ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities

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The “eternal and necessary bond between

Philosophy and Physics”
A repetition of the difference between the fichtean and schellingian systems
of philosophy

Iain Hamilton Grant

To cite this article: Iain Hamilton Grant (2005) The “eternal and necessary bond between
Philosophy and Physics” , ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities, 10:1, 43-59, DOI:
10.1080/09697250500225164

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 ANGEL AK I
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 10 number 1 april 2005

What Schelling calls ‘‘philosophy of nature,’’

does not merely and not primarily mean
the treatment of a special area ‘‘nature,’’
but means the understanding of nature in
terms of the principle of Idealism, that is,
in terms of freedom [. . .]. iain hamilton grant
Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the
Essence of Human Freedom 94

What ultimately is the essence of his [Fichte’s] THE ‘‘ETERNAL AND

entire understanding of nature? [. . .] Actually,
nothing but a moralizing of the entire
world that undermines life and hollows it
out, a true disgust towards all nature and
vitality except what there is of this in the
subject, the crude extolling of morality
and the doctrine of morals as the only
reality in life and science.
Schelling, SW VII: 18–19
resenting Schelling’s Naturphilosophie in the
P ethical or practical terms for which Schelling
castigated the inadequacies of ‘‘the Fichtean
philosophy’s’’ concept of nature, the precepts
underlying Heideggerianism are here shown, like
those underlying Fichteanism, to be ‘‘the fruit of
a culture’’ in which ‘‘unnature now actually serves
as nature’’ (SW VII: 80). Schelling in particular,
but the Naturphilosophen in general, never
stopped railing against ethics as antiphysics;
even Oken, for instance, greatly despised 2 as
an arch-idealist and an intolerable meddler in
‘‘organic physics,’’ argues that ‘‘an ethics apart
from a philosophy of nature is a nonentity, a bare
contradiction, just as a flower without a stem is
a non-existent thing’’ (1847, 656). Therefore,
the extent to which Heideggerianisms remain
possible – the extent, that is, to which morality
is ‘‘crudely extolled as the only reality’’ – is
the extent to which our philosophical culture is
the victim of an Idealism it has invented to
NECESSARY BOND
BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY
AND PHYSICS’’1
a repetition of the difference
between the fichtean and
schellingian systems of
philosophy
disguise the physicalism on whose rejection
its metaphysics is in fact grounded. When
Badiou (2000, 100) therefore sets contemporary
philosophy – particularly of the popular (because
undemanding) ‘‘post-metaphysical’’ variety3 – not
merely the question ‘‘Is metaphysics still possi-
ble?,’’ but rather the challenge ‘‘Are we capable of
it?,’’ we here explore a prospect Badiou himself
deems ‘‘impossible’’; that is, whether the capacity
for metaphysics is not dependent on the ‘‘true and
necessary juncture of philosophy and physics’’
(SW VII: 101). In what follows, we will attempt to
specify the dimensions of the problem and to
outline a solution.4
Accordingly, antiphysics has at least a two
hundred year history, established so that the
‘‘primacy of pure practical reason’’ counters

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/05/010043^17 ß 2005 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of Angelaki
DOI: 10.1080/09697250500225164

43
 systems of philosophy
Kant’s late return to Naturphilosophie in what
Schelling knew as Transition between Meta-
physics and Physics (SW VI: 8). In other words,
the immediately post-Kantian situation remains a
contested zone, bifurcating into, on one side, the
transition between physics and metaphysics; and,
on the other, the Fichtean antiphysics Heidegger
betrays in the form of a Schelling for whom nature
must be subsumed under freedom, or even become
an artefact of it, ‘‘a product of intelligence,’’ as
Fichte has it (W XI: 362). The latter solution is
not, however, restricted to Heidegger: Jason
Wirth’s Conspiracy of Life repeats this interpreta-
tion of Naturphilosophie, rendering its practicism
a priori by subjecting it to the imperatives of
self-evaluative life, which Schelling disparaged
as Fichte’s ‘‘economic-teleological’’ anti-ontology
(SW VII: 17). Accordingly, Badiou’s characterisa-
tion of Deleuze’s metaphysics, which latter draws
immensely on Idealist precursors,5 as subjecting
the concept to ‘‘the trial of biological evaluation’’
(1994, 63), repeats the ‘‘test of life’’ into which
Jaspers (1955, 114) transforms Schelling’s phi-
losophy as a whole (although Schelling mentions it
only once, at SW XIII: 177). The evaluative
vitalism of Jaspers–Badiou not only echoes
Heidegger’s (1941) subsumption of nature by
freedom but itself accords with the generally
Fichtean tenor of a great deal of philosophical
and scientific commentary by Schelling’s contem-
poraries. In an article published in the philoso-
pher’s New Journal of Speculative Physics (I,3),
the physicist Karl Friedrich Windischmann,
for instance, declared in 1802 that Schelling’s
Naturphilosophie, like all possible philosophical
approaches to nature, ‘‘pursues the physical
only under the protection and direction of the
ethical’’ (Schelling 1969, 91), while in the previous
year’s Journal of Speculative Physics (I,2 1801),
the physician Karl August Eschenmayer con-
tended that, for Naturphilosophie, ‘‘all laws of
nature are simply transposed from our mind, [and]
the first impulse of nature dwells in ourselves’’
(Schelling 2001, 267), in the form of the equation
‘‘spontaneity ¼ World Soul,’’ which Eschenmayer
interprets as a strict Fichtean.6
In the above sense at least, Heidegger accords
with common sense regarding philosophical
idealism. This accord is far from accidental, but
attests to the essentially Fichtean solution to the
metaphysics of nature underwriting the predomi-
nant trajectories of contemporary philosophy.
It is as a consequence of this that our phi-
losophy idealises Naturphilosophie, rather than,
as Schelling maintained, providing the ‘‘physical
explanation of idealism’’ (SW IV: 76). Beyond the
self-limitations of a philosophy that rejects physis
such as Schelling ridiculed in Fichte, the problem
not only of a naturalist ontology (physicalist
metaphysics) but also of the ontology of nature
itself (the metaphysics of physis), has assumed
increasing urgency in a variety of fields. For
example, while Deleuze asserts that metaphysics
must necessarily ‘‘embrace all the concepts of
nature and freedom’’ (1994, 19), Badiou declares
such a ‘‘philosophy ‘of ’, or rather [. . .] as nature’’
to be ‘‘a contemporary impossibility’’ (1994,
63–64). While Bonsepien opposes a mathematical
to a speculative Naturphilosophie,7 numbering
Schelling amongst the latter as serving, in
proper Fichtean ‘‘economic-teleological’’ manner
(SW VII: 17), moral ends, this simple, ‘‘romantic’’
and common equation is rejected both by Walther
Zimmerli (in Hasler, 1981), who ironically deploys
the arch Fichtean Eschenmayer to demonstrate
the mathematical roots of Schelling’s theory of
the powers (Potenzlehre), and, more recently, by
Châtelet’s recovery of the mathematical dimen-
sions of the naturephilosophical project. The very
terms, meanwhile, in which the avatars of prac-
ticism in philosophy obtained their ideal and
effective-actual primacy, have resurfaced as the
poles by which the ontology of nature itself – that
is, metaphysics – is contemporarily articulated.
For example, the Naturphilosoph C.G. Carus’
Organon of the Cognition of Nature and Mind
(1856) argued that ‘‘nature’’ be reconceived
as ‘‘Becoming’’ (‘‘das Werdende,’’ in Bernouilli
and Kern 1926, 303 n.), echoes in the reconcep-
tion of nature provoked by the sciences of
complexity (Heuser-Kessler 1986).8 Both,
however, are opposed by Fichte’s practicist
argument that not only is ‘‘all change [. . .]
contrary to the concept of nature’’ (W III:
115; 2000, 105) but the resultant ‘‘being’’ is
‘‘secondary to and derived from activity’’ (W I:
499; 1982, 69), the ‘‘inert residuum of an
exhausted force’’ (W XI: 364).
44

