What is an Action?

Ground and Consequent in Schelling’s

Philosophy of Nature
Iain  Hamilton  Grant
p. 3-26

TEXTO NOTAS AUTOR
TEXTO COMPLETO
 1 Schelling F.W.J., Philosophische Untersuchungen über das
Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die da (...)

All nature tells us that it is in no wise by virtue of mere geometrical

necessity that it exists; there is not simply pure reason in it, but
personality and spirit. […] Otherwise, geometric reasoning which has
ruled for so long must long since have fully penetrated nature and
have achieved its idol of universal and eternal laws of nature more
fully than has yet occurred, since every day is has to take increased
cognizance of the irrational relationship of nature to itself. Creation
is nothing given but an act. There are no consequences of universal
laws; instead, God, i.e. God’s person, is the universal law, and
everything that happens is by virtue of God’s personality. 1

 2 Schelling F.W.J., System der gesamten Philosophie und der

Naturphilosophie insbesondere (1804), in (...)

 3 “The natural philosophy of our time”, says Schelling, “has first

advanced in science the distinctio (...)

 4 SW I/7, 371; tr. Gutmann, 47

 5 SW I/7, 357; tr. Gutmann, 31

 6 SW I/7, 396; tr. Gutmann, 76, t.m.

 7 SW I/7, 395; tr. Gutmann, 74, t.m. See also SW I/7, 415; tr.
Gutmann, 98: “We have an earlier revel (...)

 8 That is, the nature ‘outlined’ in the First Outline of a System of

the Philosophy of Nature (1799) (...)

 9 This is how Schelling, drawing on Aristotle’s De anima 414b29f,

presents what he calls the “law of (...)

1A Schelling scholar would immediately note an anachronism in

my title. The concepts ‘ground and consequent’, she would
point out, stem not from the Naturphilosophie but from
the Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom
and the Objects Connected Therewith . The philosophy of nature
is over after the 1804 Würzburg System2 at the latest, and the
philosophy of freedom, if not of religion, revelation and
mythology, succeeds this beginning with the already strange
prose of the Freiheitsschrift. Why then, we would reply, does
Schelling continue to draw on the Naturphilosophie in that work,
not only for the famed distinction between ground and
existence,3 but to the extent that these inquiries affirm that “the
root of freedom” lies “in the independent ground of
nature”,4 such a way that “the task to be undertaken here can
only be developed from the fundamental principles of a true
nature-philosophy”?5 Even at the far end of the Inquiries when,
following the “dynamic mode of explanation”, “nature’s laws” are
“reduced to feeling, spirit and willing”,6 the word, the unit of
what Schelling calls a “second” or consequent revelation, is
“spoken out into nature”,7 a nature that remains despite the
“reduction” and upon which its revelation remains consequent.
Thus the nature outlined in the earlier philosophy of nature
is exhibited in the later.8 The question, then, is how
 consequence arises and what consequences this entails for the
antecedent. Why does reduction not eliminate what is reduced;
by what power, that is, does the antecedent remain in the
consequent?9
 10 Schelling F.W.J., Timaeus. Schellingiana 4, Buchner H. (ed.),
Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann-Holz (...)

 11 Schelling F.W.J., Einleitung in die Philosophie. Schellingiana 1,

Ehrhardt W.E. (ed.), Stuttgart-Ba (...)

 12 This is too compressed to be helpful here. For more on this

claim, see my ‘Remains of the World’, i (...)

 13 Andere Deduktion der Prinzipien der positiven

Philosophie (1839), SW I/4, 339: “the necessarily exi (...)

2Apart from these historical reasons, which demonstrate at least

a continuing attention to the nature-philosophy, there is a
demonstrable conceptual continuity throughout Schelling’s
career, chiefly concerning the ultimacy of environing powers.
Even the question of Schelling’s response to what he calls
“Kant’s critique of natural cognition [ Kants Kritik des natürlichen
Erkennens]” (SW II/1, 526), itself a continuation of the Kant-
Plato constellation concerning the “substantiality of the
idea”,10 admits of a constant solution throughout: Schelling
transforms Kant’s critical restriction of the capacities of the
concept into reason’s attempt at self-transcendence in what he
later called negative philosophy, the philosophy of essence or of
the what there is, of what is in the middle; that there is,
however, transcendental philosophy cannot address, since it
lacks the means for positing what is outside itself. Such a role is
taken by the Naturphilosophie in the earlier work, which opens
 reason to its source, while the later positive philosophy, the true
goal of which is “the concept of creation”, 11 forges a naturalism
concerning the powers of the concept as the basis for its
“intensification” or “potentiation”. 12 Thus neither the positive
nor naturephilosophy simply accept or reject Kantian restrictions
on the capacities of the concept, nor affirm a merely
hypothetical nature on the basis of such capacities. Rather, each
seeks a one-world solution that does not invoke the relation
‘concept-object’, but rather the positivity, the “ natura
necessaria”13 of concepts. Conceptual relations, then, just are
conceptual; but relations between concepts and other natural
kinds become questions of dependency. As he puts the point in
the Stuttgart Private Lecturesof 1810,
 14 “Inwiefern ist überhaupt ein System möglich? Antwort: es hat
lange schon ein System gegeben, ehe de (...)

To what extent is a system ever possible? I would answer that long

before man decided to create a system, there already existed one,
that of the world or cosmos.14  

3The possibility  question is not answered directly: no causal

account is offered, nor is any relation posited between the
world-system and a voluntaristically created one. Rather, the
dependency of the consequent upon an antecedent is asserted.
The location of something’s being conceived is not
the source upon which its being-conceived depends, but
distributes grounds and consequents from a state of affairs or
‘field’, as a feature of which there occurs a conceiving. In other
words, not only does the being-conceived of X entail the
conceiving of X not being, or makes the being of X consequent
upon not-X; the conceiving’s occurring similarly entails that its
 non-occurrence be conceived. To offer a sketch of the
hypothesis: the field formed by the conceiving extends beyond
an X conceived, it smears the entity into its past, and further
into a past that is no longer specifically its past. The conceiving
involves “creation”, as Schelling says, not in the sense that it is
autochthonous, but rather in the sense that nothing is or, that
everything that is, is dependent. Schelling thus offers a field
ontology that involves nature when the conditions of emergence
cannot be exhaustively recovered in the conceiving, such that
the conceiving is regional within a field which, because grounds
are distributed within it, is not grounded in itself, and so is itself
ungrounded. I hope to unpack the virtues and character of this
account in the following.
 15 Although I will not concentrate on this here, its first
formulation follows from Schelling’s 1794 c (...)

4The question of inexhaustible dependency, or the problem of

grounds, is, I assert, a problem Schelling is concerned with
throughout his work.15 Thus, I will examine it in the
‘ungrounding’ argument offered by Schelling’s Ideas for a
Philosophy of Nature (1797) via the opening pages of the First
Outline (1799), where he develops the hypothesis of “simple
actants” and the Stufenfolge or “sequencing” connected with it.
By moving freely between epochs of Schelling’s philosophizing, I
take this therefore as an opportunity to elucidate the specific
character of Schelling’s post-Kantian and naturalistic idealism.

