegel 2007, 276). The logical idea is Geist, and philosophy is Geist that comprehends that the logical idea and nature and itself is Geist. Geist is thus all there is and philosophy is Geist’s self-comprehension (Hegel 2007, 276). However, this creates the following problem: if the logical idea is Geist and nature is Geist and Geist is Geist, what, then, is Geist? In other words: if Geist is all there is, how can Geist be determined if determinacy requires contrast to something else on the same ontological plane? Since Geist has absorbed the logical idea and nature, there is nothing to contrast Geist with on Geist’s own ontological level: Geist is not the subjective idea or the negation of nature as objective idea as these are not available on Geist’s own level. Geist’s own subjectivity thus becomes unthinkable as there is nothing to differentiate it from: nature and the logical idea are ‘lost’ within Geist. In lack of a contrast with anything else, Geist is thus undetermined and unmediated: if everything can be explained with reference to Geist, Geist can be explained with reference to nothing. The idea’s abstractness and nature’s objectivity are then shown to be illusions as in truth, they are Geist’s subjectivity only that this subjectivity lacks a means of contrast and thus determination. There is no principle from which Geist can be deduced or that can be applied to explain it. Geist thus becomes unthinkable and underdetermined.10 Geist has thus been defined as the realm where a sublated nature is accommodated within an explicit, overarching universality. However, it also establishes the need for a mutual mediation of the domains of nature and nature-sublating Geist.

 To avoid this, Kant invoked the noumenal thing in itself and Fichte the I-external ‘Anstoss’.

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2.4 The Second Syllogism of Philosophy The self-undermining of Geist on its own and without contrast thus entails the need for a new understanding of philosophy and reality and thus a new syllogism. This second syllogism honours the first syllogism’s lesson about Geist’s status as active, subjective idea—and thus as the subject of philosophy—but it is designed to enable Geist to be defined in contrast to the idea’s other determinations: Geist is now different from the logical absolute idea: it is the absolute idea in concrete and active, ‘subjective’ form. This notion is available because now, Geist is contrasted with nature as the concrete, objective idea on the same ontological plane.11 Geist is the concrete, subjective idea because it is not the concrete, objective idea as nature (Hegel 2007, 276). The second syllogism of philosophy thus argues that Geist is the concrete idea in active form that comprehends the logical idea as condition of its own possibility and the idea as nature as its own horizontal negation. As a particular but autonomous aspect of Geist, the finite philosopher employs philosophical thought to comprehend the logical idea as ultimate foundation of everything, including nature and Geist, and the objective idea as nature as Geist’s opposite. Geist is thus contrasted with nature on the same ontological plane and it relates to the absolute idea as its own and nature’s origin. Geist thus relates to the idea’s other forms via a difference that is bridged by an identity claim: as opposed to the first syllogism, Geist is now explicable as concrete, subjective idea as the absolute idea remains differentiated from Geist. At the same time, Geist is contrasted with nature’s objective passivity as the other concrete form of the absolute idea. The absolute idea and the idea as nature are what philosophizing Geist relates to on the same, identity-based, ontological plane: philosophy means that Geist finds itself in and thus identifies itself with the absolute idea and nature: 1. The idea as nature is comprehended by Geist (as its own negation) 2. Geist comprehends the logical idea (as its own and nature’s origin) -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------C. Geist comprehends the logical idea and nature  One could argue from a Kantian point of view that philosophies that ultimately  - and often against their own proclamations to the contrary - undermine a notion of true consciousness-independent objectivity such as Sellars’, Brandom’s and McDowell’s encounter a variety of this problem: if one conceptually begins with finite consciousness, any claim about objectivity is made in the light of consciousness so that all objectivity is posited by and ‘for consciousness’. Unless one explains how consciousness-independent objectivity is possible from the logical beginning, any subsequent claim to objectivity’s independence can be questioned and accused of being reducible to subjectivity. To avoid the reduction of objectivity to subjectivity with the subjectivity-undermining consequences Kant associates with Hume and Berkeley, Kant and Fichte argue that there is a dimension to objectivity that escapes subjectivity (and its knowledge). However, this raises the question how any philosophical knowledge claim about subjectivity can have objective validity if true objectivity is beyond the reach of philosophy. Hegel attempts to avoid this issue by defining Geist’s subjectivity in contrast to nature’s objectivity and vice versa, thus avoiding either’s reduction to the respective other whilst grounding both of them in the idea. 11

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Geist thus discovers itself in logic and nature: the idea as Geist comprehends that the absolute idea and nature that initially seemed different from Geist are in fact compatible with it. In so doing, Geist frees nature from its otherness: nature is revealed to be accessible to Geist, the two differentiated determinations of the absolute idea share some kind of comprehension-enabling identity. A quote attributed to Hegel supports this reading: It is the philosophy of nature [...] that sublates the separation of nature and Geist and allows Geist to comprehend its own [reasonable] essence in nature. (Hegel 1986b, 15)12

The second syllogism thus concludes that the structural unity of Geist and nature and Geist and the absolute idea is something established, discovered or cognised: the difference between logical idea and nature on the one hand and Geist on the other is prioritized and only overcome in the second step of Geist’s comprehension-­ based identification with the absolute idea and nature. First, Geist differs from the absolute idea and nature and is determined through this difference. Geist then discovers via philosophical cognition that it is identical with them. Unlike the first syllogism, the second syllogism explains what Geist is: it is not the absolute idea and it is not nature. Like nature, it is one of the forms of the absolute idea. Since nature is contrasted with Geist on the same plane, and the absolute idea is their common origin, Geist is determined and intelligible as the absolute idea in concrete and active form. Thus, the first syllogism’s problem of Geist’s all-encompassing immediacy and thus lack of determination by contrast is avoided. However, Hegel argues that also this second syllogism creates a puzzle that it cannot solve: if Geist differs from idea and nature, why is Geist able to comprehend the logical idea and nature and thus find itself in them in the first place? If Geist is assumed to differ from them and then discovers its identity with them via philosophical cognition, why is Geist able to do so? Why are the non-geistige logical idea and nature accessible to Geist at all?

2.5 The Third Syllogism of Philosophy This leads to the realization that Geist is only able to comprehend the differing absolute idea and nature because whilst differing from then, it is always already united with them. The differentiated absolute idea, Geist and nature must always already be united so that Geist’s philosophical cognition can take place at all (Hegel 2007, 276). At the same time, they must always already differ so that they can determine each other.

 Translation by author. Original: “Die Naturphilosophie [...] ist es, welche die Trennung der Natur und des Geistes aufhebt und dem Geiste die Erkenntnis seines [vernünftigen] Wesens in der Natur gewährt.“ (Hegel 1986a, 15) 12

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This gives rise to the third and final syllogism of philosophy. It states that since the logical idea, Geist and nature are all forms of the idea, they are philosophically intelligible to Geist as Geist is one of the idea’s forms (Hegel 2007, 276). At the same time, they differ from each other in virtue of the idea’s self-negating self-­ determination: the absolute idea negates itself to define nature, nature negates itself to define Geist. The moments’ difference is a non-reducible function of their identity. The philosophical intelligibility of nature and Geist as well as the status of being subjective (active) and objective (passive) thus depend on their being idea: Geist and nature and their relationships only exist because the idea exists. At the same time, they are irreducibly different determinations of the idea so that it is not the case that ‘ultimately, everything is absolute idea, anyways’: also the metaphysical, absolute idea is only what it is in contrast to its forms of nature and Geist. Since the moments differ, they determine and mediate each other: no term is assumed. Geist comprehends the absolute idea because the idea is the condition of Geist’s possibility. At the same time, Geist comprehends nature and itself because both are differing forms of the idea. Geist can thus comprehend all forms of the idea since logical idea and nature and Geist are identical in all being idea. The third and final syllogism thus establishes that all subjects (Geist) and objects (Geist, nature, idea) of philosophical knowledge are different forms of the absolute idea and are known to be so: 1. The idea (‘reason’) knows its own objective form as nature (nature is the idea and is known to be) 2. The idea knows its own subjective form as Geist (Geist is idea) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------C. The idea knows itself in all its own forms.

Nature as well as the metaphysical idea and Geist are all forms of the idea (Hegel 2007, 276) and thus of the concept: by uniting itself with a self-posited objective dimension, the concept turns itself into idea, the Logic’s ‘absolute idea’ (Hegel 2010b, 299) and nature and Geist: The [final] syllogism [of philosophy] is the Idea of philosophy, which has self-knowing reason [i.e. the absolute idea], the absolutely universal, for its middle, a middle that divides into mind and nature, making mind the presupposition, as the process of the Idea's subjective activity, and nature the universal extreme, as the process of the Idea that is in itself, objective. (Hegel 2007, 276 §577)

In philosophy, the idea as Geist thus knows itself in its forms as logical idea, nature and Geist. The philosopher, as geistiges being, is part of that form of the idea that knows itself in its three forms (Hegel 2007, 276 §576). So when Geist comprehends itself, it also comprehends that it is the subjective form of the same idea that defines nature as its objective form and that determines (onto-)logical thought as such. As part of Geist, the finite philosopher thus comprehends that (1) nature is the objective form of the idea (2) Geist is the idea’s subjective form and (3) that it is the absolute idea that takes subjective form in Geist and objective form in nature. Throughout, the true subject of philosophical knowledge is the same as the object: the idea (Hegel 2007, 276 §577). Accordingly, Hegel states about philosophy:

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The eternal Idea, the Idea that is in and for itself, eternally remains active, engenders and enjoys itself as absolute [Geist]. (Hegel 2007, 276)

And since the idea originates in ‘the concept’,13 philosophy is ultimately the comprehension of the unconditioned, independent and free concept and its categorial determinations by the concept (cf. Halfwassen 2005, 327).