Heidegger’s claim that ‘‘freedom’’ is the
‘‘principle of Idealism’’ remains, then, true only
of our false idealism. Accordingly it blazes the trail
that practically all post-Heideggerian Schellingian
interpretations will follow, from Jaspers to
Habermas to, most recently, Wirth. What makes
Heidegger’s accomplishment all the more perverse
is that it achieves this primatisation of the practical
as the only ‘‘possible’’ philosophical approach to
nature. A naturalistic Naturphilosophie, specula-
tive physics as such – the mere mention of such
obviously metaphorical conceits brings peristalti-
cally immediate reactions: ‘‘it’s impossible’’
(1994: 64), cries Badiou, ‘‘except as narrative,
description, or a novel’’; a ‘‘continental science
fiction’’ narrative, adds Bowie (2005, 46), only to
erupt, ‘‘[don’t they] realize that hardly anybody is
listening anymore?’’ Likewise, when contempor-
ary philosophers turn – uncharacteristically – to
the subject of nature, and of Naturphilosophie’s
naturalism, they repeat Heidegger’s transmutation
of physis into freedom, as in the following,
excerpted from the Introduction to the recent
translation of Schelling’s First Outline of a System
of the Philosophy of Nature:
It is often overlooked that the method of
construction [which Schelling deploys in his
naturephilosophy] [. . .] also involves, in the act
of postulating, the engagement of human free-
dom in transcending mechanism from the start.
Not only epistemological and ontological, the
philosophy of nature is an expressly ethical
project. (Peterson 2003, xxxiii)
What could better illustrate the primacy of the
practical over the theoretical, the triumph of a
merely ‘‘praxical philosophy,’’ or the postulation
of a ‘‘good beyond being’’? The Heideggerian
understanding of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is
thus established beyond question. Krell is there-
fore right when, proposing to investigate the forces
of ‘‘birthing and dying’’ in the naturephilosophies
of Novalis, Hegel and Schelling, he condemns
contemporary philosophy for being ‘‘so busy
making speeches about ethics and politics,’’ and
for its failure to philosophise on the sheer scale
of so-called Idealism, precisely because of our
ignorance of physics (in the extended sense of
the term). That said, it is an alarming indication
45
grant
of a philosophy not merely antipathetic towards
but actually incapable of metaphysics that, rather
than attempting to correct these flaws, Krell
mobilises merely textual or philological apparatii
to engage a merely ‘‘logical’’9 nature, and focuses
even this limited rubric on those natural phenom-
ena that affect life and death alone (disease,
sexuality). Leaving aside the question of a ‘‘philol-
ogy of nature’’ for the moment, Krell is not alone
in treating animality or life as marking the limits
of thinkable or free nature; we can see, for
instance, no other reason for Badiou’s invocations
of ‘‘organicity’’ and the ‘‘great animal totality’’ in
his (1994) assessments of Deleuze’s philosophy of
nature. For present purposes, the most recent
iteration of this paradigm, which might for the
present be called the ‘‘organo-ethical,’’ can be
found in Jason Wirth’s (2003) ‘‘meditations on
Schelling,’’ entitled The Conspiracy of Life, where
everything is brought together: Levinas’s ‘‘good
beyond being’’ is invoked from the outset
(2003, 6ff.), and the meditations themselves
begin with living and with dead dogs, painted,
poetic and rhetorical, all collated under the
rubric of an exploration of ‘‘F.W.J. Schelling, a
great – and greatly neglected – philosopher of
life’’ (2003, 1). It may seem simply ironic that a
Lebensphilosophie should end with the require-
ment that nature be ‘‘murdered’’ (2003, 94f.), but
there is more than irony at stake, as Wirth equally
contends. We will argue that ‘‘nature-cide’’ is the
Fichtean answer Schelling rejects as ontologically
inconsistent to the transcendental question posed
in the Oldest System-Program of German
Idealism: ‘‘how must a world be constituted for
a moral being?’’ (in Frank and Kurz 1975, 110);
and the solution that Wirth’s ‘‘meditations’’ yields
does not follow merely ironically or contingently,
but, we shall argue, necessarily from the practicist,
ethico-political philosophy that not only deter-
mines the address to relatively underexplored
corners of German Idealist philosophy but
also constitutes the default of contemporary
philosophy in general.
Yet the practicist ‘‘deduction’’ of ‘‘nature for
a moral being’’ ignores that the subject (both
grammatically and metaphysically) of the question
is ‘‘the world,’’ or at very least, its being qua
constituted; the problem, in other words, is not
 systems of philosophy
how freedom can give rise to nature but how nature
can give rise to freedom. As we shall see, this is
precisely the reverse of the position that Fichte’s
most naturephilosophical of texts – ‘‘Propositions
for the Elucidation of the Essence of Animals’’
(henceforth Propositions) – adopts. Even
Schelling’s Philosophical Inquiries into the
Nature of Human Freedom is overt regarding
the one-sidedness of Fichteanism’s ‘‘free world,’’
as we shall see. Not only the nature of the
problem but also the nature of the transcend-
ental, is thus altered. The transcendental dimen-
sion of the problem of nature, which is
automatically assumed to be resolved by the
‘‘primacy of practical reason’’ inherited from
Fichteanised Kantianism, is therefore crucial
to a post-Kantian naturalism: in what regard
is physis itself transcendental, that is, the
unconditioned-conditioning? Just as, therefore,
Badiou’s dismissal of Kant (2000, 46) follows
too swiftly from his anxiety regarding the
reinstitution of a ‘‘classicism’’ twisted by the
modernist addition of ‘‘freedom,’’ making
it impossible for him to investigate the problem
of the transcendental (a crucial element of
Deleuze’s metaphysics); so too his rejection of
naturephilosophy as ‘‘an impossibility’’ deprives
philosophy of the means to meet the challenge
he sets it regarding not merely ‘‘Is metaphysics
still possible?,’’ but more ‘‘poetico-existentially’’
(a crucial element both of Guattari’s and
Badiou’s practicism), ‘‘Are we capable of it?’’
(2000, 100). Such practicisms leave a nature
that is the residuum of freedom; a ‘‘philosophy
of nature’’ reducible to a logos of physis; or a
‘‘nature’’ extending no further than the phenom-
ena of life: these restricted concepts mark
the incapacity of contemporary philosophy not
only for metaphysics but also, as Krell acknowl-
edges (1997, 2) only then to demonstrate, for
physics.
The dimensions of the problem of a philosophy
of nature to be introduced here are:
1. The nature, limitations, and philosophical
ubiquity of Fichtean nature.
2. The differentiation of Schellingian from
Fichtean Naturphilosophie.
3. How is a Transcendental Naturephilosophy
possible, and why is it necessary?
I fichteanism and animality: nature-
philosophy as two-worlds antiphysics
THEORY OF FORMING NATURE.
Nature should become moral. We are its
educator – its moral tangent – its moral
attractor [Reize].
Novalis, Wercke 450
Intellect and thing inhabit two worlds,
between which there is no bridge.
Fichte W I: 436; 1982, 17
Life – infinite metabolic reciprocity in
oneself, but outwardly directed [. . .]
Fichte W XI: 365
The ubiquity of Fichteanism in contemporary
philosophy may be assessed not only by the
number of works bearing his name (Martin 1997;
Zöller 1998; Breazeale and Rockmore 2002),
although even this seems to crop up where we
least expect it (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 207;
Alliez 2004, 30).10 Rather, a covert species of
Fichteanism continues to inflect the majority of
philosophical encounters with Schelling,11 and
thereby the nature of the philosophy of nature.
Recent studies of Schelling by Wolfgang
Bonsepien (1997, 165), Camilla Warnke (1998,
195), and Thomas Bach (2001) echo Dietrich von
Engelhardt and Nelly Tsouyopoulos (in Hasler
1981) in demonstrating the same incapacity to
distinguish the Schellingian from the Fichtean
philosophies as Hegel (1977a, 79ff.) found in
Reinhold. Again, it is not in their overt mentions
of Fichte alone that their Fichteanism consists,
but rather in their attempt to redefine Schelling’s
philosophy of nature as restricted to animal
particularity. Again, this is less Schelling than
Fichte, whose Propositions (1800) constitutes the
latter’s attempt to demonstrate, against Schelling’s
accusations to the contrary,12 that the ‘‘science of
knowledge’’ can indeed address nature, which ‘‘is
not so alien to practical philosophy as it may seem
on first glance’’ (GA II,3: 243–44). Investigating
what kind of nature this might be, in order to
differentiate Naturphilosophie from the ‘‘science
of knowledge,’’ Schelling is forced to note against
Fichteanism that ‘‘nature is also partly non-living’’
(SW VII: 10), precisely because Fichte explicitly
denies this, arguing instead that life exhausts
46