1. Two Ungrounding
Arguments
5The first matter to be confronted with respect to a philosophy
of nature concerns how it is distinguished from the natural
sciences that are indisputably a substantive a posteriori route to
natural knowledge. For this reason, a philosophy of nature
cannot avoid accusations of armchair metaphysics, which is
equated with apriorism: what must obtain if nature is conceived
in accordance with such and such a thesis?
6The assumption of those who make this accusation is that
transcendental philosophy is easily overthrown, that it does not
make things insurmountably thoughtish, so to speak (this is as
true for experienced things as for things-in-themselves). Yet
the First Outline and the Ideas  take transcendental philosophy
seriously, although where Kant asserts that insurmountability
issues from experience and its apperception, Schelling considers
that it stems from the nature of the concept. Yet this
nature problematizes the character of insurmountability, as we
shall see, since being insurmountable, this cannot be proper
only to the concept.
7This is one reason why Schelling thinks a philosophy of nature
remains prior to transcendental philosophy (the philosophy of
the concept, or the critique of natural knowing) and the
philosophy of freedom (the theory of autonomous consequents).
Other such reasons include precisely those Kantian restrictions
on what philosophy – the science of the concept – is capable of.
The questions therefore are: in what sense is (a) a philosophy
of  nature prior to transcendental philosophy; and (b) in what
sense can it be argued that nature is prior to the concept. When
therefore he writes that
 16 SW I/3, 12: “der Begriff des Seyns als eines Ursprünglichen
soll aus der Naturphilosophie (eben sow (...)

8The concept of being, as an original concept, should simply be

eliminated from the philosophy of nature (as it should equally
be from transcendental philosophy),16
 17 See Lectures 12 (SW II/1, 282-287) and 13 (SW II/1, 297-
299) of the Darstellung des rein rationalen (...)

 18 SW I/10, 303. The question Schelling asks is richer. He writes,

“the first question of philosophy i (...)

9Schelling is confirming the consequences of the destruction of

the ontological proof Kant executed in the
first Critique,17 namely, that the concept already qualifies
hypothetical entities as being minimally just such entities, so
that no valid conclusion may be drawn concerning their
existence – beyond what is already in the premise. The positive
lesson of this is that philosophy moves in the sphere of the
concept, and that existence, far from being a predicate, is
always a subject (which follows from the refutation: existence
cannot be a predicate because it is presupposed in the subject).
Hence how it is that Schelling formulates the question when he
asks, at the beginning of the 1844 Exhibition of the Natural
Process, “what am I thinking when I think what exists?” 18 The
negative lesson is that, when we think to escape it, for example,
when we imagine our ontological hypotheses to track only those
well-established deliverances of the natural sciences, then
precisely for that reason we have not exited the domain of the
concept, but remain within it.
 10But Schelling not only affirms Kantian constraints on
ontological propositions when he proposes the elimination of
“the concept of being”. He adds, concerning that concept, that it
should be eliminated as an original concept. That is, if there is a
concept of being, it is not given, but emergent or constructed.
Hence the claim that
 19 “Über die Natur philosophiren heißt die Natur
schaffen”, SW I/3, 11, tr. Peterson, 14. This is also (...)

“to philosophize about nature means to create nature”.19

11While this may be read as following asserting the strongest of

possible idealisms, as Jacobi challenged Kant to produce, i.e.
that the only nature there is to philosophize about is the one
philosophy itself produces, what follows in the First
Outline demonstrates this insufficient.
12First, the proposition leaves the agent of this philosophising
unpredicated. If it were the familiar, conceiving subject, the
proposition would either mean that to philosophize about
nature is to create the concept of nature, or that philosophy is
the only creation we know.
 20 SW I/3, 17n; tr. Peterson, 17n.

13Second, if it is not this subject (and the proposition itself gives

us no reason to think it is), then the agent of nature’s creation
can be none other than nature, so that philosophizing itself is
nature’s self-creation as concept, thus affirming that “nature is
its own product”,20 even when this product is the
philosophizing about  it. Here the proposition means: the
thinking you think you are thinking is in fact nature’s doing .
 21 SW I/3, 12; tr. Peterson, 14.
 22 The edition of the Weltalter published in
Schelling’s Works (SW I/7) dates from 1815 and has been t (...)

 23 SW I/8, 200: “Aus der Quelle der Dinge geschöpft und ihr
gleich, hat die menschliche Seele eine Mit (...)

14Third, because nature, if it is prior to being in that being is a

derivative concept and as such should be “eliminated from
naturephilosophy”,21 consists in the becoming of being, or in
creation, it cannot adequately be conceived without thinking the
emergence of emergence, the beginning of becoming, and thus
creation. In this case, the proposition means: philosophizing
about nature is to conceive creation and therefore involves
creation. This is confirmed by all drafts 22 of the Ages of the
World: “Created out of the source of things and the same as it,
the human soul has a co-science with creation.” 23
 24 Plato, Philebus 26d, cited Schelling 1994, 63. Hermann Krings
notes, in ‘Genesis und Materie - Zur (...)

15According to this last, it is because the concept of nature is

consequent upon its creation that being is not prior to nature
but consequent upon it or, since “nature” is the medium of the
“becoming of being”.24 Yet the discussion from the First
Outline  focuses on the concept of being, on the hypothesis that
every science has its unconditioned, on the problem of how an
unconditioned is to be predicated of  nature. In consequence, we
may only say so far that nature’s antecedence with respect to
being holds for, but not reducibly in, the domain of the concept.
Yet this is at first sight inconsistent with Schelling’s later claim
that
 25 SW II/3, 163n. “Denn nicht weil es ein Denken gibt, gibt es ein
Seyn, sondern weil ein Seyn ist, gi (...)

It is not because there is thinking that there is being, but rather the
converse: it is because there is being that there is thinking. 25

 26 Unpublished paper, first annual meeting of the North American

Schelling Society, Seattle, August 29 (...)

 27 SW I/10, 126; History of Modern Philosophy, tr. Andrew Bowie,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (...)

 28 Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of

the Philosophical Sciences (1830) § (...)

16It appears inconsistent because the argument here concerns

the consequent position of thinking with respect to being. Yet if
this were so, how can the concept be held to be antecedent with
respect to being? Since it is amongst what Edward Allen Beach
has shown to be the five justifiable out of the ‘Twenty-Five Basic
Criticisms of Hegel’ in On the History of Modern Philosophy26 in
Schelling’s On The History of Modern Philosophy , that “Hegel
erred in supposing that logic in principle can include
everything”,27 Schelling himself would fall foul of the same
criticism if he supposed, with Hegel, that “Nature is the first in
point of time, but the absolute prius is the Idea; this
absolute prius is the last, the true beginning, Alpha is
Omega”.28
17Stated in the form of a dilemma, either nature itself is first and
thinking last, or, the concept “nature” is prior to the nature
conceived. If anything is prior to the concept, then what it is that
so remains – being – remains originary and has not been, as per
the First Outline’s instructions, eliminated either from the
 philosophy of nature or from transcendental philosophy. But it is
not being but “the concept of being as an original concept ” that
is the candidate for elimination. The salient difference then is
between being and its concept, where the latter is consequent
upon the former, as per Schelling’s remark in the Grounding.
 29 Lyotard, J.-F., Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime, Paris:
Galilée, 1991, 222.