2.6 Philosophy and the Absolute Idea Due to the idea’s overarching and all-determining role, this description of philosophical thinking is modelled on the structure of the ‘absolute idea’ (Hegel 2010b, 735ff). Like the absolute idea, the structure of ‘philosophy’ as activity of absolute Geist is ‘free’ in the sense that it is exclusively self-referential, independent and spontaneous: philosophy’s idea as Geist knows itself as it truly is, it is knowledge as complete congruence of subjectivity and objectivity without external conditioning: The idea as the unity of the subjective and the objective idea is the concept of the idea, for which the idea as such is the object […]—an object into which all determinations have gone together. This unity is accordingly the absolute and entire truth, the idea thinking itself, and here, indeed, as thinking, as the logical idea. (Hegel 2010b, 299)

In absolute and thus self-referential knowledge, the knowing subject and the known object are thus always already one and their difference is accommodated within an identity-based unity (Hegel 2010b, 299–300 §237). The subject can know the object because they are the same in being different. This entails that the difference between the Logic’s absolute idea and absolute Geist’s definition of philosophy is merely one of concreteness: the latter contains all the features of nature14 and Geist15 and thus involves geistige beings and a philosophical comprehension of the ontological structures of nature and of Geist in its self-comprehension. As geistige entity, the philosophical thinker thus comprehends the structure of the logical realm, of nature and of Geist. In contrast, the logical idea as subject and object of knowledge is purely logical without external natural or geistige manifestation or knowledge thereof. And yet, while the self-reference of absolute Geist in philosophy is categorically richer and thus more concrete than that of the merely logical, absolute idea, their structures are fundamentally the same. The most basic reason for this congruence lies at the root of Hegel’s description of philosophy as the self-knowing of the absolute (logical) idea (‘the idea’) in its forms as natural and geistige idea. Since the absolute idea defines the structure of knowledge as such, the manner in which the unconditioned idea of philosophy knows itself as nature and as Geist is the idea’s own form: the unity of Geist and nature within the philosophical self-knowing of the unconditioned idea is itself  It is the unity of the concept’s subjective and objective forms (Hegel 2010a, 282).  mechanics, physics, organics. 15  subjective (cognition), objective (action) and absolute (art, religion, philosophy). 13 14

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ideal (cf. Halfwassen 2005, 9). This defines philosophy as the unconditioned idea that knows itself as nature and Geist in the manner of its own being. To Hegel, philosophy thus means that the concept-based, unconditioned idea knows itself through Geist as Geist and as nature in its own way (Hegel 2007, 577 §276).

2.7 Idea and Concept While the third syllogism is able to avoid the self-undermining of Geist, the question remains how and why the idea is able to differentiate itself into three moments whilst retaining an overarching unity that renders all its forms compatible. Hegel’s answer to this question points to his account of freedom with its origins in the description of the logical concept: the concept’s universality negates itself to become particularity and finally, individuality (Hegel 1991, 239–240), paralleling the absolute idea’s self-negation and -transformation into nature and then into Geist. Via judgement and syllogism, the concept’s individuality turns itself into objectivity and then unites itself with this objectivity to ultimately define the absolute idea (Hegel 1991, 303). This movement, and by extension, the entire system along with nature’s place in it, thus has its roots in the concept’s free self-positing of universality, particularity and individuality. In its free manner, the concept unites the dimensions of universality and particularity within individuality in such a way that within its unity, neither dimension is reducible to the other: [The concept’s] universal is what is identical with itself explicitly in the sense that at the same time the particular and the individual are contained in it. Furthermore, the particular is what has been differentiated or the determinacy, but in the sense that it is universal in itself and as an individual. Similarly, the individual has the meaning of being the subject, the foundation which contains the genus and species in itself and is itself substantial. This is the posited inseparability of the moments in their difference […], the clarity of the concept in which no difference interrupts or obscures the concept, but in which each difference is instead equally transparent. (Hegel 2010a, 238–239)

While universality seems to take precedence in virtue of representing the active dimension of the concept’s triad, universality’s activity is inherently self-negating: But the “I” is in the first place purely self-referring unity, and is this not immediately but by abstracting from all determinateness and content and withdrawing into the freedom of unrestricted equality with itself. As such it is universality, a unity that is unity with itself only by virtue of its negative relating, which appears as abstraction, and because of it contains all determinateness within itself as dissolved. (Hegel 2010b, 514)

The concept’s universality thus freely posits itself as particularity—like the absolute idea posits itself as nature—and then negates this determination to unite particularity with universality to form individuality like the idea defines Geist: For in its absolute negativity the universal contains determinateness in and for itself, so that, when speaking of determinateness in connection with the universal, the determinateness is not being imported into the latter from outside. As negativity in general, that is, according to the first immediate negation, the universal has determinateness in it above all as particu-

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larity; as a second universal, as the negation of negation, it is absolute determinateness, that is, [individuality] and concreteness. (Hegel 2010b, 532)

In positing itself as particularity and individuality, the concept’s universality thus posits itself and in so doing remains unconditioned, independent and self-­referential. Insofar as it is in the very ‘nature’ of the concept’s universality to freely posit itself as particularity and individuality, the concept’s universality would not exist and is neither thinkable nor explicable without them. It could not be undetermined and self-referential activity (i.e. universality) because there would be no determinacy and dependency (i.e. particularity) to contrast it with. The concept’s undetermined universality thus ensures its independence, self-­ referentiality and unconditionality. Meanwhile, particularity’s determinacy enables the concept to be contentful, determined and to relate to other particulars and their determinacy: the concept’s particulars are relational to entities other than themselves and mutually define and limit each other (Hegel 2010a, 534). Within the concept’s individuality, particularity thus obtains universality’s feature of independence and self-positing whilst universality receives particularity’s determinacy and relationality. Universality and particularity are one and the same within individuality whilst retaining and bestowing unto each other their distinct characteristics. Neither moment is prioritised over the respective other because they are simultaneous: universality has always already been particularity and particularity has always already been universality. (Hegel 1991, 240) In the same manner in which particularity relates to universality within individuality, nature thus relates to Geist within the idea as ‘reason’ (Hegel 2007, 276): on its own, both nature and Geist are but abstractions of the overarching, self-­knowledge enabling unity of idea, nature and Geist and yet, both nature and Geist are clearly differentiated: nature can be thought as radically different from Geist and Geist as radically different from nature: nature is truly objective in comparison with Geist’s subjectivity and Geist is truly self-referential in comparison to nature’s self-­ alienated, external objectivity.

3 Hegel’s Non-naturalist and Non-spiritualist Idealism The final, idea- and thus concept-based syllogism of philosophy establishes why Hegel is not a naturalist on any conventional definition of ‘naturalism’: the overarching, all-informing principle to Hegel is the concept-engendered idea, and nature is but one of the two forms it gives itself. Labelling him ‘naturalist’ suggests that according to his system, ‘all is nature’, which is contradicted by the first syllogism of philosophy’s notion that Geist absorbs (‘sublates’) and replaces nature and by the differences between absolute idea and nature and nature and Geist that the second and third-syllogisms of philosophy illustrate.