nature, so that non-living nature is only the
‘‘inert residuum of exhausted force’’ (W XI:
364). This examination of Fichteanism is under-
taken for two reasons, therefore: firstly, because its
ubiquity will demonstrate its philosophical actu-
ality; secondly, because besides offering an effec-
tive metaphysics of the practical, and
experimenting in the field of the transcendental,
Fichte’s ontology is tortured by a nature it
disavows: ‘‘It pressures him, hits him, gnaws at
him from all directions, forever threatening and
restricting’’ (SW VII: 17).
Although an ‘‘immense gulf that Nature has
appointed between animate and inanimate
Creation’’ might be mistaken for a metaphysi-
cians’ idea, it derives in fact from Blumenbach
(über den Bildungstrieb, Göttingen, 2nd ed.,
1789, 71), and thus from the natural sciences.13
It is, however, Kant’s Critique of Judgement that
is to be credited with transforming this from a
physically into a transcendentally divided nature,
now comprising, as Schelling critically remarked
(SW VI: 8), an ‘‘organic nature entirely separate
from nature in general.’’ For Kant, a ‘‘Newton of
the blade of grass’’ (Ak.V: 400; 1987, 282), i.e., a
physics of organisation, is not merely contin-
gently, as a matter of historical fact, but neces-
sarily unavailable, due to transcendental
conditions, since organisation cannot be judged a
constituent of nature itself. The ‘‘gulf ’’ the third
Critique seeks famously to bridge (Ak.V: 175;
1987, 14)14 is no longer a product of nature in
nature, as Blumenbach conceived it; rather, nature
becomes the divided product of a transcendental
differentiator. Nor is Kant alone: philosophers
show a disturbing propensity to adopt theses
stemming from the natural sciences as axioms for
addressing nature, while historians of ideas look to
such sources as grounds for authority. Thus
Blumenbach’s distinction survives in Bernouilli
and Kern’s (1926, viii) identification of opposing
biocentric and logocentric, vitalist or formalist,
tendencies within Naturphilosophie. It has
recently been repeated in Badiou’s stark separa-
tion of ‘‘animal from number’’ (1994, 63) and,
consequently, of naturephilosophy from ontology.
In both these latter instances, while Kant’s
transcendental subtlety has been supplanted by
critical15 stringency, a further dimension of the
47
grant
problem is invented. This new dimension consists
in the increasing tendency to define the whole
of nature as animality, not to acknowledge that
‘‘nature is also partly non-living’’ (SW VII: 10).
From this perspective, it is surprising that
Fichteanism is usually considered only as the
practical completion of the Kantian critical
system, as the subjugation of knowledge to the
idea, as making knowledge the artefact of an
activity that renders the latter primary with
respect to the former.16 Although, as we have
suggested, this simplistic view accords with the
various forms that contemporary philosophy has
sculpted for the primacy of the practical over
metaphysics, Fichte does not straightforwardly
assert this without transforming the constitution
of ontology in turn. Indeed, one of the resources
on which this new Fichtean ontology will draw is
the introduction of the concept of force in
transcendental philosophy, by which Kant was
seeking contemporaneously to make the
Transition from Metaphysics to Physics.17
Rather than drawing this concept from dynamics
in the natural sciences, however, Fichte main-
tained its strictly transcendental application,
so that the theory of scientific knowledge must
demonstrate that ‘‘all of those specific actions
which the human mind is necessarily forced to
perform’’ (W I: 63; 1988, 120; emphasis added),
at the same time constrain it to the production of
actuality. Somehow, however, the exercise of these
transcendental forces in the form of ‘‘acts of
mind’’ or of an I, must impact upon nature, on the
‘‘Not-I.’’ The problem the Wissenschaftslehre
must therefore resolve is the nature of this Not-I,
or as the second edition Concerning the Concept of
Wissenschaftslehre (1798) has it, ‘‘nature’’:
The Wissenschaftslehre furnishes us with
nature as something necessary – with nature
as something which, both in its being and
its specific determinations, has to be viewed
as independent of us. (W I: 64; 1988, 121)
The Not-I is everything that does not act, every-
thing that is determined or that is always what it
is, everything that is being rather than force.
As Hegel’s Difference essay will realise and exploit
even while seeming to disparage it beyond serious
philosophical attention, Fichte’s revolutionary
 systems of philosophy
gesture is to have made being and matter
equivalent, as opposed to the ancient concept of
matter as ‘‘not-being,’’ me on or non-ens. In so far
as this is the case, the role of the Not-I becomes
simply to limit the I, while the I has as its goal the
maximal reduction of the Not-I; at stake between
the two is transposing the free determination of
being by activity from the sphere of the I to that of
the Not-I, thus determining not only how mind
ought to act but also how ‘‘the whole universe
ought to be’’ (GA II,3: 247). But how is what acts
but has no being to limit what is but does not act;
and how is what does not act but simply is, to limit
what acts but is not? This is the root of what
Schelling presents as ‘‘Fichte’s contradictory
concept of nature’’ (SW VII: 9), which, trans-
cendentally presented – that is, in terms of
forces – under the rubric of the Not-I from
Fichte’s first sketches of the Wissenschaftslehre,
is necessarily held to spill beyond force and into
being, beyond the act into being. Just as in Kant,
the transcendental differentiates in nature, so
Fichte’s limit must be a transcendental actor
locatable in nature.
Fichte pursues forces to the point of their
exhaustion in Propositions, and locates this point
in nature. That is to say, animate-organic nature – at
its lowest threshold of consistency, Fichte’s trans-
cendental animal is composed of a ‘‘system of
plant-souls’’ (W XI: 366); at its highest,
it comprises the ‘‘entire universe’’ (GA II,3:
247) – articulates the juncture where exhausted
force issues in being as its ‘‘residuum.’’ The
Propositions calls this process of residual produc-
tion ‘‘crystallization’’ which, although for Kant it
betrayed visible evidence of intelligible structure,
for Fichte signifies the end of the road for force:
‘‘there is only result here, no organisation’’ (W XI:
364). In what Fichte himself calls his Naturphi-
losophie (W XI: 363), ‘‘being’’ has thus become
phylum-specific, attaching only to the mineral
realm, so that nature itself is now ontologically
divided. Accordingly, if the Wissenschaftslehre is
to demonstrate the ‘‘absolute totality’’ by which it
is differentiated from other sciences (W I: 59 n.;
1982, 117 n.), then the transcendental philosophy
derived from its ‘‘three a prioris’’ or absolutes
(I, Not-I, Limit; cf. GA I,1: 151 n.; 1988, 134 n.)
must now comprise nature, ‘‘as something
necessary and independent of us’’ (W I: 64; 1988,
121) and yet as something deducible in terms of the
‘‘acts of mind’’ the Wissenschaftslehre demon-
strates to be ‘‘necessary.’’ It follows from this that
Fichte is constrained to argue that (a) ‘‘nature is the
product of intelligence’’ (W XI: 362) and that (b) it
remains nevertheless ‘‘necessary and independent
of us’’ (W I: 64; 1988, 121). What Schelling calls
Fichte’s ‘‘contradictory’’ solution is cited therefore
at the outset of the Propositions:
I transfer, runs the Wissenschaftslehre, the
concept of my self onto nature as far as
I can without eliminating from it its character-
istics as nature itself, i.e., without making
it into an intelligence (into a self-positing I).
(W XI, 362)
Accordingly, the Propositions begins with a
refutation of the argument that ‘‘Intelligence is a
higher power [Potenz] of nature’’ (W XI: 362);
or, in terms of the Schellingian Naturphilosophie
the Propositions is designed to counter,18
‘‘Intelligence [. . .] is a simple consequence of
nature’s incessant potentiation’’ for which it ‘‘has
made long preparations’’ (SW IV: 76). Schelling
concluded thus on the grounds that a transcen-
dental philosophy could account only for the
products, but not, however, for the production,
of intelligence itself, for which purpose a
Naturphilosophie is therefore required. Now
since Fichte presents the Wissenschaftslehre as
the one complete science, it is imperative that,
rather than adopting a Naturphilosophie along the
lines that Schelling stipulates, the latter can be
constructed under the rubric of transcendental
philosophy. In order to achieve this, Fichte must
show the derivation of material being from
activity. In the Wissenschaftslehre, therefore,
the concept of being is by no means considered
primordial, but rather derivative, a concept
derived [. . .] from contradiction with activity,
and so a merely negative concept. (W I: 499;
1982, 69)
How, then, does material nature arise? Fichte gives
two solutions to the problem of the generation of
material nature. The first, in the Crystal Clear
Report, merely states that ‘‘our existing world is
complete,’’ but goes on to add ‘‘Life is not
48