18But how is such a “sideways on view” of the difference

between the concept and its object generated, as though this
view were not afforded precisely by the concept of ‘concept,
object’? Is it Schelling’s contention that such a view is available?
In other words, does the philosophy of nature rest precisely on
the claim that, given the elimination of being from
transcendental philosophy, the priority of the philosophy of
nature over transcendental philosophy is “given”? Yet how would
this be thinkable without violating the first principle of
transcendental philosophy, that every concept is constructed,
that nothing is given, and everything taken (“ accepta,  non data”,
as Lyotard perspicuously notes)?29
19Look again at the statement:
The concept of being, as an original concept, should simply be
eliminated from the philosophy of nature (as it should equally be
from transcendental philosophy).

 30 SW I/3, 13: “Das Seyn selbst = Thätigkeit ist.” Tr. Peterson,

14.

20What is the elimination candidate? It is not Being but

the concept of Being. Hence the later hypothesis that “Being
 itself is = activity”,30 or the earlier one that if, according to the
principles of transcendental philosophy,
 31 SW I/3, 12: “[A]lles, was ist, Construktion des Geistes ist, so
ist das Seyn selbst nichts anderes (...)

everything that is, is a construction of the mind, then Being itself is

nothing other than the constructing itself.31

 32 ‘Über den wahren Begriff der Naturphilosophie und die richtige

Art ihre Probleme aufzulösen’ was fi (...)

 33 SW I/4, 84.

21Nor is it the concept of Being  per se, but rather the concept of
being as an original concept, that is to be eliminated. Schelling
objects to the very idea of the priority of the concept, in the first
place as regards the philosophy of nature. “There is an idealism
of nature, and an idealism of the I”, he writes, responding to a
review of his nature-philosophical works up to 1800, enitled ‘On
the true concept of Nature-philosophy’: 32 “To me, the former is
the original, and the latter the derivative”33. Nature, that is, is
not to be conceived as parasitic upon an originary concept,
which means precisely that the concept is not autochthonous.
Therefore, a nature-philosophical inquiry begun from the
originary concept of being begins precisely with a
false prius since the concept of being, like all concepts, is
derived. It is the derivative nature of the concept that is
insuperable, and this belongs to a natura necessaria it shares
with everything consequent.
 34 Fichte writes that “the concept of being [Seyns] is by no
means regarded as a primary and original (...)
 35 SW I/4, 84 &n; tr. Peterson, 21 &n.

22The question is from what is it derived. Or rather, since by

reason of derivation there are no originary concepts, how is
derivation itself conceived to arise? If “being simply is activity”
(Thätigkeit), there is no being from which activity could issue
without violation of the proposition. In order that there is no
straightforward opposition between being and activity, as there
is for Fichte,34 Schelling identifies the principle of things,
existents or beings with “simple actants”. According to this
“dynamic atomism” we may now add that being
is individuated  activities, not merely activity itself. While the
entirety of Section Two of the First Division of the First Outline is
concerned with these “original actants”, their elaboration per
se is hypothetically presented in a long footnote 35 – because to
acknowledge that there are simples is problematic for the
sciences of emergence or the dynamic accounts of nature
Schelling championed throughout his Naturphilosophie. Further,
the problem of the identification of an X with a Y – a concept
with, say, an action, a pulse of energy – is an account of identity
he will first offer in § 52 of the 1801 Presentation of my System
of Philosophy:
 36 I have not altered Vater’s translation choices as they are
felicitous for my argument. However, it (...)

 37 SW I/4, 145, tr. Vater, 2012, 164.

The essence of absolute identity, insofar as it is the immediate

ground of reality [Realität], is power [Kraft]. – [This] follows from the
concept of power. For every immanent cause [Grund] 36 of reality is
designated a power. But if absolute identity is the immediate ground
 [Grund] of a reality, it is immanent cause [ Grund] as well. This is so
because it is really only the immanent cause [ Grund] of a Being
[Seyns].37

23The simple actant is therefore simultaneously a principle  (i.e.,

a creature of reason) and an entity. What is, is a derivative
simple action. What, then, is the source of the hypothesis of
“simple actants”?
24We have already laid the groundwork for the hypothesis. This
groundwork consists of the following principles. Firstly, the
elimination of originary concepts does not entail the elimination
of concepts, nor even of concepts of origins, but only the
originary nature of the concept as such. That is to say, they
emerge and therefore are not the totality of what is. Secondly, if
the concept is emergent then the conceiving of things is
similarly so, such that emergence may be generalized or, as
Schelling puts it, “unconditioned [unbedingt]” with respect to
what is often called either a “space of reasons” or a nature
occupying a distinct domain (for example, as the product of an
equally rational “realm of law”). Thirdly, since if emergence
occurs, we can neither assert an originary being nor assert of
such and such an entity that it is original without contradicting
the hypothesis, it follows that while actions are prior to
products, products are not other than actions but inhibited,
therefore reiterative, actions. It is these recursions or repetitions
that are the simples of nature if nature consists, as Kielmeyer
had it, in “proportions of forces” rather than in basic material
substances.
 38 SW I/3, 17; tr. Peterson 17.

 39 SW I/2, 350; tr. Grant, 2010, 93.

25Accordingly, when the First Outline proposes that “Nature has
unconditioned reality [unbedingte Realität]”,38 “unconditioning”
works, minimally, in two ways. Firstly, the hypothesis entails
that there is no original condition under which alone nature
occurs, and secondly therefore, the conceiving of nature does
not supply these conditions, such that the transcendental loop is
never closed in knowing, which is why “our knowledge of first
causes” is “incomplete”39 but rather open towards
transcendentally and physically unrecoverable antecedence,
towards a source never identifiable with any or all of its
emergents.
26What Schelling here calls “unconditioned” is therefore a
version of the ungrounded argument he provides first in the
Introduction to the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, which we
shall discuss prior to returning to the hypothesis of “simple
actants” and their organization. The ‘Introduction’ consists, I will
argue, in a realist argument for ungrounded powers and a realist
critique of transcendental philosophy as “natural cognition”.
Both are preparatory for an idealism that simultaneously
outflanks the philosophy of the concept and a naturalism that
outflanks that of the mere realist, whose criterion must always
be less than the totality of the real.
27The ‘Introduction’ to the Ideas is critically addressed to the
problems to which transcendental explanations of nature are
subject, an argument that the translation unfortunately
disguises by rendering the specifically Kantian
term Vorstellung  not, as is standard practise, as
“representation” but as “idea”, which term is further used to
translate Schelling’s Idee. To establish the gist of Schelling’s
 problematization of transcendental philosophy, it is worth
rehearsing some of the Introduction’s key points. Specifically,
these problems centre on how it is that concepts or ideas arise.
If experience is as the transcendental philosopher says it is –
namely, as we saw, ungrounded in anything underlying or
originary – then there can be no distinction between object and
idea. This is manifestly important if we are concerned either to
deny or to affirm egress beyond a space of reasons by means of
reason. However, our inability to distinguish object and idea,
that is to say, rests on our knowing of “the reality of objects
independent of our representations” only through our
representations:
 40 SW I/2, 15; tr. Harris and Heath, 1988, 12.

In that I represent [vorstelle] the object [Gegenstand], object and

representation are one and the same. And only in this inability to
distinguish the object from the representation during the
representing itself lies the conviction, for the ordinary understanding,
of the reality of external things, which become known to it, after all,
only through representations.40

 41 As Fichte found: “Intellect and thing are thus exact opposites
[entgegengesetzt]: they inhabit two (...)

 42 SW I/2, 16; tr. Harris and Heath, 13.

 43 Schelling introjects the question, therefore, of how the

question of the possibility of a world for (...)