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Furthermore, if naturalism is defined as ‘universal explicability’ while rejecting the concept-metaphysics-based notion of universality as a radically undetermined dimension of reality—which Hegel also associates with Kant’s ‘noumenon’ and Fichte’s ‘Anstoß’ and ‘god’—as all other naturalisms do, Hegel would object to the label. The fact that his metaphysics of the concept do incorporate the radical indeterminacy of the concept’s universality sets him apart from all other approaches that champion universal explicability. Crucially, it is this concept-based, explicit accommodation of universality’s radical indeterminacy that irreducibly differentiates Geist from nature: nature only carries universality implicitly as part of its own objectivity, while Geist’s explicit universality defines the domain of Geist’s subjectivity and grounds the autonomy of individual subjects’ minds within Geist. This defines his account of the body-and-soul-relationship, of spontaneous cognition and of absolute Geist’s art, religion and philosophy. It also informs Hegel’s concept of the freedom of the will: it is in virtue of Geist’s unnatural, explicitly universal self-­ referentiality that particular, geistige agents can think otherwise and independently and spontaneously define ends and choose to pursue them. (Hegel 2008, 28ff) All three syllogisms of philosophy rely on these features to differentiate Geist from nature’s purely external and universality-implying but not universality-explicating objectivity. Furthermore, Hegel himself argues against naturalist ontologies that they cannot explicitly accommodate universality’s indeterminacy and fail to establish a suitable notion of the domain of Geist in contrast to the domain of nature. While most naturalisms champion universal explicability, they remain committed to a metaphysics of being or essence that do not properly emancipate undetermined universality from determined particularity whilst uniting them in the manner of individuality (Hegel 1991, 135–235). Although Hegel thus agrees with naturalisms on the desirability of universal explicability, he disagrees with them on its foundation and shape. In contrast to all other supporters of universal explicability, Hegel’s Geist-grounding metaphysics of the concept thus uniquely accommodate the radical indeterminacy of universality that Kant and Fichte associate with the supernatural subjectivity of consciousness while placing its origins and grounding beyond the reach of determinacy-­based explicability. Hegel follows in their footsteps with regard to the structure of universality’s supernatural indeterminacy. However, he also renders it explicable when he places it within the concept’s individuality. This enables him to define supernatural accounts of consciousness and Geist that incorporate indeterminacy-based autonomy. He thus contradicts all pre-Kantian naturalisms and natural scientific naturalism: Hegel’s account of Geist and with it, his account of mind are grounded in undetermined, self-referential, unconditioned but conditionality-accommodating, supernatural universality. To Hegel, this entails that Geist and the finite mind are unapologetically ‘supernatural’ and beyond the limits of substance-metaphysics, metaphysics of being and of any possible natural science.

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Hegel’s absolute idealism is thus unique insofar as it renders the concept’s universality’s radical indeterminacy explicable by accommodating it within his concept-­ metaphysics that also ground his notion of the idea: universality-­ accommodating thought and reality in its logical, natural and geistige forms is intelligible because it is structured by the same concept-based idea. So while Hegel shares the commitment to all-encompassing explicability with pre-Kantian philosophical ‘naturalists’ such as Spinoza and Aristotle, Hegel still champions a notion of the radical difference between nature and Geist and would differentiate himself from pre-Kantian essentialist naturalists in virtue of his commitment to concept-­ metaphysics (Hegel 2010b, 233): in contrast to pre-Kantian essentialists and proponents of a metaphysics of being, he would argue that mind and world are not both functions of a ‘natural’, ultimately determined16 ontological principle—usually labelled ‘substance’, ‘knowable god’, ‘essence’ or ‘nature’ (cf. Hegel 2010b, 223). Due to the fundamentality of these principles’ objectivity, and thus their failure to emancipate universality’s self-referential indeterminacy from particularity, everything—and thus also the mind of a thinking and acting, particular subject—is explicable with reference to an ultimately objective principle that renders minds as determined as the principle itself. This undermines the mind’s free, universality-­ based subjectivity, which in turn deprives objective nature of a means of contrast on its own ontological plane, thus also undermining nature’s objectivity. According to Hegel, pre-Kantian, explicability-defending and essentialist or being-based accounts of metaphysics thus define all of reality as ultimately ‘objective’ and Hegel thinks they have to argue this to be consistent within their own assumptions (Hegel 2010b, 224–225). Doing so, however, undermines the prioritised notion of objectivity because it requires the contrast to subjectivity to be what it is on the same ontological level: universality-implying but not explicating objectivity has to be ‘non-­ subjectivity’ to have any conceptual determinacy. Without subjectivity, objectivity cannot be determined as what it is (Hegel 2010a, 735). In contrast, Hegel’s concept-metaphysics-based domain of Geist as unity of subjective mind and the objective body and mind-external world is itself subjective because it explicates the concept’s universality. As his three syllogisms of philosophy attempt to establish, Hegel defines the consciousness-and-world-grounding Geist as subjective and then contrasts it with nature as the idea’s other, objective form.

3.1 Naturalism and Hegel’s Nature It is thus Hegel’s commitment to concept metaphysics that enables him to differentiate objective nature and subjective Geist: Geist as subjective idea renders explicit the self-referential and independent, undetermined universality that nature as

16

 And thus an ‘objective’ rather than ‘subjective’ principle.

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objective idea only implies. As opposed to natural beings, Hegel’s geistige beings thus accommodate external influences within their mind. In contrast, natural entities, events and beings, including organisms, at best have immediate sensibility of external entities but are neither conscious nor self-conscious. One of the consequences of the categorial difference between nature and Geist is that Geist is beyond natural scientific and naturalist-metaphysical explanation as these are exclusively concerned with mechanics, physics and organics. So even if naturalism is equated with ‘philosophical-’ rather than ‘natural scientific explicability’, the notion of ‘natural explicability’ would still fail to apply to Hegel’s realms of Geist or to the absolute idea realm of logic because nature’s prioritisation of external particularity over universality neither applies to the logic nor to the philosophy of Geist. Meanwhile, the essentialist-naturalist kind of explicability that pre-Kantian ‘naturalists’ champion, falls short of accounting for the indeterminacy of universality and its unity with particularity and individuality within Hegel’s concept-metaphysics and thus in his philosophical sub-systems of logic and Geist. Insofar as Hegel ultimately grounds the explicability of logic, nature and Geist in the concept-informed, universality-accommodating and objectivity-­ guaranteeing idea, Hegel is thus best labelled an ‘idealist’ rather than a ‘naturalist’.17

4 Conclusion Despite its commitment to universal explicability, Hegel’s philosophy differs from other philosophies that ground explicability either in the subjectivity of consciousness or in the objectivity of nature. Instead, Hegel is committed to the concept-­ metaphysics-­informed idea as origin of Geist and nature that are differentiated in virtue of their manner of either articulating supernatural, undetermined universality (Geist) or merely implying it (nature). In contrast to the philosophies based on metaphysics of being or essence that are usually equated with naturalism, Hegel thus champions a supernatural, concept-based notion of Geist as subjective idea that affirms Kant’s and Fichte’s commitment to explicitly universal, spontaneous autonomy. At the same time, he justifies nature’s irreducible objectivity with reference to the same idea that grounds Geist’s subjectivity, thus avoiding the subjectivist reduction of nature to Geist. To Hegel, freedom and universal explicability, subjectivity and objectivity, and Geist and nature are all irreducibly real, mutually determining and mediating. At the same time, they are united through their participation in the same concept-based idea that renders his philosophy an idealism and that serves the same, unifying purpose as Heraclitus’ everliving fire.

 Taking Hegel’s thought as a standard, the label naturalist would apply if one equates the notion of ‘nature’ with Hegel’s ‘idea’, maybe calling the logical idea ‘abstract nature’, the idea as nature ‘nature’ and the idea as Geist ‘self-referential nature’. While this is certainly possible, it might end up confusing interpreters of Hegel more than helping them orientate within his thought. 17

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References Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. 1971. Die Wissenschaftslehre in ihrem allgemeinen Umrisse (1810) in Fichtes Werke. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ———. 1986. Die Wissenschaftslehre: Zweiter Vortrag im Jahre 1804. Hamburg: Meiner. Gabriel, Markus. 2016. What Kind of an Idealist (If Any) Is Hegel? Hegel Bulletin 37 (2): 181–208. Halfwassen, Jens. 2005. Hegel und der spätantike Neuplatonismus. Untersuchungen zur Metaphysik des Einen und des Nous in Hegels spekulativer und geschichtlicher Deutung. Felix Meiner Verlag: Hamburg. Hegel, GWF. 1986a. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie I. Werke 17. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Hegel, G.W.F. 1986b. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830): Zweiter Teil: Die Naturphilosophie. Werke 9. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Hegel, GWF. 1991. The Encyclopedia Logic. Trans. T.F.  Geraets, W.A.  Suchting, H.S.  Harris. Cambridge, MA: Hackett. ———. 2007. Philosophy of Mind. Trans. W.  Wallace and A.V.  Miller. Rev. & Intro. Michael Inwood. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2008. Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. Trans. T. M. Knox. Rev., ed., and intro. Stephen Houlgate. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010a. The Science of Logic. Trans. George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010b. Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline. Part One: The Science of Logic. Trans. and Ed. K. Brinkmann, and D. O. Dahlstrom. Cambrigde: Cambridge University Press. Houlgate, Stephen. 2006. The Opening of the Logic. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knappik, Franz. 2016. Hegel’s Essentialism: Natural Kinds and the Metaphysics of Explanation in Hegel’s Theory of “the Concept”. European Journal of Philosophy 24: 760–787. Kreines, James. 2015. Reason in the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McDowell, John. 1994. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pinkard, Terry. 2012. Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1975. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Scientism as Ideology; Speculative Naturalism as Qualified Decoloniality Paul Giladi

How can he think that that can be brought into thinking about this? (Cora Diamond)