a producing, but a finding’’ (GA I,7: 249;
Behler 1987, 98). Fichte’s second, and more
complex, solution stipulates that despite opposing
the I’s activity, being is only within the I: ‘‘nothing
is outside of the I’’ (W I: 335–36; 1988, 248). The
division here seems to fall between the transcen-
dental ‘‘foundation of all matter, as will become
clearer and clearer,’’ enthuses Fichte, on the one
hand, and the practical business of life engaging
with a world that is already complete and does not,
pace Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, require to
be generated. In other words, the entire
Wissenschaftslehre would reduce to a choice
between a practical engagement with the world
as it is, and a theoretical engagement in forming all
the concepts to generate a transcendental world, a
world as it might be. But the being of the world as
we find it could not be the material being founded
by the production of ‘‘passive or static material,’’
since the world as we find it is found precisely in so
far as it is not produced, whereas the ‘‘foundation
of all material and all enduring substrata’’ is
precisely ‘‘the mere product which results from
the unification of opposed activities,’’ of the I
and the Not-I (W I: 336; 1988, 248).
While contradictory, it would be difficult to say
that this contradiction lay within the Fichtean
concept of nature, as Schelling argues. If, however,
the problem of the generation of material nature is
posed within the framework that Fichte supplies in
the Propositions, a different solution emerges that
places the contradiction at the core of natural
production. We noted above that the lowest
threshold of consistency that the Propositions
gives for the ‘‘transcendental animal’’ consists in
‘‘the system of plant-souls.’’ This is because, Fichte
argues, there is reciprocity between plant and
environment, rather than an ‘‘artificial’’ or, rather,
artefactual causality that generates abstractions:
Either one-sidedly, mere causality, that gives
rise to a product, so that that on which it acts is
not determined by itself to retroact, thus
remains just an inert residuum of the exhausted
force. The mineral [. . .] [:] There is only
result here, no organisation; hence no
developing, self-renewing reciprocity with the
world, because the chemical force is bound
by the non-penetrated equivalent masses.
(Again, an abstraction). Or reciprocally,
49
grant
that both or all penetrate each other
internally, forming a reciprocal solution, and
flow together into a new whole. (Organisation,
presented in the simplest abstraction in
plants.) (W XI: 364)
Fichte’s distinction works by opposing the imma-
nent causal determination of the fixed particular
(this mineral, that crystal, etc.) to transcendental,
i.e., non-phenomenal, organisation comprising
many systems (plant-souls). The entire orientation
of Propositions is to build the transcendental
animal not from this or that causal property, nor
into a particular form,19 but from the convergence
of all reciprocity ‘‘into a new whole [. . .], the most
intimate union in the All.’’ In the end, therefore,
there will be only ‘‘one force, one soul, one mind’’
(W XI: 364), and it is in this sense that the animal
becomes transcendental – organic activity trans-
cends the particularity by which it falsely signals
phenomenal completeness.
Meanwhile, it follows from the first of the
Propositions – that ‘‘nature is the product of
intelligence’’ (W XI: 362) – that such activity is
doubly transcendental, both in the sense that this
is not simple activity such as is found in ‘‘complete
[ fertig]’’ nature, but also activity in so far as its
generation is intelligible. Accordingly, ‘‘nature
and intelligence terminate in each other without
hiatus’’ (ibid.), i.e., without interrupting transcen-
dental reciprocity. The ‘‘foundation of all matter’’
thus generated produces not simply a particular
product with this or that set of properties or
attributes that may then be enumerated and its
‘‘being’’ determined, but rather a transcendental
substrate of activity in general. The production of
the transcendental substrate thus coincides with,
but is not, the point at which the activity of the
I meets resistance, in so far as it, necessarily alive,
encounters ‘‘the ready-made world’’ (the transcen-
dental animal stumbles on a crystal). The complete
world is not a whole, but a finite particular
precisely in so far as it is complete, whereas life
is ‘‘infinite reciprocity, outward directed and in
itself’’ (W XI: 365). It is a consequence, then, of
Fichte’s transcendentalism that life becomes the
reciprocal condition of the continuous flow of
intelligence into nature, and plant-souls into the
All, while minerality becomes artificial, an unflow-
ing, fixed particulate being incapable of activity,
 systems of philosophy
illustrating what Hegel (1970, 23) calls the
‘‘impotence of nature.’’
Indeed, this is exactly what Hegel’s Natur-
philosophie draws from Fichte. Expressing the
point as though Hegel were commenting on the
metaphysics derived from the Propositions, Hegel
writes:
Naturephilosophy takes up the material which
physics has prepared for it empirically, at the
point to which physics has brought it, and
reconstitutes it, so that experience is not its
final warrant and base. Physics must therefore
work into the hands of philosophy, in order
that the latter may translate into the Concept
[Begriff ] the abstract universal transmitted to
it [. . .] It is because the method of physics
does not satisfy the Concept that we have to
go further. (Hegel 1970, 10)
The world as it is is simply the world as
‘‘empirically prepared by physics’’; since physics
does not satisfy transcendental philosophy, its
material must be reconstituted, with experience
providing neither evidence of, nor ‘‘foundation’’
or ‘‘basis’’ for, the nature of material nature. The
jettisoning of all corporeal particularity – that is,
not just the peculiarities of this body (the
‘‘sthenic’’ philosopher, the impotent mineral),
but also the particularity attaching to body as
such, its immanent detachment – is a prerequisite,
Hegel argues (1977a, 88), for philosophy to
undertake the reconstitution of matter. Yet
Fichte is far from recommending the abandon-
ment of the particularity of the world ‘‘as it is,’’
making the ‘‘modification of matter’’ (W I: 307;
1982, 269) into the metric of philosophy’s
practical actuality; at its highest threshold of
consistency, then, life – ‘‘infinite metabolic
reciprocity, outwardly directed and in itself ’’ –
is expressed as the ontological imperative,
‘‘the whole universe ought to be an organised
whole’’ (GA II,3: 247). While Fichte withdraws
all capacity to act from physical nature,
Hegel grants Nature this capacity even beyond
bodily particularity, so that matter becomes
‘‘a pure abstraction’’ (1977b, 351), only in order
that it demonstrate ‘‘its impotence [. . .] to
adhere strictly to the Concept’’ (1970, 23–24).
If for Hegel ‘‘natural objects do not think’’
(1970, 7) because they are irremediably
particular, Fichtean nature cannot think because
it cannot act.
Thus Fichte’s only error, and one Hegel
commits in turn when he supports Mosaic history
against evolution on the grounds that the former
guarantees that each thing was always what it
now is (i.e., nothing emerged from something
other; Hegel 1970, 284), is to deny activity to
nature on transcendental grounds while rejecting
the central precept of dynamic physics as emerg-
ing under Boscovich–Priestley, and later Oersted
and Faraday,20 i.e., that there is no substance
behind the powers. In other words, by maintaining
a distinction between force and substance,
activity and being, animal and artifice, Fichte
ensures that between ‘‘intellect and thing [. . .]
there is no bridge’’ (W I: 436; 1982, 17).
Accordingly, while sharing a vocabulary with a
physics to which his philosophy is entirely blind,
Fichte’s dynamics transforms his attempts at a
naturephilosophy into an antiphysics that prepares
the ground for Hegel, although the latter does not
acknowledge Fichte’s preparatory labour. Against
this, Schellingianism’s physicalism is entirely
clear: ‘‘nature has made long preparations for the
heights she reaches through reason’’ (SW IV: 76).
Having, as Schelling advises, ‘‘set aside all
practical admixture’’ (SW IV: 86) in order to
properly diagram Fichte’s transcendental
animality, or biocentric naturephilosophy, as a
two-worlds antiphysics, and before proceeding to
differentiate the Schellingian from the Fichtean
naturephilosophy, we will turn to one amongst
many instances of neo-Fichteanism.
II neo-fichteanism: the vital instance
as the incapacity for physics
One does not think without becoming some-
thing else, something that does not think –
an animal, a molecule, a particle – and that
comes back to thought and revives it.
Deleuze and Guattari, What is
Philosophy? 42
By grounding naturephilosophy on animal
being, Fichte gives credence to the dichotomy
that Bernouilli and Kern establish between
50