 44 SW I/2, 17, tr. Harris and Heath, 13.

28Yet the philosopher may conceptually

distinguish Gegenstand and Vorstellung in that, if, according to
the hypothesis, things are independent of representations, they
cannot be the effects of the latter. Yet if we then argue that
“things are the causes [Ursachen] of representations”, it follows
that the antecedence of thing to representation becomes
permanently unbridgeable,41 such that no passage may be
assumed from one to the other. It follows that things are what
they are, while representations are what they are, and things
therefore “are not represented” and that “we have no concept
[Begriff] of them whatsoever”.42 This is not however an
explanation of how things are in themselves, but rather of how
it is that mind and matter separate, and they may do so not on
their own, but rather only insofar as this separation issues from
me:43 only because I recognize the dependency of each on my
conceiving do “both arise only in the necessary succession of my
representations, from which I have released myself” insofar as I
raise myself above them as their source.44 This “raising myself
above” is the apperceptive instance whereby alone I
acknowledge my representations as my own. But this now
reduplicates the ordinary understanding’s account of the
‘lateral’ separation of representation and object ‘vertically’: both
representation and object are mine, resolving the question of
their arising for me insofar as such objects are dependent on my
representations. What now becomes inconceivable is how
objects may affect me at all, how an I might have arisen, since I
am alone the source of their representations. This is the top-
down version of the ‘hard problem’, so to speak, such that there
is no passage between the higher and the lower since the lower
is the product of the higher. It is eliminative idealism.
29Now if this follows the “necessary succession of my
representations”, then it is impossible that things be otherwise.
Accordingly, I posit objects as powerless, yet as being affected
by activity superior to them. Yet superior in what sense? How,
that is, would my activity affect objects unless these objects
were already my activity? And how, were that the case, would the
nature of the activity differ from the nature of those objects? If,
in other words, no objects are posited that are not posited by
me, there can be no question of a causal relation – minimally,
one in which effects arise – between things as they are in
themselves  and my representations, despite the fact that such
things in themselves are not representations, because they are
empty thought-things posited by me. And yet how would they
then differ from objects I represent, since they are effects of the
same capacity or power?
30Schelling’s point is absolutely not to argue in favour of  a
causal route to the arising of representations, but rather to show
how there arises, in a nature so conceived, a dualism of object
and act, of body and force, in consequence of the spontaneous
separation of mind as representer and world as represented.
Now, therefore, the transcendentalist must argue that a
representation of matter, for instance, is not an object, but the
sum total of actions that make it up. Hence the hypothesis that
“matter has forces” which entails, according to Schelling, that if
such a thing as matter is posited that is the bearer or substance
of which forces are the accident, then matter cannot be argued
to have arisen from forces at all, regardless of their source –
whether a transcendental I or a material world. This is the point
at which the initial rehearsal of what I am calling, in advance of
 Schelling’s own nomenclature for the ground of existence, the
ungrounding argument.
31Assuming matter ontologically prior to forces, how would it
acquire them? This is impossible, argues Schelling, since it
entails an action by which both object and force are affected,
that is, it presupposes what is to be explained,
namely, that forces affect objects. Yet how could this occur
unless the object or matter were not different in kind from
forces? If they are not different in kind, then it cannot be argued
that matter is in any sense “independent” of forces, nor
therefore that it is ontologically prior to its activities. As
Schelling puts it,
 45 SW I/2, 23; tr. Harris and Heath, 18.

You know only how matter, i.e. force itself, works against force; and
how effects can be produced on something which originally
is not  force, we have no conception at all.45

 46 SW I/2, 23; tr. Harris and Heath, 18.

32If there is a concept of matter that has and therefore is not

forces, neither is it thinkable how matter could have such forces,
nor how forces could affect such matter. Matter serves merely as
the “ultimate substratum, beyond which your knowledge cannot
go”. Neither therefore can forces be explained from matter. So if
activity occurs at all, it cannot be the case that it does so on the
basis of some material substratum different in kind from forces.
Yet the concept of matter arises precisely as a means of
asserting a basis of reality independent of my representations,
albeit this time neither as cause nor effect – because it is, ex
hypothesi, external to me or, as Kant argues in the Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science, “outside my concept” (AA IV,
295) – but as that which is affected by forces such as, to use
Schelling’s example, gravitation [Schwere]. So regardless of
whether matter exists in itself or in my representations, it is
inconsistent with the possibility either of its being or having
effects since, by definition, it can neither have nor be the forces
by means of which alone effects would be conceivable. Thus
forces “cannot be explained from the matter” 46 nor objects from
activities, assuming the former different in kind from the latter.
The only alternative therefore is to explain objects from forces
and to abandon the idea of the substrate or ground in which
they inhere or of which they are properties or accidents.
33Schelling’s conclusion is remarkable in that it demonstrates
the requirement that, given a powers hypothesis, their
ungroundedness is necessary regardless of whether the problem
arises transcendentally or otherwise. If there are powers, then
powers cannot be conceived as properties of something that
essentially is not them on pain of simple dualism, since the
latter cannot be explained from the former, nor the former from
the latter. Moreover, we note that according to this account, the
distribution of antecedent and consequent entails that the latter
be consequent upon the former. That is, it follows from
Schelling’s argumentation that no ground may be postulated as
original if origination is to occur. That consequents arise is
therefore the ground of antecedents consequently, not
antecedently. If antecedence is operative at all, then it itself is
emergent, not merely given.
34Hence the elimination of the “concept of being, as an original
concept” rehearses the Ideas’  ungrounding argument at the
 outset of the First Outline, and is neither reducibly an argument
concerning transcendental philosophy nor does it ignore it in
the interests of some naïve realism. Rather, in consequence of
Schelling’s pursuit of it, it emerges that antecedence is entailed
when consequents, whether concepts or otherwise, arise. Hence
the entailment of “simple actants” is that nature has
unconditioned reality if there are actions at all. An action, that
is, is one just when its emergence and its cessation are not
reducible to one another, when, in other words, alpha is not
omega, or when something arises. If what thus arises is
conceived as ultimately or reducibly a change in some given
substrate, then while the action is grounded, that substrate
cannot be conceived as itself an action. In consequence,
explaining how it is that something alien to action can be
affected by one falls foul of the objections raised in the Ideas, to
wit, that no such antecedent substrate may be conceived, if
there are actions (i.e. if there are distributors of antecedence
and consequence), without eliminating the concept of action and
thus the emergence or derivation of the concept at the same
time as that of nature. The question is whether, as the critical
philosopher might think, this is a recommendable state of
conceptual affairs, or whether the cost is too high – whether,
that is, ontological quietism is secured by a presumed
impotence of the concept.
 47 SW I/4, 156; tr. Vater 2012, 171.