1  1 Hegel’s work is a treasure trove of substantive philosophical insights about life, nature, and cognition. Important features of, what I previously termed, Hegel’s ‘speculative naturalism’1 (Giladi 2016) reveal what is to dialectically make sense of these kinds of concepts, what it is to grasp these concepts in such a way so as to have both the world itself and humanity-in-the-world in view: simply put, for Hegel, the most compelling criterion for best conceptualizing life, nature, and cognition is what enables one to be at home in the world. The concept of being at home in the world consists in making a non-­ anthropocentric natural order rationally intelligible to human mindedness. We can never be at home in the world if we account for life, nature, and cognition in an extirpated state of mechanised petrification in an iron cage. For Hegel, then, one must go beyond a narrow third-personally articulated naturalism that views nature as ‘self-alienated spirit’. (Enc2: § 247 Z). Focusing on Hegel’s construal of the human subject as Geist, my chapter contends his sense-making framework is not just deeply hostile to hegemonic scientific naturalist vocabulary, but that it can also provide a profound insight into what is lost  Namely, the specific ways in which Hegel articulates the emergence of Geist from Natur and the modalities of geistig reflexivity in making sense of things. 1

P. Giladi (*) SOAS University of London, London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Corti, J.-G. Schülein (eds.), Life, Organisms, and Human Nature, Studies in German Idealism 22, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_19

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in the wake of scientific naturalism’s way of rendering life, nature, and cognition ‘intelligible’. Additionally, Hegel’s resources may be reasonably thought of as having a progressively transformative orientation. Such an orientation equips inquirers with logico-epistemic resources for overcoming conceptual loss in a qualified decolonial manner.2

2  2 One of Max Weber’s central aims is to explain why formal rationality has come to dominate in modern Western society, and why, by consequence, has nature been disenchanted (entzaubert) and culture faces ‘extirpation’ (Karlberg 1980, 1176) culminating in a state of ‘mechanised petrification’ (Weber 1992, 124) in a stahlhartes Gehäuse (Weber 1992, 123). The model of scientific explanation that had initially been articulated by Pierre-Simon Laplace and refined by the German Materialists during the mid-1800s had enabled formal reason to achieve hegemony due to how the formalisation and mathematisation of the complexities in nature were being met with enthusiastic acclaim (cf. Adorno & Horkheimer [1944] 2002, 25). With Hermann von Helmholtz’s Über die Erhaltung der Kraft leading from the front, one explained natural events and processes by subsuming them under general laws of mechanics, specifically in the reduction of all changes in the physical world down to the movements of atoms. For Helmholtz, as Michael Friedman writes, ‘… the possibility of reducing all of the appearances of nature to this basis, in accordance with the law of causality, is then “the condition for the complete conceptualisability of nature”’ (Friedman 2013, 82). If modern advances in physics and chemistry had not already proclaimed scientific nomothetic rationalisation as the Weltherrscher, the revolutionary impact of Darwinism guaranteed the disenchantment of the world by construing humanity in purely causal and naturalistic vocabulary: traditional ontotheological concepts and categorisations were now consigned out of the scientific image, whose primacy demands that the conceptual framework of persons and the language of intentionality be integrated into that image. Indeed, such was the totalizing effect of formal reason’s transformation of inquiry that the Laplacian model of scientific explanation became the foundational schema of what Anglo-American philosophers tend to call the ‘Placement Problem’.  While it is well-established that Hegel himself is guilty of egregious Eurocentrism, a worldview which hardly evidences someone who could be enlisted for sympathetic engagement with decolonialty’s transmodern critique of Western modernity, I think Hegel’s role in providing dialectical conceptual frameworks that serve as a major inspiration for ‘post-analytic’ philosophy can make Hegel a curious ally of sorts. While he is not epistemically disobedient, his resources are epistemically mischievous. See Giladi (forthcoming 2025) for what is meant by ‘epistemic mischief’, where Hilary Putnam is the focus here. For further on decoloniality and epistemic disobedience, see Castro-Gómez (2007), Dussel (1993, 2019), Maldonado-Torres (2007), Mignolo (2009, 2011a, b), Mignolo & Walsh (2018), Quijano (1999/2007). 2

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As Huw Price (2004) writes, the Placement Problem may be expressed in the following way3: 1 . All reality is ultimately natural reality. 2. Whatever one wishes to admit into natural reality must be placed in natural reality. 3. Modality, meaning, norms, intentionality, and so on do not seem admissible into natural reality. 4. Therefore, if they are to be placed in nature, they must be forced into a category that does not seem appropriate for their specific characters; and if they cannot be placed in nature, then they must be either dismissed as non-genuine phenomena or at best regarded as parasitic. The Placement Problem problematises where phenomena such as norms and intentionality might ‘fit’ within the world described by physics, chemistry, and biology. Why modality, meaning, moral, epistemic and aesthetic norms, consciousness, self-­ consciousness, and intentionality, and so on are problematised here is principally because their status as central concepts of the manifest image’s web of belief means there is invariably friction between them and the mathematisable and quantifiable features of the scientific image. Such philosophical problematisation can be most clearly evidenced (at a general level) in our struggles to balance the naturalistic drive with our default commitment to phenomena such as first-person intentional states, reasons, and norms, which eo ipso seem to radically differ from leptons, quarks, and quantum fields. First-person intentional states and the concomitant vocabulary of persons and agents, which are united under the concept of ‘human being’, are integral parts of the manifest image of the world, a humanistic perspective indispensable for making sense of human beings qua human beings. As Cora Diamond writes, “[t]o be able to use the concept ‘human being’ is to be able to think about human life and what happens in it; it is not to be able to pick human beings out from other things or recommend that certain things be done to them or by them” (Diamond 1988, 266). The subsequent situation, then, is one in which the conflict between the nomotheticscientific drive and the humanistic drive gives rise to a fundamental aporia  – or fragmentation with our discursive architecture – ‘the problem of the modern episteme’ (Oksala 2005, 31). As John McDowell puts it: Modern science understands its subject matter in a way that threatens, at least, to leave it disenchanted, as Weber put the point in an image that has become a commonplace. The image marks a contrast between two kinds of intelligibility: the kind that is sought by (as we call it) natural science [“the kind we find in a phenomenon when we see it as governed by natural law”] and the kind we find in something when we place it in relation to other occupants of “the logical space of reasons” [“the kind of intelligibility that is proper to meaning”]. (McDowell 1994, 70)

 Price’s Placement Problem owes much to Jackson 1998, where it is dubbed ‘The Location Problem’, although Price endeavours to distinguish them (Price 2013, 27n). 3

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Curiously, though, from a critical theoretic perspective, I think there is something rather peculiar about scientism, which aims to regard nomothetic intelligibility as epistemically supreme and cognitively exhaustive of all ways of sense-making. To quote John Dupré here, ‘[i]f the reductionistic account of science mirrors the hierarchical structure of nature, then science will be the one source of truth in these as in other matters’ (Dupré 1995, 255). Scientism depends on an unqualified, imperialistic, hierarchical Unity of Science Thesis (hereafter, ‘UIHUST’). This position contends that every phenomenon explicable by higher-level sciences, such as psychology and sociology, could in principle be explained by lower-level sciences, such as physics. Alex Rosenberg advocates UIHUST proudly: What is the world really like? It’s fermions and bosons, and everything that can be made up of them, and nothing that can’t be made up of them. All the facts about fermions and bosons determine or “fix” all the other facts about reality and what exists in this universe or any other if, as physics may end up showing, there are other ones. Another way of expressing this fact-fixing by physics is to say that all the other facts – the chemical, biological, psychological, social, economic, political, cultural facts supervene on the physical facts and are ultimately explained by them. And if physics can’t in principle fix a putative fact, it is no fact after all. (Rosenberg 2014, 19)

UIHUST is not simply ‘greedy’ (in Daniel Dennett’s sense). It is easily refutable, so much so that the position is not taken especially seriously in contemporary philosophy of science.4 Given this, the following pertinent question arises: ‘why, from a diagnostic perspective, does scientism still persist?’ Scientism is, therefore, peculiar, because it persists despite resting on implausible grounds, since ‘the omnipresent neo-Pythagoreanism of contemporary science is surely not adequately justified by its empirical successes’ (Dupré 1995, 224). I think a particularly compelling answer to this question involves explaining scientism’s persistence in terms of scientism’s status as the theoretical concomitant of the kind of social pathologies caused by the ideological exercise of formal reason in capitalist modes of production. In what follows, I shall argue that there is a significant conceptual parallel between (a) Jürgen Habermas’s concerns about how modernity results in the colonisation of the lifeworld and (b) my concern about how nomothetic rationality encroaches on the territory of the logical space of reasons: nomothetic reason has attained explanatory superiority so much so that disciplines paradigmatically defined by the operation of nomothetic rationality began to ‘internally colonise’ the logical space of reasons.