a ‘‘biocentric’’ and a ‘‘logocentric’’ Naturphiloso-
phie, although they falsely locate this dichotomy
in Schelling. They write:
The later mutilations of the Schellingian
Naturphilosophie by its own creator prove
that Schelling was logocentrically rather than
biocentrically oriented. (1926, viii)
That this is a false dichotomy is evident in many
ways. Firstly, while it is manifestly false that
Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, late or early, was
ever ‘‘logocentrically’’ (as opposed, say, to
‘‘transcendentally’’)21 oriented, such a combina-
tion would arguably cease to be a philosophy of
nature in any sense at all.22 Secondly, the
appearance of dichotomy is undermined even if
we assume that the only way, therefore, to pursue a
philosophy of nature is to select for life rather than
language, to go ‘‘biocentric.’’ This is indeed the
path adopted by many contemporary philosophers
of a naturalistic bent, so that biology marks the
limits if not of nature itself, then of plausible
philosophical attention. Biocentrism does not,
however, define nature- against language-
philosophy, as we might think, but rather defines
the moment beyond which the phenomenological
envelope will not extend, precisely because life is
thought not in itself, but for consciousness.
‘‘Biocentrism’’ marks the point, that is, where a
phenomenology of nature23 turns back from nature
itself, through ‘‘life,’’ and towards the conscious-
ness that life vehiculates. Finally, the dichotomy
collapses because logos and bios are the elements
of species man; both poles, therefore, of the
distinction, remain reducible humanisms, and
differentiate only along the lines of arid philoso-
phies of language versus lush philosophies of life.
Philosophers, then, repeatedly use animality as
the threshold beyond which the fabric binding
consciousness to the practical shreds irreversibly,
and action ceases to be possible. Accordingly, we
might propose that from the organo-ethical
perspective, to venture beyond animality (‘‘one
does not think without becoming something else,
something that does not think,’’ write Deleuze and
Guattari (1994, 42), giving ‘‘animal’’ as a first
example before following through, ‘‘[. . .] a mole-
cule, a particle [. . .]’’) is a regrettable passion that
acts on me, something suffered or undergone; to
51
grant
descend from cognition to animality marks out the
territories of agency in the contours of the act, now
traced in political and existential histories rather
than mammalian odo-geographies.
It is precisely in its attachment to the vital
instance that attempts at a naturephilosophy are
caught within the infinitely reciprocating circuit of
Fichtean life, ‘‘wavering’’ on the thresholds of
physis and ethos. Thus we may already observe
Fichteanism in the biologism of Warnke and Bach,
and in the medicalism of von Engelhardt and
Tsouyopoulos, just as surely as we can identify the
Fichteanism of contemporary philosophy in its
assumption that prioritised practicism is grounded
in the somatic intimacy of life. ‘‘Nature’’ in
Fichteanism serves as the ground, therefore,
from which to begin the ascent to its determination
by consciousness, rather than the unground or
abyss into which the naturephilosopher descends:
‘‘the naturephilosopher puts himself in the place
of nature’’ (Schelling 2001, 192), every particular-
ity ‘‘dissolved in the All’’ (SW VI: 183–84).
Wirth’s recent study of Schelling thus begins
(2003, 6ff.) by updating Fichteanism, applying
Levinas’s (1974, 95) prioritisation of the ‘‘Good
over the True’’ to the foundations of post-Kantian
philosophy, in order to present Schellingianism in
general, and Naturphilosophie in particular,
as an ethics. While ultimately this is a false,
Fichteanised Schelling, Wirth’s arguments are for
that very reason revealing both as regards the
Fichtean grasp of contemporary philosophy, and
as regards the resultant problems being played out
in the naturephilosophical context.24 Wirth’s
argument is that the nature ‘‘spiritualised’’ in
Schelling’s Philosophical Inquiries into the
Essence of Human Freedom, ‘‘render[s] [. . .] its
foundation as ideal’’ (2003, 68), so that this
becomes a nature ‘‘wherein freedom rules’’ (SW
VII: 350; 1986, 24). The question is whether this
‘‘rendering of the foundation as ideal’’ is sufficient
to achieve the prioritisation of the practical over
the physical, as Wirth’s contends. Schelling,
following the passage just cited, explicitly denies
that the primatisation of the practical demand
is ontologically sufficient: ‘‘it would by no means
suffice to declare that ‘Activity, life and freedom
are alone true actuality [das wahrhaft
Wirkliche],’ ’’ since even a ‘‘subjective idealism
 systems of philosophy
(which does not understand itself)’’ such as
Fichteanism ‘‘can go that far’’ (SW VII: 351;
1986, 24; translation modified.). The insufficiency
of such actuality derives from its restriction of all
actuality, ‘‘nature, the world of things’’ (SW VII:
351; 1986, 24; translation modified) to particulars,
especially ‘‘activity, life, freedom.’’ ‘‘Rather it is
required,’’ corrects Schelling, ‘‘that all actuality
(nature, the world of things) be grounded in
activity’’ (ibid.). It is, in other words, insufficient
to show, with Fichte, that freedom consists in the
‘‘modification of matter’’ (W I: 307; 1982, 269);
rather, if freedom is actual, there must be not
merely an ethical usage (which Schelling calls
Fichte’s ‘‘economic-teleological’’ ontology, SW
VII: 17) of nature, since actual freedom necessi-
tates an ethology of matter, without conscious-
ness, even without life.
Clearly, when Wirth attempts to ground this
practical demand, and free action is made depen-
dent on consciousness, that is, on the human
‘‘co-science (Mitwissenschaft)’’ with nature,
whereby ‘‘nature comes to affirm its own prodigal
animality’’ (2003, 25), his is a Fichteanism
masquerading as Schellingianism. ‘‘Activity, life,
freedom’’ are not found in nature, but only in
conscious ‘‘human animality.’’ The ontological
demand for a philosophy of nature is not satisfied
by the restrictedness of ‘‘animality,’’ no matter
how ‘‘prodigal,’’ but rather confronts it directly:
what is not free cannot be determined as free, but,
if freedom is to dominate, must rather be used
and then eliminated in the ‘‘nature-cide’’ towards
which Wirth’s titular ‘‘life conspires’’ (2003, 94f.).
Fichte defines ‘‘life,’’ as the second of the two
epigraphs above has it, as ‘‘infinite metabolic
reciprocity in oneself, but outwardly directed’’
(W XI: 365); that ‘‘Fichte’s concept of nature is
contradictory’’ did not escape Schelling (SW VII:
9). Wirth is only following Fichte in reaching for
animal being in order to ground the practicism of
his critico-transcendental ontology; but life,
the animal, apparent paradigms of nature, do not
conjoin consciousness to nature, but rather
segregate the one from the other.
Wirth’s Fichteanism gets it wrong on
two counts, regarding the assertion of an
unequivocal practicism driving Schellingian
naturephilosophy: firstly, since this presents
only a one-sided, therefore only a partially true,
and being only partially true, wholly false,
account of the Philosophical Inquiries; and
secondly, the assertoric mode of Wirth’s account
misrepresents transcendental arguments from the
Oldest System-Program as what, from that philo-
sophical perspective, would be anarcho-dogmatic
ones. This requires that all the dimensions of
the problem be properly laid out, and the problem
of the relation of transcendental to nature-
philosophy examined. For one reason, the
Philosophical Inquiries does attest to a spiritua-
lisation or ‘‘potentiating [potenzierende]’’ of
nature, but one that is a power of nature rather
than an act that passive nature suffers at divine or
otherwise non-natural yet spontaneous causality,
making transcendental conditions coincident with
physical ones. For another, the transcendentalism
of the Oldest System-Program’s account of how a
world, how nature, ‘‘must be constructed for a
moral being’’ (Frank and Kurz 1975, 110) does not
entail the automatic assumption of the primacy of
the practical, nor does it ground this primacy as
‘‘nature for a moral being’’; rather, transcendental
sufficiency, as in the passage from the
Philosophical Inquiries (SW VII: 351; 1986, 24)
examined above, is given only when the conditions
become themselves unconditioned, ‘‘unthinged
[unbedingt]’’ or absolute, i.e., when they lose all
particularity. In terms of the overt relation of
philosophies of life to Fichtean rather than to
Schellingian philosophy,25 therefore, Wirth’s
account is exemplary, not only revealing the
ethical-epistemological axis of the problem (the
good vs. the true), but also the formal ontological
dimension of Fichtean naturephilosophy, to which
we now turn before considering the transcendent-
alism of Naturphilosophie, as disputed between
Schelling and Eschenmayer.
III the disputed transcendentalism of
naturephilosophy
I absolutely do not acknowledge two differ-
ent worlds, but rather insist on only one and
the same, in which everything, even what
common consciousness opposes as nature
and mind, is comprehended.
Schelling, SW IV: 101–02
52