 48 SW I/9, 439-452.

35Why then are “simple actants”, the hypothesis of “dynamic

atomism”, advanced so hesitantly, principally in footnotes? As
we shall see, Schelling is hesitant about the simplicity which
attaches not to atoms or units, but powers, since if there are
powers, and these are unbroken by grounds of another
substantial kind, then how is it that “inhibition” might arise
other than by powers acting on powers? In other words, it is
the derivative rather than original  character of simple actants
that gives Schelling pause, since simplicity of actant is
consequent upon a turbulent and ubiquitous acting. Consider,
for example, a magnet. Its actions are simple and depend on
opposing poles. But the local magnetic field is local not because
it is autochthonously emergent, but because it is a localisation
of a general magnetism or, as Schelling puts it, “the empirical
magnet must be regarded as the indifference-point of the
universal magnet [Totalmagnet]”.47 Øersted’s later
demonstration that magnetism is derived from
electromagnetism demonstrates a further complexification of
what is involved in a local magnetic field, as Schelling remarks in
his account of ‘Faraday’s most recent discovery’ in 1832. 48 The
question therefore raised by dynamic atomism is whether the
simple is more or less complex than the complex? Accordingly,
the structural or systemic account to which it gives rise is the
absolute reverse of what was called, in the 1840s, the genetic
problem, which may be exemplified by Goethe’s search for
the Urpflanze  and Urknochen, and in general by the hunt for
seed of all nature. Lest the strangeness of this quest be lost: it is
a viable search if and only if the assumption is that the
particular from which the type actually sprang remains
empirically available as the source of what comes later, or as the
perdurant antecedent. In what respect, then, antecedent? It is for
 this reason the First Outline develops the account of nature as
a Stufenfolge, in which the simple finds its niche.

2. Nature, the Concept of

Nature, and the Stufenfolge
 49 SW I/2, 313-314n; tr. Harris and Heath, 249.

36The idea of the Stufenfolge – a “sequence of stages” or, later,

the Naturprozess  – occurs throughout Schelling’s
early Naturphilo-sophischen works, and is augmented by the
theories of powers or potencies left undeveloped at the end of
the Ideas,49 where it is credited to Eschenmayer. Briefly
summarized, it is a forerunner of the later Potenzenlehre in
several respects:
1. Like each of the Potenzen, each stage or Stufe in a series (Folge)
consists in at least two powers, articulating both ascent and descent
(SW I/3, 195), the higher and the lower ( SW I/3, 255-6), and
individualisation and generalization ( SW I/3, 90-91), each according
to a law of proportionality (SW I/3, 68)

 50 See Schelling’s discussion of dimensionality in organic and

inorganic nature in Lecture 19 of the P (...)

37A potency or power, that is, is not one unless it is capable of

increase or diminution, and of contrary effects: magnetism
attracts and repels; gravity maintains a body’s integrity and
crushes it, and so on. These poles articulate a dimensionality of
the power, a topology, as when the activities of a body make the
spacetimes of which they are by nature capable.50
 51 SW I/4, 43.
 2. The sequence of stages is also subject, like the Potenzlehre, to
acting on itself, or acting at a different power (there are “second
order” sequences of stages, or “production-reproducing natures”)51

 52 SW II/1, 502: “[T]he ascending consequent is consonant with

and natural to reason”.

38Here a central logical feature of both the Stufenfolge and

the Potenzenreihe emerges. The capacity Schelling grants them
for “self-activity” is not to be confused with autochthony for the
following reasons: firstly, were self-activity a homonym for
spontaneity, this would be the one instance that undermines the
hypothesis of antecedence consequent upon the ungrounding
arguments set out above. Secondly, since the self-activity is of a
series, no termini can be given for it at either beginning or end.
Indeed, what a Stufe consists in is already problematized by its
never being given outside a Folge, i.e. a sequence, such that
sequencing affects each stage. Not only therefore are no stages
on their own, but rather no stage may be settled as one without
reference to the sequence in which it acts. A stage in a sequence
is therefore a logical and systemic “raising”52 or “potentiation”
with regard to any stage in which it is operative. Therefore:
3. Sequences of stages are not confined to one class of entity, e.g.
the organic, but, by virtue of (1) above, necessarily conjoin everything
from the physics of colour ( SW I/2, 173) and the intensity of light
(SW I/2, 281) and magnetism (SW I/4, 11), to the construction of
matter (SW I/4, 51), oxidation (SW I/2, 579), motion (SW I/2, 185),
the functions of organs (SW I/2, 523) or functions in general (SW I/2,
564, SW I/4, 10), the excitation of animal matter ( SW I/2, 552), and
ultimately constitute the dynamic natural process (SW I/4, 73).
 39It is often concluded that the Potenzen can have only a logical
nature. Yet if this were so, they must either be exempted from
the domains noted in point three above, or merely asserted of
them in such a manner that these domains either retain only a
rationally insuperable counterfactual potential, or are
themselves merely or sheerly conceptual fruits.
 53 SW II/3, 102; Schelling 2007, 160, t.m.

 54 SW II/1, 375f, my emphasis. See also Aristotle, De anima II

414b29f, on which Schelling draws here: (...)

4. The Potenzlehre is as closely associated with the negative

philosophy as is the Stufenfolge with that of nature, such that both
are elements of the philosophy of essence or of whatness. Yet this
does not mean that potencies cannot exceed what is actual. Indeed,
Schelling writes that the potencies are “by their nature… about to
spring into being” such that “thought is drawn outside
itself”.53 Although as antecedent the potency “has its actuality in the
consequent in respect of which it is accordingly mere potency ”,54 this
does not entail that potency is only consequently, but rather
that, qua antecedent it is only potency in respect of or for the
consequent, while itself remaining ungrounded  in what is actual. Just
as the Stufenfolge is ungrounded in the “nature-process”, so too is
the Potenzenreihe ungrounded in creation, in actuality’s antecedent.

 55 SW I/10, 303.

40This is why it is a mistake to consider the transcendental

philosophy isomorphic and contemporaneus with the negative
philosophy: both terminate in a thatness of which neither is
capable: the powers or series are possibilities of the subject of
existence itself, the “what” in “what am I thinking when I think
 what exists?”55 What this is, is neither stipulated in advance, nor
satisfied by any totality of predicates which latter must, by
definition, simultaneously exceed this thatness in extension
(whatever it is that is might equally, for instance, not be as be)
and be less than it in essence (being is more than logic).
 56 As Schelling states in the title of his 1800 work Universal
Deduction of the Dynamic Process, or, t (...)

41What is sequenced in the sequence of stages is not only the

relation of the simple and the complex, of whole and part, or
individual and general; it is also the higher and the lower,
height, breadth and depth; the forward and the backward; the
customary, the natural and the contrary directions;
electromagnetism, gravitation and spacetime; matter, finitude
and motion. If these are categories, they are the categories not
of this or that thing or experience, but of the process itself.56
 57 SW I/3, 90-91.

 58 SW I/3, 68.

42It is nevertheless noteworthy that Schelling explicates

the Stufenfolge at one point in the First
Outline as the
explanation of “how the individual in nature affirms itself
against the general”57, or how particularity emerges and
sustains itself. That is, because an individual is affirmed against
a universal, sequencing fundamentally affects the propositional
structure of particularization rather than, perhaps, the actual
emergence of individuals. This is partly confirmed when
Schelling writes that, since this was the problem to be resolved,
the problem now is “to derive a priori the Stufenfolge in nature
itself, and thus to turn natural history into a system of nature” 58.
 Yet surely such a system would be the very antithesis of the
ungrounding antecedence account I have offered here, from
which particulars arise as consequents?
43Note two things however, concerning what a priori means.
Firstly, that the a priori “derivation” is consequent upon the
explanation of the individual’s self-affirmation against the
general, or is necessitated by the “de-generalization” of the
process. Secondly, that if each stage in the series consists of a
simple actant, and simple actants are the consequent grounds of
subsequent actants, then the system at issue constitutes a
continuous process that does not issue from  but rather in  that
process or in its Darstellung or ‘exhibition’: as the highest
potency of dissolving particularity or the incapacity of nature for
complete self-abstraction. Structure arises in the
world because the world is itself the yield of structures, as
the Stuttgart Private Lectures remind us.
 59 SW I/4, 43.