 I think it is worth emphasizing that, as Cartwright et al. 1996 have convincingly argued, UIHUST is not attributable to Otto Neurath, especially considering Neurath’s anti-foundationalism, antipyramidism, and articulation of an ‘encyclopedia-model’. 4

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3  3 For Habermas, the lifeworld is the background constellation of practices and institutional structures geared towards the (re)production of culture, society, and personality.5 As the domain of symbolic reproduction, the lifeworld is constituted by communicative action. This type of action is guided by concerns for intersubjective consensus and interpersonal care. To quote Nancy Fraser here, ‘[s]ymbolic reproduction … comprises the socialisation of the young, the cementing of group solidarity, and the transmission and extension of cultural traditions’ (Fraser 1985, 99). The linguistically-shared norms governing communicative practices are not extra-­ human dictates, but are ‘social achievements’ (Brandom 2002, 216), in that what is deemed appropriate or inappropriate in a society is not determined by any completely mind-independent stuff “out there”, so to speak. Rather, norms are established by the discursive intersubjective practices between agents. However, though socially-historically mediated norms are themselves not fixed, the lifeworld itself is fixed, insofar as it is necessarily organised by communicative action and symbolic reproduction (viz. Habermas 1987, 355). In contrast to the lifeworld’s intrinsically communicative and symbolic nature, Habermas holds that systems operate via non-communicative action, which in turn is non-linguistically regulated by instrumental reason – money and power, institutionalised by the market and the state respectively. Modernity, so the story goes here, involves the ‘decoupling’ of the lifeworld (the realm of interpersonal cooperation) and system(s) (technical operation) from one another and the way friction is generated when both models interact. Habermas’s explanation for the clash between the lifeworld and system(s) focuses on how the expansion of capitalism to all arenas of human activity causes the two models to collide: advanced forms of capitalism engender people’s self-­ identification and interests qua homo economicus and social position as a consumer. Consumption is not mediated through (Habermasian) discourse, since what governs consumption is the private satisfaction of subjective tastes and preferences (viz. Viz. Habermas 1989, 160–61). Consumerism crystallises producers and consumers into well-organised complexes, to the totalising extent that the reifying principle of exchange and commodity form levels out society. In doing so, the communicative orientation towards mutual understanding is substituted by the instrumental and strategic orientation towards success’ (Thomassen 2010, 76). As Habermas writes: … we today have a “fragmented consciousness” that blocks enlightenment by the mechanism of reification. It is only with this that the conditions for a colonisation of the lifeworld are met. When stripped of their ideological veils, the imperatives of autonomous subsystems make their way into the lifeworld from the outside – like colonial masters coming into a tribal society – and force a process of assimilation upon it … (Habermas 1987, 355)

 Viz. Habermas 1987, 137; 214; 217; 348–49; Habermas 1975, 8–9; Habermas 1982, 268, 278–79.

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[C]onflicts have developed in advanced Western societies that deviate in various ways from the welfare-state pattern of institutionalised conflict over distribution … Rather, these new conflicts arise in domains of cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialisation … The issue is not primarily one of compensations that the welfare state can provide, but of defending and restoring endangered ways of life. In short, the new conflicts are not ignited by distribution problems but by questions having to do with the grammar of forms of life. (Habermas 1987, 392; cf. Habermas 1987, 368)

For Habermas, the harm of the colonisation of the lifeworld consists in how the domination of the sphere of cultural reproduction by instrumental reason leads to anomie: prior to colonisation, the content of the lifeworld is informal and interpersonal. However, because communicative practices have now been supplanted with instrumental and strategic action, the grammar of the lifeworld has been skewed and perverted. I think there is a significant conceptual parallel between Habermas’s concerns about the grammar of forms of life and my concerns about scientism, insofar as scientism might be said to involve the colonisation of the logical space of reasons. To see the way this works, I think it would be particularly helpful to articulate how scientism can be conceived of as an ideological partner-concept of capitalism. Scientism can be conceived of as an ideological partner concept of capitalism, not only by noticing how both scientistic varieties of naturalism and increasingly unfettered forms of market capitalism are historically symbiotic with one another, but also by noticing how scientism and capitalism are logically bound instantiations of formal reason: scientistic varieties of naturalism are typified by systematic practices of nomothetic reason aimed at subsuming all phenomena under the laws of fundamental physics (cf. Adorno & Horkheimer [1944] 2002, 7); capitalism is typified by systematic practices of strategic reason aimed at subsuming all phenomena under the commodity form, construing humanity exclusively as homo economicus. More to the point, neoliberal capitalism exercises modern, disciplinary power by producing and reproducing an epistemic hierarchy in which STEM is positioned at the top of the intellectual recognition order, which is itself structured entirely by the non-humanistic focus on positive return-on-investment (see Brown 2015, 181–2). There is constant marked and unmarked pressure to conform to this homogeneous scientistic model, and concomitantly, the marked hyper-visibilisation of subjects that do not conform to STEM regulative discourse is harmful.6 First, under the STEM hierarchy, not only are the humanities’ web of meanings and constellations defined from a non-humanistic perspective, but the humanities invariably regard their internal epistemic practices from an externalised, homogenising point of view, to the extent that “certain concepts require for their content or intelligibility background conditions which are no longer fulfilled” (Diamond 1988, 257). [The humanities] have lost a recognition of [them]selves as held together by literatures, images, religions, histories, myths, ideas, forms of reason, grammars, figures, and languages. Instead, [they] are presumed to be held together by technologies and capital flows. That presumption, of course, is at risk of becoming true, at which point humanity will have

 Cf. Pollock 1956, 227. Cf. Brown 2015, 187.

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entered its darkest chapter ever. We would be the entities of human capital, and nothing else, of the contemporary economic theoretical imagination. (Brown 2015, 187)

Second, under the STEM juridical hierarchy, if the humanities do not conform to STEM regulative discourse, whose ‘metrics abjure humanistic inquiry’ (Brown 2015, 196), then they are disciplined with a view to being punished: either humanities departments are defunded, or humanities departments are subject to closure. Conceived in this way, one can develop an analogous relationship between the colonisation of the lifeworld and the colonisation of the space of reasons: Colonisation of the lifeworld 1. Dominance of the sphere of cultural reproduction by instrumental reason 2. ‘Juridification’ by the welfare state 3. Transforming the content of the lifeworld from informal/interpersonal to formal/apersonal 4. Levelling principle of exchange: Individuals are defined as units of capitalist practices rather than as autonomous agents with specific wants and needs 5. Complete social homogeneity, hollowing out the potential for developing the capacities needed for democratic citizenship

Colonisation of the space of reasons 1. Dominance of the manifest image and the space of reasons by nomothetic reason 2. ‘Formalisation’ by unified science 3. Transforming the content of the manifest image and the space of reasons from informal/ interpersonal to formal/apersonal 4. Levelling principle of mathematisation: One explains all events and processes by subsuming them under the laws of fundamental physics 5. ‘Unified science, we might conclude, would require Utopia or totalitarianism’ (Dupré 1995, 261), hollowing out the potential for developing the capacities needed for humanistic inquiry

The dominance of the sphere of cultural reproduction by formal reason parallels the dominance of the manifest image and the space of reasons by nomothetic reason: for example, the welfare state that is an essential institution of social democracy principally structures the provision of welfare under the framework of reifying capitalist practices: since the structure of social democracy is constituted by the systems of money (market capitalism) and power (the state), the provision of welfare will invariably fail to fulfil the function of mitigating conflict (cf. Offe, 1984, 85). Under the social-welfare state, there is little or no way to avoid ideological encroachment and colonisation by systems, since what is the base of the societal superstructure is the capitalist mode and relations of production. If the base is constituted by systems, then the entire whole is vulnerable to encroachment by systems. Securing and protecting the lifeworld, therefore, is effectively impossible under the welfare state.7 Equally, even with the Sellarsian synoptic vision, which involves the integration or fusion (as opposed to reconciliation) of the manifest and scientific images into one coherent image,8 ‘Sellars does indeed want to hold that the ontology of persons as rational agents and conceptual thinkers within the space of reasons is in principle

 Viz. Habermas 1987: 347. Cf. Habermas 1987: 348; 350–51.  For further, see Giladi 2022.