We cannot agree with Hegel’s judgement that
‘‘Schelling’s answer to Eschenmayer’s idealistic
objections against the Naturphilosophie’’
(1977a, 79) fails to bring into sharp relief the dif-
ference between the Schellingianising and Fich-
teanising tendencies in the philosophy of nature
(not least in Hegel’s own). Indeed, the argu-
ments around which this exchange of two articles
– Eschenmayer’s ‘‘Spontaneity ¼ Worldsoul’’ and
Schelling’s ‘‘On the true concept of nature-
philosophy’’ – is constructed continue to divide
these tendencies, as we have seen, into the
contemporary.
Here, in list form, is the core of Eschenmayer’s
argument (Schelling 2001, 233–34):
1. Naturephilosophy problematises, but
cannot resolve, the nature of the ‘‘connection
between nature and concept, law and freedom,
dead mechanism and vital dynamics.’’
2. Eschenmayer cites Schelling’s formulation
of the second problem: ‘‘what is the universal
source of activity in nature?’’ (SW III: 20; 2004, 19)
– nature itself (Schelling’s ‘‘unconditioned or
unthinged empiricism’’) or the I (Fichte,
Eschenmayer)?
3. If Schelling is correct, then there can be no
principle of becoming, but only actual becomings,
none of which could furnish a principle for any
other. Therefore, a transcendental philosophy is
necessary in order to produce the free concept.
4. This free concept must be free according
to principles that are themselves spontaneous
and undetermined by nature. Therefore, a
transcendental investigation of the concept of
becoming in nature leads not to material nature
as its source and principle but rather to ‘‘vital
consciousness,’’ i.e., to spontaneity, the ‘‘soul of
the world.’’
In other words, the argument hinges around
whether nature itself is active, and whether a
transcendental philosophy or a philosophy of
nature, which Eschenmayer calls an ‘‘uncondi-
tioned empiricism’’ (unbedingten Empirismus;
Schelling 2001, 234), is capable of resolving this
problem. Against the Fichtean transcendentalism
Eschenmayer offers, Schelling writes: ‘‘some,
misled by the term ‘naturephilosophy’, will think
they should expect a transcendental deduction
of natural phenomena’’ (SW IV: 81). On the
53
grant
contrary, the reason, writes Schelling, for the
opposition of naturephilosophy and transcenden-
tal philosophy, and why these two sciences
proceed along ‘‘entirely different lines [. . .], lies
in things’’ (SW IV: 83). Schelling is always clear
that, while connected, the transcendental and
naturephilosophy operate along contrary axes.
The mistake is often made, following Hegel’s
characterisation of Schelling’s philosophy in
On the Difference between the Fichtean and the
Schellingian Systems of Philosophy, of merely
viewing the two as the symmetrical constituents
of a philosophical science as such, reducible to
neither. Yet Schelling consistently insists that the
relation is asymmetrical: transcendental philoso-
phy is identical to dynamics (SW III: 452;
1978, 91), but dynamics restricted to a single
region of nature, namely the ‘‘natural history of
mind’’ (SW II: 39; 1988, 30), whereas nature-
philosophy is concerned with what is not recover-
able in mind, that is, the natural productivity that
is as active in geology as in ideation. Caught, then,
between a false equilibrium of the two sciences in
philosophical science per se, and a naturalistically
false prioritisation of mentation over physis,
Schelling opts to reject any transcendentalism in
naturephilosophy whatsoever. In doing so,
however, Schellingian naturephilosophy is indeed
open to the ‘‘charge’’ (if charge it is) of ‘‘uncondi-
tioned empiricism’’ levelled at it by Eschenmayer.
The question is, granted that Kant and Fichte
are transcendental philosophers, and granted that
Schelling does not wish to repeat their errors, is
there another means of pursuing a transcendental
naturephilosophy that does not entail these errors?
For instance, does Wirth’s error regarding the
transcendental background to the problem of
world-constitution for a moral being provide an
alternative means to construct a transcendental
naturalism?
Before addressing this directly, what solu-
tions does Schelling offer to Eschenmayer’s
criticisms? Key to this is Schelling’s solution to
Eschenmayer’s second point, concerning the
source of activity in nature: this solution proposes
activity to be ‘‘the unconditioned or unthinged
[das Unbedingte] in nature’’ (SW III: 11; 2004, 13).
Thus, overtly contra Fichte and Hegel, Schelling
posits activity in nature that is not only
 systems of philosophy
autochthonous but law-governed: ‘‘In nature-
philosophy, I say that nature is its own lawgiver’’
(SW IV: 96). In so far as this is the case, the sphere
covered by transcendental philosophy is not so
much separable from that covered by the philoso-
phy of nature as it is generated by it. It does not
do so, however, in accordance with the simplistic
alternative of causality vs. reciprocity with which
Fichte works in the Propositions; rather, ‘‘the acts
which are derived in the theoretical part of
idealism are acts the simple powers of which
exist in nature and are set out in naturephiloso-
phy’’ (SW IV: 92); or, as Schelling puts it earlier in
the same work, ‘‘electricity in nature [is] intelli-
gence [. . .] [as] a simple consequence of nature’s
constant potentiation’’ (SW IV: 76). In other
words, the final phenomenal link between the act
of thinking and the experience of the content of
thought has been broken; to reinstate it is
thereafter the function of transcendental philoso-
phy, the only science with such a ‘‘double series’’
according to Schelling: ‘‘Transcendental philoso-
phy, since its object is the original genesis
of consciousness, is the sole science in
which this twofold series occurs’’ (SW III: 398;
1978, 49).
Rather than pursuing this here, which would
take us into the arena of formalism in naturephi-
losophy, I wish to conclude with an idea of
transcendental naturalism left open by the
problem posed in the Oldest System-Program;
that is ‘‘how must a world be constituted for a
moral being?’’ (in Frank and Kurz 1975, 110).
If we add to this Schelling’s solution to the second
of Eschenmayer’s criticisms, i.e., that ‘‘nature is
its own lawgiver,’’ then the problem can be recast
in terms of a naturalism structured around the
world as the constituting agent. This inverts the
transcendental order understood in Kanto-
Fichtean terms, and thus as understood by
Eschenmayer, but it opens up two potential
solutions for a transcendental naturalism not
subject to this ‘‘transfer of intelligence from the
I onto nature’’ (W XI: 362) account.
The first of these solutions operates the con-
ceptualisation of constructions on the basis of
Leibnizian sufficient reason, rather than on the
completeness of a transcendental deduction. Since
Schelling has already noted that we are misled
if we expect to discover such deductions in his
Naturphilosophie, sufficiency provides a guaran-
tor for the transcendental construction that is the
same as the guarantor for the physical, but that
does without the finally conditioning instance
that settles the constructed into exclusively
transcendental territory.
The second solution concerns Schelling’s
constant search for the ‘‘unconditioned in
nature’’: to the extent that this is a possible
programme, there can be no guarantee that
the unconditioned has been reached. Accordingly,
the transcendental would again lack conditions of
closure, and would instead open onto sequences of
unconditioning that carry the entire process back
beyond the envelope of the second of the twofold
series in which transcendental philosophy consists,
and into naturephilosophy itself. As Schelling
put it in the Journal, ‘‘the naturephilosopher
puts himself in the place of
nature’’ (Schelling 2001, 192):
this is not to be understood as the
transfer of intelligence, but as the
motions of its physical precursors.
notes
1 In the Exposition of the True Relation of
Naturephilosophy to the Improved Fichtean Theory
(1806), Schelling writes: ‘‘Above all, the true signifi-
cance of the eternal and necessary bond between
philosophy and physics remains a mystery even in
our time’’ (SW VII: 101). References are to Friedrich
Willhelm Joseph von Schellings sa«mmtlicheWerke, XIV
vols., ed. K.F.A. Schelling (Stuttgart and Augsburg:
J.G. Cotta’scher, 1856 ^ 61). Where available, trans-
lated sources follow these citations; otherwise,
all translations are my own.
2 That Oken remains despised is clear from the
most recent treatment of his work by the histor-
ian and philosopher of science Nicholas Jardine
(Scenes of Inquiry (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) 1),
who delights in the ‘‘grotesque’’ nature of his
system. The biologist and theoretician Gould
(Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP,1977)), meanwhile, does not bellow his disdain
with the same excess of sobriety. Pursuing the
contrasting degrees of abstraction tolerable by
the natural as opposed to the human sciences
would be instructive.
54