44Regarding the first, if what I have offered concerning

Schelling’s account of the transcendental philosophy has virtue,
then the elimination of original concepts is precisely why the a
priori derivation is not a transposition of the
structure into nature, but rather precisely the consequence of
the ungrounding of the concept with respect to the conceived,
such that the conceiving has itself an antecedent or a nature
that is not a priori or qua “originary concept” available to it as
the content of a concept. Indeed, this is why it is only as a
“second order” process, the recapitulation of the Stufenfolge in
another, that their “production-reproducing nature can be
exhibited in actuality”, and that only in the second power “does
 productive nature run its course before our eyes” 59. In other
words, Schelling seeks hereby to explain on the basis of a
“production-reproducing nature”, why the exhibition of a
process minimally entails its second order operation, or consists
in the action of that order of sequenced stages on another.
When X exhibits the process, that is, X is both = and not = the
totality of the process, since X must itself be, by hypothesis, the
exhibition of the process and consequent upon that process. A
particular exhibition, therefore, both expresses in its matter and
in its being consequent upon, the process that it exhibits.
 60 As Schelling argues, in the Introduction to the Ideas, bodies or
essences cannot be said to have po (...)

45Let us return to the question of the simple actant: the simple

is simple not in itself, but relatively to the complexity from
which it issues. The exhibition or expression of a process, the
hypothesis, in other words, concerning its nature, yields simple
actants just when it is (a) the only hypothesis remaining that is
capable of accounting for the particularity of natural products
within the unconditioned infinity of natural production; 60 and (b)
when its expression is entailed by that hypothesis as applied to
its own production – just when, that is, it is an
expression consequent upon the confirmation of its hypothesis.
This is not to say that the expression is identical with the
hypothesis, not the hypothesis with the nature of which it is
itself an hypothetical exhibition or expression; rather, the
simple (the exhibition itself) is a rational potency of the process
and, by virtue therefore of being consequent upon it, not
identical with that process. Let the process be = A; if the
expression of A just is its expression, then the latter, by virtue
 of its consequence upon it, is = A ; thus, in A = A, A  is not = A .
2 1 2

If A  were not A  but only A, then there would have been no

2 2

consequence at all, regardless of its nature. As Schelling writes,

 61 SW I/7, 346; tr. Gutmann, 18-19.

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; that is, the whole conception would
eliminate itself.61

46Thus, as a rational entity, the consequent expression of an

antecedent system remains, regardless of its particular nature, a
consequent or is not at all. Moreover, as a Darstellung or
an Entwurf, the expression is importantly amphibolous, in that it
registers both in intellect and sense, not least in virtue of its
forcefulness (quantitatively expressed, the number of iterations
or confirming instances of which its life has proven capable).
Further, insofar as the hypothesis is also a rational entity, in that
the expression of X is consequent upon the X it is not by virtue
of being consequent upon it – dependent ( abhängig) and
autonomous (selbständig) and therefore
not independent (unabhängig) of it – neither can the
confirmation of the hypothesis in its iteration be reducibly of
reason, in the sense that it might be said to
belong exclusively to a “space of reasons”. To put it differently,
although the simple actant is consequent upon the ungrounding
of powers in bodies or in a substrate – that is, in an antecedently
existent particular or universal – and is therefore a power of the
process it exhibits, it is neither rationally reducible to the
structure or content of the hypothesis from which it issues, nor
 closed with respect to those domains from which it might be
said to issue. This is the jarring, maximally amphibolous point
the opening sentence of the Stuttgart
Lectures emphasizes: systemic understanding is possible just if
systems are antecedent to rational ones ; the cosmos is such a
system.
 62 SW I/3, 11; tr. Peterson, 13, t.m.

 63 SW I/2, 223; tr. Harris and Heath, 179.

 64 SW I/3, 68; tr. Peterson, 52, t.m.

47So were the theory of dynamic atomism a theory of natural

simples, or of simple givens, then nature as a whole would be
grounded in particulars from which development takes place,
but which themselves are not developed (the primal germ
hypothesis). But it is not this because the theory of simple
actants arises on the basis of the hypothesis answering to the
problem with which the First Outline  opens, namely, “how the
unconditioned might be attributed to nature?” 62 It can be
unconditioned not insofar as this or that natural entity
is the absolute, after the manner, for instance, of Schelling’s
account of matter as “the seed-corn of the universe” in
the Ideas;63 nor insofar as nature itself might be said to enjoy
unconditioned existence, since this is already conditioned by its
not being inexistent, a power inalienable from nature’s being.
Rather, nature might be predicated as unconditioned  just if
neither its existence nor that of some primal entity is given, i.e.,
where it is ungrounded, and where accordingly neither concept
nor object provide its ground or reducible basis. Thus, when
Schelling describes the Stufenfolge as consisting in the
 “determination of the different organic functions and of their
different possible proportions”,64 this is not to ground
the Stufenfolge  in organic nature, but to unground it by way of
the problem of the form of a genetic nature, which form, if itself
emergent, must reiterate the genesis from which it and its
domains of applicability arise. As the form of all becoming, such
a form must be a consequent form rather than either
a primal one or a form antecedent to all forms from which form
alone issues.
 65 SW I/4, 10.

 66 SW I/4, 156; tr. Vater and Wood, 171.

48Yet just as the consequent is not reducibly rational, nor is it

reducibly biological. Schelling stresses throughout that
the Stufenfolge is not limited to organic features but extends to
“inorganic nature”.65 If this is so, it is not the particular from
which general nature develops (the primal seed hypothesis) but
rather the general from which particularity proceeds. Biology
and reason are merely two particulars, rather than the sum-total
of all things. What then is the general? It is not a given universal,
awaiting activation and thus satisfying if not the primal germ
hypothesis, then at least the design one, since it has itself no
prior form. The form of the universal is created, i.e.
is consequent, as a particular diversity; form is consequent upon
formlessness, structure is not prior to instantiation, but only
afforded by it insofar as uninstantiated form cannot itself have
form. In other words, each particular is a proportion of
particularity relative to the universality of form . The universality
of form, however, is itself not universal but particular, and not
itself given but precisely what nature creates: the emergence of
form from unform. Universality per se, in other words, is all; but
the universality of X is always for that reason a conditioned or
relative universality, equal to all minus not-X. The particular
therefore is a product of the natural process in the degree to
which form is (a) emergent from formlessness and (b) thus
contributory to the universal. The empirical magnet, is a
localization of the total magnet.66
49Form is unconditioned, therefore, insofar as its conditions are
not given in advance, but contributed as its production. In other
words, unconditioning entails ungrounding. The ungrounding of
relative universals, or of the ubiquitous – ultimately of existence
– ungrounds not some but all such relative universals, such that
none is that has the ground of its existence in itself. The simple
actants that are the “intermediary links” in the Stufenfolge are
not intermediary between things, therefore, not simple in the
sense of being individuals, but insofar as are
actualized proportions between particularity and universality, or
the degree of creation of form in formlessness . Bluntly put,
since an action is one just when something occurs that hitherto
was not, an action is simple when X arises from not-X, that is,
when creation occurs.
 