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successfully accommodated within the comprehensively physicalist ontology of the ideal scientific image of the world’ (O’Shea 2009, 194). Since the Sellarsian synoptic vision is primarily structured by the comprehensively physicalist ontology of the ideal scientific image, the purely naturalistic vocabulary will invariably fail to fulfil the function of mitigating conflict with the grammar of the manifest image. Under the synoptic vision, there is little or no way to avoid colonisation by the scientific image, since what is the base of the synoptic vision superstructure is purely naturalistic vocabulary. If the base is constituted by the comprehensively physicalist ontology of the ideal scientific image, then the synoptic vision is vulnerable to systemic encroachment by scientistic forms of naturalism. Securing and protecting persons as rational agents and conceptual thinkers within the comprehensively physicalist ontology of the ideal scientific image of the world, therefore, is effectively impossible. The manifest image conception of persons as thinking and intending beings is, as such, likely to be ‘overwhelmed’, rather than protected or preserved. In this way, the specific danger is a type of alienation, one which involves losing, to point of never recovering, precisely those sets of concepts/ways of thinking and speaking/vocabularies needed to make internal sense of life, nature, and cognition.9 To quote Karl Marx here, [o]ur objects in their relation to one another constitute the only intelligible language we use with one another. We would not understand a human language, and it would remain without effect. We are so much mutually alienated from human nature that the direct language of this nature is an injury to human dignity for us, while the alienated language … appears as justified, self-confident, and self-accepted human dignity. (Marx 1967, 280)

I find much to agree with Diamond’s Iris Murdoch-inspired analysis of this passage from Marx’s 1844 writings, where she notes that the intellectual and affective deprivation constitutive of the kind of alienation in play here is the absence of ‘the capacity for a reflective use of … concepts’, which leaves a language-user ‘unable to make intelligible to himself … the responsibilities and commitments internal to the moral life in which … they participate’ (Diamond 1988, 261). Under such a stance, the exercise of a language devoid of the subtle complexities of lifeworld discursive dynamics for making sense of life, nature, and cognition makes no sense of life, nature, and cognition. The exercise of a language devoid of the subtle complexities of lifeworld discursive dynamics is ‘blindness to what our conceptual life is like’ (Diamond 1988, 263). In what follows, I argue that aspects of Hegel’s metaphysics can and should be seen as offering a meaningful and powerful conceptual resource for explicating the cognitive pathology of scientistic forms of reductionism and eliminativism and for also painting a picture of how to decolonise the space of reasons from oppressive instances of scientific naturalism. Paraphrasing Walter Mignolo somewhat, this decolonial way of thinking is ‘nothing more than a relentless analytic effort … to overcome the logic of [epistemic] coloniality underneath the rhetoric of modernity,

 See Giladi (2022) for further on this.

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the structure of management and control that emerged out of the transformation of the [epistemic] economy’ (Mignolo 2011a, 10).

3.1  3.1 In his Science of Logic, Hegel bemoans the growing development of a scientistic culture: The fact is that interest, whether in the content or in the form of the former metaphysics, or in both together, has been lost … The exoteric teaching of the Kantian philosophy – that the understanding ought not to be allowed to soar above experience, lest the cognitive faculty become a theoretical reason that by itself would beget nothing but mental fancies – this was the justification coming from the scientific camp for renouncing philosophical thought. In support of this popular doctrine was added the cry of alarm of modern pedagogy, that the pressing situation of the time called for attention to immediate needs – that just as in ways of knowledge experience is first, so for skill in public and private life, exercise and practical education are the essential, they alone what is required, while theoretical insight is even harmful … [T]he singular spectacle came into view of a cultivated people without metaphysics – like a temple richly ornamented in other respects but without a holy of holies. (SL: 21.5–6; 7–8; cf. SL: 21.29–30; 25)

In this passage, Hegel appears to blame Kant’s doctrine of Humility for (inadvertently) giving rise to philosophy’s ‘self-renunciation’, namely the rising positivist philosophic culture in early nineteenth century Prussia. The ultimate worry Hegel has is that contempt for metaphysics deprives inquirers of the conceptual tools necessary for being at home in the world. This is what I take to signify Hegel’s most powerful metametaphysical argument, one which is nicely expressed in the following passage from the Encyclopaedia: Newton gave physics an express warning to beware of metaphysics …; but, to his honour be it said, he did not by any means obey his own warning … The real question is not whether we shall apply metaphysics, but whether our metaphysics [is] of the right kind: in other words, whether we are not … adopting one-sided forms of thought, rigidly fixed by understanding, and making these the basis of our theoretical as well as our practical work. (Enc 1: 144)

What we find here is Hegel’s dismissal of the question concerning whether metaphysics tout court is possible, and his insistence on asking the real question, ‘Which kind of metaphysics is the right kind of metaphysics?’. The new metametaphysical challenge posed by Hegel amounts to a litmus test for any metaphysical system to not merely be theoretically satisfying but also practically significant in a specific manner. The specific sense of practical significance concerns a broadly therapeutic notion that our general understanding of how all things hang together enables us to achieve at homeness in the world. In other words, the kind of metaphysics we are properly after is going to be sufficiently general/broad (hence not ‘one-sided’), and one which is a metaphysics of reason/speculative reflection (hence not ‘rigidly fixed by understanding’). The distinction, therefore, between reason (Vernunft) and

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understanding (Verstand) plays a significant role in the development of the right kind of metaphysics.10 For Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, properly making sense of nature involves going beyond a particular kind of naturalism, namely a naturalism that ‘turns out to be the dissolution of the distinct and the determinate, or, instead turns out to be simply the casting of what is distinct and determinate into the abyss of the void’ (PS: §16, 10). In other words, one cannot rest discursively content with a naturalism that aims to achieve at homeness in the world through the praxis of making sense of things either by eliminating or re-translating the sui generis in nature. The chapter ‘Observing Reason’ is where Hegel presents his argument against (proto-)scientistic naturalism, where such a naturalism ‘… analyses objects by distinguishing and isolating their various features, [where] these features [then] acquire the form of universality by being separated’ (Ferrini 2009, 92–93). Furthermore, Hegel’s principal critical argument in ‘Observing Reason’, because it is concerned with the respective Weltanschauungen of (proto-)scientistic naturalism and a more speculative naturalism, provides the conceptual resources to enable consciousness to posit concrete universals and arrive at the standpoint of Science. The ultimate advantage of speculative naturalism is that it is a remarkable improvement over the emaciated empiricism of scientistic naturalism, under which, as Dupré correctly writes, ‘the relationship of science and metaphysics in contemporary philosophy is often an unhealthy one’ (Dupré 1995, 167). What is crucial here is that the Hegelian diagnosis, which locates the cognitive pathology of scientistic forms of reductionism and eliminativism in a one-sided nomothetic conceptual structure (cf. McDowell 1994, 77–8), is not in any way suggesting that we bring in as many entities and processes to satisfy a penchant for highly complex landscapes. Hegel aims to show that neither a bifurcation of reality into two separate realms, nor any Ramsifying attempt to translate normative properties in non-normative, non-evaluative terms, à la heterophenomenology,11 will do the relevant philosophical work to correctly and fully understand the world we inhabit. Of course, having commitments to irreducible and ineliminable normative phenomena makes one’s ontology more complex than the ontology of a scientistic  For Hegel, the principal advantage of drawing this distinction between reason and understanding is that we are not vulnerable to being wrapped up in the various intractable and cognitively destabilizing dualisms which are the inevitable consequence of reflecting only from the perspective of understanding, i.e. purely analytical forms of reflection. What reason provides consciousness with is the means to avoid the pitfalls of such dualisms and the problems of analysis by thinking dialectically, i.e. by drawing distinctions yet establishing interconnectedness to a whole. A metaphysics which does not draw this distinction or one which conflates reason with understanding will, therefore, not be the right kind of metaphysics. This is because failing to draw the distinction between reason and understanding or conflating reason with understanding results in a one-sided conception of thought and a purely mechanistic conception of philosophic explanation. Sense-making, at least in the way I am interpreting Adrian Moore’s 2012 definition of metaphysics, for Hegelians, would require a commitment to a form of naturalism that is speculative and genuinely immanentist. 11  Heterophenomenology is a sophisticated right-wing Sellarsian position. 10

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naturalist; but the really substantive question that philosophers should ask themselves now is whether the principle of ontological parsimony as conceived from the scientistic perspective is genuinely able to make sense of things. The picture of reality as presented by scientistic naturalism and a unified science is of an aggregate of physical objects and processes objects governed by strict mechanical laws. Nature is thus conceived as ‘refined’ (James 2000, 15). Such a nomothetic framework and picture is opposed to speculative naturalism, which views our environment as phenomenologically robust and experientially vibrant, not least because the world to which we direct our sense-making practices, to quote Lynne Baker, is ‘capacious … – more English garden than desert landscape’ (Baker 2013, 234). Conceived in this way, the game played by scientism turns on itself: rather than serve science, it is anti-scientific. (i) To acknowledge the rhapsody of sensation and the blooming, buzzing confusion in nature in no way degenerates into a form of mysticism or supernaturalism: the aversion to dryness, as Murdoch would put it, and the taste for phenomenologically and metaphysically robust landscapes is part of a properly reflective, scientific understanding of the world. (ii) Recognizing the autonomy and heterogeneity of the logical space of reasons in no way entails conceiving of intentionality, et al. as ‘imaginary skyhooks’ (Baker 2013, xxii). On the contrary, such recognition deepens our way of viewing reality as intelligible by doing justice to our geistige Einstellung, our status as self-interpreting amphibians engaging in multifaceted modes of sense-making. Thus far, I have argued that Hegel’s metaphysics, as an example of speculative naturalism, can and should be viewed as offering a meaningful and powerful conceptual resource for explicating the cognitive pathology of ‘fetishistic reverence’ (Dupré 1995, 167) in scientistic forms of reductionism and eliminativism. Hegel rejects the idea that developing a speculative naturalist middle-ground between “rampant Platonism” and “bald naturalism” means having commitments to a spooky cognitive faculty, such as intellectual intuition. Rather, the development of speculative naturalism, which has a new clarity about nature, just means that a discursive consciousness, which takes concepts to be the principal (and in fact, only) means of cognising objects, must go beyond an epistemic framework which has a narrow/ thin/dry conception of thought and experience. To be a thinking subject is not to be a disembodied res cogitans that is separate from the world and is little more than a cognitive voyeur. As Matthew Ratcliffe writes, “[w]e do not philosophise as disembodied loci of rational thought, stripped of our practical, affective, bodily attunement to things” (Ratcliffe 2011, 126). In the next section, I detail how speculative naturalism might paint a picture of how to decolonise the logical space of reasons from oppressive instances of scientific naturalism.