3 I use Habermas’s (1992) formulation not only
because it can stand tolerably well for all those
who assert the end or death of metaphysics to
have occurred as either an historical or as a meta-
physical fact; but specifically because Habermas
delights, like Cromwell in a cathedral, in liberating
moral-practical problems from conceptual strin-
gency of any sort, and in reducing metaphysical to
discoursive-historical objects. In place, then, of
standing like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, at the
gateway Moment, at the juncture of eternity
and recurrence, post-metaphysics confronts
philosophy with a decision: ‘‘Left and Right
Hegelianism?’’ And in place of the manifest
impracticality of metaphysics as textual scholar-
ship, the equally transparent practicality of
post-metaphysics as ^ speech.
4 In part this paper has been provoked by
having spent a year in the company of several col-
leagues, especially Peter Jowers and Sean Watson,
wondering repeatedly how exactly it might be pos-
sible to develop a metaphysics that ‘‘embraces
all the concepts of nature and freedom’’ (Deleuze
1994, 19). The paper’s title is an expression of my
thanks to them, and its use of the collective ‘‘we,’’
therefore, not even empirically inaccurate.
5 To say nothing of the more overt statements to
this effect in What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994,11^12,102, 208), amongst the devel-
opments in Difference and Repetition indebted to
Idealism we might number the discussion of the
relation between good sense, science and philoso-
phy in terms drawn from Hegel’s Differenzschrift
(1994, 224f.); while the geo-logical articulation of
depth, ground, ungrounding, the profound, and
‘‘transcendental volcanism’’ (1994, 228 ^32, 241)
draws on Schelling’s citations and development of
Steffens’ geological researches (SW IV: 504 ^ 05,
citing Steffens’ essay, ‘‘On the Oxydation and
Deoxydation Processes of the Earth,’’ published in
Schelling’s Journal of Speculative Physics I.1 (1800), in
Schelling 2001,100 ^ 01).Catherine Malabou (in Paul
Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996) 114 ^38) has prompted a recon-
sideration of Hegel’s role in Deleuze’s metaphysics,
an unpopular view seconded by James Williams’s
argument, in his Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and
Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2003) 26, that ‘‘general-
ized anti-Hegelianism’’ is a trap laid by the book.
As noted elsewhere, Eric Alliez recommends
the philosophical value of a ‘‘confrontation with
55
grant
the Fichtean standpoint’’ in his The Signature of the
World (London: Continuum) 30.
6 Fichte agreed with this verdict of Eschenmayer,
whose anonymous review of Schelling’s First Outline
of a System of the Philosophy of Nature and
Introduction to the Outline (both 1799) had appeared
in the Erlanger Literatur-Zeitung for April 1801,
and which Fichte expressly praised in his letter
to Schelling of 31 May 1801. It is Eschenmayer’s
(‘‘increasing,’’ according to Durner, in Schelling
2001, 2: xix) Fichteanism that makes his
‘‘Spontaneity ¼ World Soul,’’ which appeared in
volume II.1 (1801) of Schelling’s Zeitschrift fu«r
spekulative Physik, along with Schelling’s simulta-
neously published response,‘‘TheTrue Concept of
Naturphilosophie and the Proper Technique for
Resolving its Problems’’ (SW IV: 79^104), into a
theatre in which the divergence of Fichteanism
from physics is played out. In the Difference
between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy
(published September 1801), Hegel claims that
‘‘Schelling’s answer to Eschenmayer’s idealistic
objections against the Naturphilosophie’’ (Hegel
1977a, 79) precisely fails to bring the distinct-
ness of the two systems out into public
discussion, and notes the ‘‘distortion’’ of the
Schellingian by the Fichtean system this occasions.
Hegel’s derogatory use of ‘‘idealistischen’’ here is
to be noted.
7 Reinhard Lo«w’s critique of ‘‘the modern, mathe-
matico-physical philosophy of nature,’’ against
which he positions what he styles as Schelling’s
advancement of ‘‘the interests of reason: how
must nature be thought so as to conceptualize
actuality on the one hand and on the other, so
that man can understand himself as an intellectual
and moral being?’’(in Hasler 1981, 103), perfectly
and falsely exemplifies the tendency that
Bonsepien follows and that Zimmerli and
Cha“telet reject.
8 Heuser-Kessler’s study concentrates on estab-
lishing conceptual likenesses between the precepts
of specifically Schellingian Naturphilosophie and
the contemporary natural-scientific paradigm to
which the study’s title adverts. The current con-
text, however, is oriented towards the problem of
an ontology of nature rather than theoretical
homologies.
9 Noting that Aristotle’s name for his forebears
is physiologoi, Heidegger asks what this means:
‘‘the physiologoi are neither ‘physiologists’ in the
 systems of philosophy
contemporary sense [. . .] nor are they philoso-
phers of nature. The physiologoi is rather a genuine
primordial title for a questioning about beings as a
whole, the title for those who speak out
about physis, about the prevailing of beings as a
whole [. . .]’’ (1995, 28). Thus arises a merely
logico-discursive nature.
10 As philosophers of the concept, Deleuze
prefers Hegel, Schelling and even Maimon
(cf. Deleuze 1993, 89) to Fichte, while the latent
existentialism of Alexis Philonenko’s Fichte
(La Liberte¤ humaine dans la philosophie de Fichte,
2nd ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1980)) appeals to Guattari. To
advance the cause of philosophy as onto-ethology,
which is how he reads Deleuze and Guattari’s
What is Philosophy?, Alliez notes the timeliness
of a ‘‘confrontation with the Fichtean standpoint’’
(2005, 30).
11 Jaspers (1955,178) inaugurates this Fichteanised
Schelling with his mid-century Schellingian revival:
‘‘For Schelling, Kant is the turning-point, Fichte’s
idealism the foundation, and he himself the com-
pletion of the philosophy of freedom that can
recreate metaphysics quite otherwise than all
prior metaphysics.’’ Similarly, despite citing
Schelling’s condemnation of Fichte from the
Stuttgart Seminars (SW VII: 445; 1994, 215;
Heidegger 1985, 93) to the effect that the ‘‘Science
of Knowledge’’ delivers ‘‘a complete deathblow to
nature,’’ Heidegger’s Schelling wavers between
Fichteanism and Schellingianism precisely as
regards the problem of nature.
12 See Walter Schulz (ed.), Briefwechsel
Fichte-Schelling (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1968), and the ‘‘Selections from Fichte ^Schelling
Correspondence,’’ translated in Jochen
Schulte-Sasse et al. (eds.), Theory as Practise
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,1997) 73^90.
13 Blumenbach does not so much create a wholly
new method in the natural sciences as translate
outmoded Stahlian debates surrounding vitalism
into a positivistic-naturalist context. Similarly, it is
not so much in its great utility to natural history,
whatever Kantians such as Girtanner had to say,
as it is in the transformation of this from a straight-
forwardly naturalistic into a transcendental
problematic that the Kantian principle acquires
its philosophical significance.
14 For Kant’s brief acknowledgement of
Blumenbach in the third Critique, see Ak.V: 424;
1987, 311. For a naturalistic solution of this
transcendental gulf, see my ‘‘Physics of Analogy’’
in Rachel Jones and Andrea Rehberg (eds.), The
Matter of Critique. Readings in Kant’s Philosophy
(Manchester: Clinamen, 2000) 37^ 60.
15 Although Badiou (2000, 45) likes to think that
his classicism surpasses its criticist precursors,‘‘cri-
ticality’’ is more properly the dimension he retains,
mistakenly jettisoning the transcendental in its
stead. Further, the sense Fichte gave to ‘‘philoso-
phical critique’’ in Concerning the Concept of the
Wissenschaftslehre accords with the usage Badiou
intends of precisely such distinctions between clas-
sicism and criticism: ‘‘One can philosophise about
metaphysics itself [. . .] One can embark on investi-
gations into the possibility, the real meaning, and
the rules governing such a science. And this is
very advantageous for the cultivation of the
science of metaphysics itself. The philosophical
name for a system of this sort of inquiry is
‘critique’’’ (W I: 32; 1988, 97). However, the
dimension of criticality to which we wish to draw
attention at the present moment consists in its
eliminative one: ‘‘a pure critique,’’ stipulates Fichte,
‘‘is intermixed with no metaphysical investiga-
tions’’ (ibid.), i.e., expels all metaphysical elements
from its field.
16 It is equally important to note that the ‘‘stan-
dard story’’ regarding Fichte ^ the one that is
standardly derived from Hegel ^ is not the only
one told. See Pippin in Sedgwick (2000, 147^70).
Regarding Fichte’s Naturphilosophie, see the reveal-
ing and heavily guarded acknowledgement by
Breazeale (in Sedgwick 2000, 179) that Fichte’s
philosophy of nature, while barely developed, is
concerned with the nature of experience, or in
Breazeale’s own terms, with ‘‘what experience, and
hence ‘nature’, necessarily is and must be’’ (emphasis
in original).
17 The important Fichtean texts in the present
context ^ Concerning the Concept of the
Wissenschaftslehre, Outline of the Distinctive
Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with Respect to
the Theoretical Faculty, Foundations of the Entire
Wissenschaftslehre, Foundations of Natural Right
and the ‘‘Propositions for the Elucidation of the
Essence of Animals’’ ^ were all published between
1794 and 1800, while the relevant texts of Kant’s
Opus postumum (1993, known by Schelling
(SW VI: 8) as u«bergang von der Metaphysik zur
Physik, as noted above) were written between
1798 and 1801 (see Kant 1993, xxvi ^xxix for the
chronology).
56