50What recommends Schelling’s account of what an action is,
therefore, is threefold. Firstly, it eliminates the “autochthony”
undercurrent that underwrites voluntaristic accounts of action,
and is only barely disguised in the concept of “spontaneity”.
Secondly, it shows that an action is an action when it issues in a
consequent independent of that from which it itself issues, but
which by that token creates its antecedent as such, without
which that antecedent would not be a factor of emergence, and
no action would have taken place. Finally, it shows the extent to
which ungrounding is entailed by any theory of emergence, or of
powers. If it were not, powers would not act, and to what extent
then would they be powers at all?
NOTAS
1 Schelling F.W.J., Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen
der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängende
Gegenstände, in Schelling K.F.A. (ed.), Schel-lings Werke [SW],
Stuttgart and Augsburg, Cotta, 1856-61, XIV vols. Here SW I/7, 395-
6. Tr. Gutmann, 75.

2 Schelling F.W.J., System der gesamten Philosophie und der

Naturphilosophie insbesondere (1804), in SW I/6, 214-576.

3 “The natural philosophy of our time”, says Schelling, “has first

advanced in science the distinction between being [ Wesen] in so far
as it exists and being [Wesen] in so far as it is the ground of
existence.” (SW I/7, 357; tr. Gutmann, 31)

4 SW I/7, 371; tr. Gutmann, 47

5 SW I/7, 357; tr. Gutmann, 31

6 SW I/7, 396; tr. Gutmann, 76, t.m.

7 SW I/7, 395; tr. Gutmann, 74, t.m. See also SW I/7, 415; tr.
Gutmann, 98: “We have an earlier revelation than any written
one – nature.” Compare, e.g. SW I/7, 421; 1994c, 197.

8 That is, the nature ‘outlined’ in the First Outline of a System of the

Philosophy of Nature (1799) is the nature ‘exhibited’ in the Exhibition
of the Process of Nature (1844).
9 This is how Schelling, drawing on Aristotle’s De anima 414b29f,
presents what he calls the “law of motion” (SW I/1, 375) in
the Darstellung der rein rationale Philosophie (1854): “the law that
‘the antecedent always consists in the consequent according to
potency’, was applied particularly by the Naturphilosophie to the
greatest extent and with the greatest consistency, yet remains to be
proven.” (SW I/1, 376)

10 Schelling F.W.J., Timaeus. Schellingiana 4, Buchner H. (ed.),

Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994, passim.

11 Schelling F.W.J., Einleitung in die Philosophie. Schellingiana 1 ,

Ehrhardt W.E. (ed.), Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Fromman-Holzboog,
1989, 117.

12 This is too compressed to be helpful here. For more on this claim,

see my ‘Remains of the World’, in Schelling-Studien 1 (2013), 9-25.

13 Andere Deduktion der Prinzipien der positiven

Philosophie (1839), SW I/4, 339: “the necessarily existent or natura
necessaria which, independently of actual existing, of the actus of
existing, is also what necessarily exists, namely, according to its
nature or its essence.”

14 “Inwiefern ist überhaupt ein System möglich? Antwort: es hat

lange schon ein System gegeben, ehe der Mensch darauf gedacht hat,
eines zu machen – das System der Welt.” (SW I/7, 421; ‘Stuttgart
Seminars’, in Pfau T. (tr. and ed.), Idealism and the Endgame of
Theory. Three Essays by F.W.J. Schelling, New York: SUNY, 1994, 197,
t.m.).

15 Although I will not concentrate on this here, its first formulation

follows from Schelling’s 1794 commentary on the Platonic account of
nature in the Timaeus. He returns to it throughout his work,
strikingly in the Freedom essay. At Timaeus 28b, Plato notes the
central difference between being and becoming: if what is “always is”,
what becomes “always becomes” and therefore never is. Does this
mean that what becomes is not-being? The Timaeus’s account of
what “always becomes”, or of a phusis that consists in
“approximations” to what is, thus raises the question of whether
there is a form or Idea of becoming that becoming approximates (in
Plato, “kata phusin” or “in accordance with nature” is always “kata
dunamin”, “in accordance with “power or possibility”). What is the
intelligible nature of becoming? The absence of such a form leaves
becoming groundless and shifting, hence the Platonic theory of
matter which, as noted in the Freedom essay, “follows a dark,
uncertain law and is incapable of forming anything that can endure”
(SW I/7, 360). The “powers philosophy” that fascinates Schelling’s
later period attests to the persistence of the problem despite the
alteration in orientation. As he says in his last work,
the Presentation of Pure Rational Philosophy (1847-52), “To begin
with Plato and end with Aristotle might be the best course for a life
dedicated to philosophy [Der beste Verlauf eines der Philosophie
geweihten Lebens möchte seyn, mit Platon anzufangen, mit
Aristoteles zu enden.]” (SW II/1, 380).

16 SW I/3, 12: “der Begriff des Seyns als eines Ursprünglichen soll
aus der Naturphilosophie (eben sowie aus der Transscendental-
philosophie) schlechthin eliminirt werden.” tr. Keith R. Peterson, First
Outline of A System of the Philosophy of Nature, Albany: SUNY, 2004,
14.

17 See Lectures 12 (SW II/1, 282-287) and 13 (SW II/1, 297-299) of

the Darstellung des rein rationalen Philosophie for Schelling’s
detailed discussion of Kant’s transcendental ideal.
18 SW I/10, 303. The question Schelling asks is richer. He writes, “the
first question of philosophy is therefore this: what is the existent?
What belongs to the existent? What am I thinking when I think what
exists? [die erste Frage der Philosophie ist darum diese: Was ist das
Existirende? Was gehört zum Existirenden? Was denke ich, wenn ich
das Existirende denke?]”

19 “Über die Natur philosophiren heißt die Natur schaffen ”, SW I/3,

11, tr. Peterson, 14. This is also the first line of the ‘Outline of the
whole’ that prefaces the First Outline: “Da über Natur philosophiren
so viel heißt, als die Natur schaffen, so muß vorerst der Punkt
gefunden werden, von welchem aus die Natur ins Werden gesetzt
werden kann” (SW I/3, 5).

20 SW I/3, 17n; tr. Peterson, 17n.

21 SW I/3, 12; tr. Peterson, 14.

22 The edition of the Weltalter published in

Schelling’s Works (SW I/7) dates from 1815 and has been translated
by Frederick de Wolfe Bolman (New York: Columbia University Press,
1946, 84) and by Jason M. Wirth (Albany: SUNY, 2000, xxxvi).
Manfred Schröter published two earlier drafts – WA I (1811) and WA II
(1813) – along with fragments and outlines, in 1946 as
an SW Nachlassband. The Mitwissenschaft claim occurs at WA I (1946:
4), WA II (1946, 112; tr. Judith Norman, Ann Arbor: Michigan
University Press, 1997, 114), and in a fragment entitled ‘Introductory
concept’, where the phrase “the human soul has, to a certain
degree…” is added (1946, 205).