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3.2  3.2 For Habermas, social conflict in late modernity is principally rooted in the struggle to resist the colonisation of the lifeworld by systems. Conflict is not now principally resulting from dissatisfaction with the material distribution of goods and services in society, but rather resulting from dissatisfaction with the encroachment by systems on the lifeworld’s territory. In The Theory of Communicative Action, the language Habermas uses to articulate how the lifeworld can and should deal with the pathological effects of juridification is primarily defensive. As he writes, ‘[t]he goal is no longer to supersede an economic system having a capitalist life of its own and a system of domination having a bureaucratic life of its own but to erect a democratic dam against the colonizing encroachment of system imperatives on areas of the lifeworld … (Habermas1987, 364). [I]t is a question of building up restraining barriers for the exchanges between system and lifeworld’. (Habermas 1992, 444)

As I understand Habermas here, the way in which one should deal with the pathological effects of juridification is by effecting resistance to the system’s ‘colonial’ oppression: one acts as a border-patroller and maintains a protective barrier. Crucially, though, Habermas appears to be committed to the claim that capitalist structures must be accepted as having primacy over communicative ones, and that the best one can hope for is to maintain the integrity of the democratic dam. By analogy, given the conceptual parallels between capitalism and scientism as partner-instantiations of formal reason, the way in which one resists scientistic naturalism’s colonial power is to act as a conceptual border-patroller and to maintain a protective hermeneutic barrier: recognising the hegemony of the natural sciences and nomothetic rationality’s dominance requires those wishing to resist the totalising encroachment of the logical space of reasons to erect a hermeneutic dam and maintain its structural integrity as best as one reasonably can. Crucially, though, this defensive strategy appears to be committed to the claim that nomothetic rationality must be accepted as having primacy over other forms of reason-based sense-making: for example, the liberal notions of finding a place for mind in the natural world and making elbow room for intentionality in the world described by physics both seem to presuppose that one ought to accept from the very outset the vocabulary and general Weltanschauung of the natural sciences, and then find some meaningful and coherent way of, quite literally, fitting intentionality and normativity into that nomothetic picture. This is very recently evidenced by David Rosenthal, who writes that ‘Sellars’s effort to fuse the manifest and scientific images constitutes one of the richest and most penetrating attempts to make room for mathematically recalcitrant manifest properties within a scientific worldview’ (Rosenthal 2016, 150). For that matter, the Placement Problem, from the very outset, aims to level out the idiosyncratic dimensions of the manifest image and the logical space of reasons. Both the logical structure and the discursive vocabulary of the Placement Problem

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frame the legitimacy of norms and intentionality, et al. in terms of whether they can be “managed” in the world described by the natural sciences: anything that resists is labelled ‘odd’. By being visibly marked, ‘odd’ phenomena become ‘queer’ phenomena, which then become ‘problematic’ and ‘punishable’ phenomena. There is, as such, compelling reason to think that nomothetic structure of placeability/locatability operate juridically. Paraphrasing Judith Butler, ‘the subjects regulated by such structures are, by virtue of being subjected to them, formed, defined, and reproduced in accordance with the requirements of those structures’ (Butler 1999, 4). Since purely naturalistic vocabulary is given priority for arranging our way of making sense of things, modality, meaning, norms, intentionality, et al. must be forced into a quantitative category that is appropriate for their specific characters. From a Hegelian perspective, the concern about resistance as well as the liberal naturalist notions, such as “making elbow room”, is that fitting intentionality and normativity into that nomothetic picture remains locked in the viewpoint of Verstand. It is, therefore, inhibited from dialectically revising the very notion of how sense-­ making ought to be constituted and practised, so much so that one fails to grasp how currently existing discursive formations can substantively challenged, rather than insipidly resisted or merely tweaked. The following by Paul Raekstad nicely captures the problem with resistance in general: In today’s political and philosophical context, a focus on resistance is, I would argue, inherently regressive, even reactionary, for two reasons. First, it implicitly takes for granted the basic institutions that produced the society we have now – with all its crises, inability, and refusal to address them. This in turn implies neglecting the need to look for new and better forms of social organisation that are more compatible with free, democratic, and ecologically sustainable modes of life. Second, it implies a kind of servility with respect to the status quo. It implies putting up some sort of fuss and opposition to the powers-that-be in the vain hope that they will then fix things for us, when what we need is something far more ambitious … (Raekstad 2020, 340).

Habermas himself recognised the deficiency of resistance and overly defensive attitudes to system-encroachment. I think the way he shifts to a far more positive and ambitious model in Between Facts and Norms is a Hegelian move, one which can and should be extended to the goal of decolonizing the space of reasons from scientistic encroachment. In this later work, he contends that if one is to overcome juridification, one must develop deliberative democracy, in which legal power can be rooted in the communicative power of the lifeworld, especially a well-functioning public sphere and civil society. Traversing ‘the long march through the institutions’ is progressively transformative, because debunking the legal positivist framework in favor of a discourse theory of law involves combatting and reversing the unofficial circulation of power in constitutional democracies. While the official circulation of power in a constitutional democracy involves the public voting and providing input to legislative assemblies; legislative assemblies then makes laws; the executive enacts these laws; and the judiciary reflects on these laws in cases of conflict. The unofficial circulation of power, by contrast, involves political parties, etc. manipulating the public. For Habermas, ‘in a perceived crisis situation’ (Habermas 1996, 380), the flow of power can be reversed to its official

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state once the public become actively aware of its unofficial circulation. This form of social consciousness reveals how one no longer deems current frameworks as rationally satisfying, thereby compelling agents to radically revise their socio-­ political sense-making practices. With regard to concerns about scientistic forms of naturalism, the perceived crisis situation here amounts to the crisis of the human sciences: for all of the indisputably important and impressive cognitive achievements of the natural sciences in making sense of things, the march to scientism constitutes a type of self-­renunciation and failure of rationality. As Henri Bergson puts it, ‘[w]e see that the intellect, so skilful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches the living. … [The intellect] proceeds with the rigor, the stiffness and the brutality of an instrument not designed for such use’ (Bergson 1944, 181). For Edmund Husserl, the best means of combatting the colonisation of the space of reasons by nomothetic disciplines and to retain the autonomous grammars of forms of life would be through conceptualising intentionality and the like from the perspective of transcendental phenomenology (see Moran 2012, 300–1). Though Hegelians and Husserlians will no doubt constructively disagree over whether speculative naturalism or transcendental phenomenology is the most effective decolonizing philosophical project, I think Husserlians would be hard-pressed to deny a significant Hegelian dimension to transcendental phenomenology. For, labelling scientism as ‘one-sided’ and ‘one-dimensional’ constitutes a dialectical move, which aims to supplant the perspective of the understanding with the perspective of reason in second-order discourse about sense-making. If one is to eventually overcome scientism, one must develop speculative sense-­ making practices, in which hermeneutic power can be rooted in the communicative power of discourse about sense-making. Traversing this ‘path of despair’ (PS: §78, 52) is progressively transformative, because debunking the one-sided and one-­ dimensional nomothetic framework in favour of a dialectical framework involves a quasi-decolonial practice of combatting and reversing the circulation of epistemic power. Such second-order modes of reflection necessarily presuppose the kind of self-conscious attitudes and intentional vocabulary of Geist. To this end, the following passage by Frantz Fanon is relevant here on a formal level12:

 I think it is very important to clarify what exactly I mean here: the analogy I am proposing depends exclusively on a formal similarity, but in no shape or form involves any attempt to construe a material similarity with decolonial political movements and the brutal hardships that come with historical colonisation. Colonialism operates under a logic of totalizing violence: everything about the indigenous is subjected to the insatiable appetite of the coloniser. There is cultural imperialism and systemic material exploitation of the colonised’s land, labour, and life. Colonisation, as harrowingly detailed by Fanon, involves the production and reproduction of a crippling inferiority complex, the paralysis of the dynamism of the indigenous population, and a near-permanent state of internalised dependency on colonial hegemons. Colonisation dehumanises and degrades colonised peoples “to the extent that they have to go through the whole process of relearning to be human” (Kebede 2001, 540). I recognise that separating out formal qualities of theories from their material and symbolic effects can never be cleanly done. All discursive moves are shaped by, and contribute to shaping, 12

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Decolonisation is the encounter between two congenitally antagonistic forces that in fact owe their singularity to the kind of reification secreted and nurtured by the colonial situation … Decolonisation never goes unnoticed, for it focuses on and fundamentally alters being, and transforms the spectator crushed to a nonessential state into a privileged actor … It infuses a new rhythm, specific to a new generation of men, with a new language and a new humanity. Decolonisation is truly the creation of new men … Decolonisation, therefore, implies the urgent need to thoroughly challenge the colonial situation. (Fanon [1961] 2004, 2)

In a formal decolonial respect, the dialectical function of speculative naturalism can also be articulated in Foucauldian ways, insofar as speculative naturalism qua critical theoretic framework ‘should be seen as a kind of attempt to emancipate historical knowledges from that subjection, to render them, that is, capable of opposition and of struggle against the coercion of a theoretical, unitary, formal … discourse. It is based on a reactivation of local knowledges – of minor knowledges, as [Gilles] Deleuze might call them – in opposition to the … hierarchisation of knowledges and the effects intrinsic to their power’ (Foucault 1980, 85). To be able to use concepts of these local/minor knowledges ‘is to be able to think about human life and what happens in it; it is not to be able to pick human beings out from other things or recommend that certain things be done to them or by them’ (Diamond 1988, 266). Central to the particular variety of decolonial project I have proposed is diagnosing scientism as a cognitive pathology, since its discursive form of life is not just symptomatic of, but encourages, ‘the failure to recognise the autonomy of individual provinces of knowledge’ (Windelband 1980, 171). Science as the measure of all things, as opposed to the measure of things only in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, is guilty of a cognitive imperialism, which is the theoretical equivalent of Iris Marion Young’s concept of cultural imperialism: In societies stamped with cultural imperialism, groups suffering from this form of oppression stand in a paradoxical position. They are understood in terms of crude stereotypes that do not accurately portray individual group members but also assume a mask of invisibility; they are both badly misrepresented and robbed of the means by which to express their perspective. Groups who live with cultural imperialism find themselves defined externally, positioned by a web of meanings that arise elsewhere. These meanings and definitions have been imposed on them by people who cannot identify with them and with whom they cannot identify. (Young 1990, 59)

Under this approach, the value of cultural distinctness is essential to individuals and not something accidental to them: their personal autonomy depends in part on being able to engage in specific cultural practices with others who identify with one another as in the same cultural group. For Young, most modern societies contain multiple cultural groups, some of which unjustly dominate the state or other important social institutions. In doing so, such a dominating group inhibits the ability of minority cultures to live fully meaningful lives in the latter’s own terms. The fields of power relations. All discursive moves, therefore, have concrete effects. I am invested in offering up this formal analogy between i) colonisation and scientism, and ii) decolonisation and speculative naturalism, because doing so explains the crisis facing the humanities and how the demos is being undone.

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dominant group in society can limit the ability of one or more of the cultural minorities to live out their forms of expression, namely the vocabularic and reflexive hermeneutic qualities of cultural minorities’ particular form of life. In other words, the dominant culture threatens to symbolically (and materially) swamp the minority culture, so much so that different cultural hermeneutic spheres  – ways in which members of cultures interpret (and re-interpret) their experiences  – are either crowded out or erased. Conceived in this formal way, the ultimate concern about scientism is that the vocabulary of the ideal scientific image becomes authoritarian by forcing other forms of inquiry to adopt the discursive recourses and grammars of formal disciplines fundamentally different in various ways to the manifest image’s ‘web of meanings’, to the extent that there is a type of, what one may call, ‘disciplinary double-consciousness’. To elaborate this, one should consider the logic underpinning those ideologies responsible for double-consciousness: for Du Bois, racist ideologies typically involve the marked and unmarked construction of hierarchies of ideal types against which others appear radically and problematically different, inferior, deviant, abject, base, and even disgusting. For example, as part of their self-conscious identification with fellow African-Americans in an African-American community, African-­ Americans communicatively self-interpret and find such communicative action empowering. However, African-Americans (and, of course, other people of colour), as part of a wider and racist world, are met with external and hostile web of meanings that radically distort such uplifting local self-conceptions. Under racist systems, not only are a range of Black and other racialised cultures’ web of meanings defined from a White perspective, but people of colour are subjected to regarding their own agency and bodies from a hostile racial point of view, namely ‘the white gaze’: It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. (Du Bois [1903] 2007, 38)

The symbolic and material power structure of racial oppression is intensified by what Fanon identifies as the colonial situation. Central to the colonial situation is not only a violent material order, but also a vocabulary and range of sense-making frameworks imposed by colonisers that are functionally designed to render abject and even eliminate local vocabularies and sense-making paradigms. In colonial lifeworlds, which (re)produce a pathological society, personality, and culture, the basic experiential relation people of colour have to themselves becomes distorted and mutated by viewing their agency and their body from the perspective of traditional White prejudicial attitudes.

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Central to the reproduction of a crippling inferiority complex in colonised peoples is the brutalizing effect of epistemic violence on the subjectivity of the colonised. The effect of systematic dehumanisation and portrayal of local populations as ‘barbaric’ and ‘savage’ means that the coloniality of power operates in a such a way that colonised people risk losing the ability to think of themselves in non-colonial ways. To quote Fanon here, ‘I cast an objective gaze over myself, discovered my blackness, my ethnic features; deafened by cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders, and above all, yes, above all, the grinning Y a bon Banania’ (Fanon [1952] 2008, 92; cf.Fanon [1952] 2008, 94). By formal analogy, as part of their self-conscious identification with fellow humanists in a humanist community, humanists communicatively self-interpret and find such communicative action empowering. However, humanists, as part of a wider world, meet external and hostile web of meanings that radically distort such uplifting local self-conceptions. Under the ideology of scientism, not only is the web of meanings of the humanities defined from a STEM perspective, but humanists invariably start to regard their own discursive formations and sense-making practices from the STEM gaze. The risk of this ‘depleted vocabulary’ (Diamond 1988, 263) is losing the ability to think in imaginative humanist ways. As such, given all these alienating and pathological qualities, rather than solve the Placement Problem, I think we should dissolve it. This is because ‘solving’ the problem still retains a commitment to the underlying framework of formal reason that typifies the marked problematisation and colonisation of the space of reasons. The explanation for why the Placement Problem grips the philosophic imagination with such force is that rational activity is exclusively articulated in terms of the kind of inferential patterns definitive of Verstand.13 However, central to Hegelianism is a committed opposition to treating the model of rationality which Verstand instantiates most explicitly as exhaustive of critical thinking. This is because Hegel places significant emphasis on the dialectical function of Vernunft, which does not conceive of rational activity as an inflexible, critical reason. While he notes that a positive feature of modernity is the development of individual autonomy and an unwillingness to defer to external authorities, at the same time, one should acknowledge that Hegel deems inflexibility as defective in cases when it morphs into onedimensionality and crowds out dialectical means of making sense of things. (viz. SL: 21.5–6; 7–8). Given the difference between natural science and philosophy in terms of how they respectively make sense of things, I think it would be incorrect to suppose that natural science and philosophy should be understood in terms of a geistig hierarchy. This is because the way in which natural science makes sense of things is so different to the way in which philosophy makes sense of things: conceived in this way, one ought not to regard natural science and philosophy as rival forms of intelligibility competing with one another to best satisfy our desire for understanding our world.

13

 See Giladi (2019).

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On the contrary, natural science and philosophy should be viewed as complementary reflective practices, practices that are jointly indispensable for adequately and holistically engaging with our environment: reflection on our discursivity illuminates the particular kind of amphibian epistemic architecture we have for experiencing the world from our Geistig perspective. To quote Bernard Williams here, who expresses a similar claim: ‘I take philosophy to be, part of a more general attempt to make the best sense of our life, and so of our intellectual activities, in the situation in which we find ourselves’ (Williams 2006, 182). Though Hegel does not obviously suggest his amphibian analogy applies to shifting between space-of-reason-discourse and space-of-nature-discourse, I think there is sufficient reason to believe the analogy also holds in this context: Spiritual culture, the modern intellect, produces [an] opposition in man which makes him an amphibious animal, because he now has to live in two worlds which contradict one another … If general culture has run into such a contradiction, it becomes the task of philosophy to supersede the oppositions, i.e. to show that neither the one alternative in its abstraction, nor the other in the like one-sidedness, possesses truth, but that they are both self-dissolving … (LA: 54–55)

Coming to terms with and embracing our amphibious intellectual situation and its rich, complex vocabularies enables us to realise that, for Hegel, ‘[t]he final end of the world … is that of life assuming the position of Geistigkeit (our own mindful agency) and coming to a full self-consciousness, that is, our full awareness of our status as self-interpreting animals’ (Pinkard 2012, 190). Such self-consciousness is unattainable so long as one remains locked in the discursive framework of the Placement Problem and the ‘monochrome formalism’ (PS: §15, 11) of dry voyeurism. As Diamond expresses it, ‘[w]hat it is to grasp the biological concept is nothing like what it is to grasp the concept of a human being. But neither is the concept of a human being that of Homo sapiens plus an evaluative extra’ (Diamond 1988, 265). Conflating saying and showing means ‘the problems of life have still not been touched at all’ (Wittgenstein 1922, 6.52).

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