23 SW I/8, 200: “Aus der Quelle der Dinge geschöpft und ihr gleich,
hat die menschliche Seele eine Mitwissenschaft der Schöpfung”. Tr.
Jason M. Wirth, xxxvi.
24 Plato, Philebus 26d, cited Schelling 1994, 63. Hermann Krings
notes, in ‘Genesis und Materie - Zur Bedeutung der “Timaeus”-
Handschrift für Schellings Naturphilosophie’ (in Schelling
F.W.J., Timaeus 1794, Buchner H. (ed.), Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt:
Frommann-Holzboog, 1994, 117-155), that “In Plato, Schelling
encounters the concept of a nature “prior” to all becoming of things,
the concept of a pregenetic physis as the condition of the emergence
of the visible world” (137-138).

25 SW II/3, 163n. “Denn nicht weil es ein Denken gibt, gibt es ein
Seyn, sondern weil ein Seyn ist, gibt es ein Denken.”; tr. Bruce
Matthews, Grounding of Positive Philosophy, New York: SUNY, 2007,
203.

26 Unpublished paper, first annual meeting of the North American

Schelling Society, Seattle, August 29-September 1, 2012.

27 SW I/10, 126; History of Modern Philosophy, tr. Andrew Bowie,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 134.

28 Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of

the Philosophical Sciences (1830) § 248z, tr. A.V. Miller, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1970, 19.

29 Lyotard, J.-F., Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime, Paris: Galilée,

1991, 222.

30 SW I/3, 13: “Das Seyn selbst = Thätigkeit ist.” Tr. Peterson, 14.

31 SW I/3, 12: “[A]lles, was ist, Construktion des Geistes ist, so ist
das Seyn selbst nichts anderes als das Construiren selbst.” Tr.
Peterson, 13.

32 ‘Über den wahren Begriff der Naturphilosophie und die richtige

Art ihre Probleme aufzulösen’ was first published in
Schelling’s Zeitschrift für speculative Physik Bd.II, Heft 1 (1801): 110-
146. The Zeitschrift has recently been reissued, ed. Manfred Dürner
(Hamburg: Meiner, 2001), where the present essay, a highly critical
response to Karl August Eschenmayer’s ‘Spontaneität = Weltseele
oder über das höchste Princip der Naturphilosophie’, (Schelling ed.,
1801: 3-68; Dürner, ed., 2001: 233-272), is found at pp. 297-319.

33 SW I/4, 84.

34 Fichte writes that “the concept of being [Seyns] is by no means

regarded as a primary and original [erster und unsprünglicher]
concept, but merely as derivative, as a concept derived… by
opposition to activity, and hence as a merely negative concept.”
(Werke I: 499; Science of Knowledge tr. Heath and Lachs, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982, 69; translation modified)

35 SW I/4, 84 &n; tr. Peterson, 21 &n.

36 I have not altered Vater’s translation choices as they are felicitous
for my argument. However, it is not standard to render Kraft as
“power” rather than “force”, and Grund as “cause”, especially if, as I
think, Schelling deploys the concepts of ground and consequent in
order precisely to avoid the over-determination of sequences in
accordance with what he often criticizes as the invention of fictitious
causes: “I hate nothing more that the mindless striving to eliminate
the multiplicity of natural causes through fictitious identities.”
(SW I/2, 348; tr. Grant 2010, 90).

37 SW I/4, 145, tr. Vater, 2012, 164.

38 SW I/3, 17; tr. Peterson 17.

39 SW I/2, 350; tr. Grant, 2010, 93.

40 SW I/2, 15; tr. Harris and Heath, 1988, 12.

41 As Fichte found: “Intellect and thing are thus exact opposites
[entgegengesetzt]: they inhabit two worlds between which there is no
bridge.” (Werke I, 436; tr. Heath and Lachs, 17).

42 SW I/2, 16; tr. Harris and Heath, 13.

43 Schelling introjects the question, therefore, of how the question of

the possibility of a world for me supplants the actuality of a world in
which I am. If I can cogently represent myself as arising from nature,
that is, then what prevents this representation informing the
transcendental world I now populate with objects extraneous to my
representations is the isolation of acting on my own part, not on that
of the object which must remain, insofar as it is an object for me, an
effect of my acting.

44 SW I/2, 17, tr. Harris and Heath, 13.

45 SW I/2, 23; tr. Harris and Heath, 18.

46 SW I/2, 23; tr. Harris and Heath, 18.

47 SW I/4, 156; tr. Vater 2012, 171.

48 SW I/9, 439-452.

49 SW I/2, 313-314n; tr. Harris and Heath, 249.

50 See Schelling’s discussion of dimensionality in organic and

inorganic nature in Lecture 19 of the Presentation of Pure Rational
Philosophy, with its references to his own Naturphilosophie and to
Davy’s electromagnetic experiments. SW II/1, 433-436. The
comparison with mid nineteenth century ethology and the phase-
spaces of animal motion with later versions of these same sciences
would be instructive.

51 SW I/4, 43.
52 SW II/1, 502: “[T]he ascending consequent is consonant with and
natural to reason”.

53 SW II/3, 102; Schelling 2007, 160, t.m.

54 SW II/1, 375f, my emphasis. See also Aristotle, De anima II

414b29f, on which Schelling draws here: “the earlier type always
exists potentially in what follows”.

55 SW I/10, 303.

56 As Schelling states in the title of his 1800 work Universal

Deduction of the Dynamic Process, or, the Categories of
Physics (SW I/4, 1-78).

57 SW I/3, 90-91.

58 SW I/3, 68.

59 SW I/4, 43.

60 As Schelling argues, in the Introduction to the Ideas, bodies or

essences cannot be said to have powers in the manner of accidents
without eliminating the possibility of bodies coming into existence by
virtue of powers, and thus resulting in a dualism; and as he
demonstrates in regard to rational grounds for the elimination of
substrate hypotheses if reason must begin hypothetically, even
though reason itself is issuant of darkness, errancy and chaos, as per
the Ideas and later reiterated in the Freedom essay (SW I/7, 359-360;
tr. Gutmann, 34): “Following the eternal act of self-revelation, the
world as we now behold it is all rule, order and form; but the unruly
lies ever in the depths…, and order and form nowhere appear to have
been original, but it seems as though what had initially been unruly
had been brought to order. This is the incomprehensible basis of
reality in things, the irreducible remainder which cannot be resolved
into reason”.

61 SW I/7, 346; tr. Gutmann, 18-19.

62 SW I/3, 11; tr. Peterson, 13, t.m.

63 SW I/2, 223; tr. Harris and Heath, 179.

64 SW I/3, 68; tr. Peterson, 52, t.m.

65 SW I/4, 10.

66 SW I/4, 156; tr. Vater and Wood, 171.

AUTOR
Iain  Hamilton Grant
Established the Philosophy Department at the University of the West of England in 2006. He
has written widely on post-kantian European Philosophy and is author of the
books Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (Continuum, 2006) and, with Jeremy Dunham
and Sean Watson, of Idealism. History of a Philosophy  (MQUP, 2011). He is currently
completing a book titled On Grounds and Powers and translations of Schelling’s On the
World Soul and Other Nature-Philosophical Writings