18 This is Fichte’s first recorded use of the term
Potenz, which, having been one of the conceptual
mainstays of Schelling’s philosophy since the lat-
ter’s Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (SW II: 314 n.;
1988, 249 n.) took it from Eschenmayer’s Principles
from the Metaphysics of Nature (1796), demonstrates
that the Propositions is a response to Schelling
(cf. GA II,5: 419). Further demonstrations of this
can be found by comparing the substance of
the Propositions with the exchange of letters
between Fichte and Schelling, specifically
those Fichte drafted or sent to Schelling on
27 December 1800.
19 Fichte’s animal is thus exceptional in the
Goethean age, where morphogenesis and com-
parative anatomy were determined almost exclu-
sively to search for the Urtyp.For more exceptions
to this supposed rule of natural science during the
Romantic era, and in Naturphilosophie in particular,
see my Philosophies of Nature After Schelling
(Continuum, forthcoming 2006).
20 R.J. Boscovich’s theory of ‘‘point-atoms’’
(in Crosland1971, 210 ^14), and J.B. Priestley’s defini-
tion of matter by ‘‘powers’’ rather than substances
(ibid. 115^19) were amongst the eighteenth-
century sources for the ‘‘dynamic atomism’’ in
Schelling’s First Outline of a System of
Naturephilosophy (SW III: 22^24; 2004, 20 ^22);
Hans-Christian Oersted discovered electromag-
netism in 1820 (although this is usually credited to
Faraday in1831), and thus prepared the way for the
field theories of force promulgated by Michael
Faraday, for example, for whom ‘‘the substance is
composed of its powers’’ (Experimental Researches
in Electricity, 3 vols. (London: Taylor 1839^55) 1:
362.
21 In the 1844 Presentation of the Process of Nature,
for instance, Schelling demonstrates a marked
shift from the position he adopted forty years
earlier as regards Kant’s Critique of the Power of
Judgment. In the earlier text, Kant’s work divides
organic being from nature in general (SW VI: 8),
contrasting with the more positive use of that
Critique in the later work (SW X: 366 ^75).
22 The prime example of this tendency remains
Heidegger (cf. n. 9, above), whose etymology
of physiologia demonstrates him incapable of a
philosophy of nature precisely because his is a
philosophy of logos. Amongst other philosophers
promoting an essentially logocentric nature-
philosophy, Krings (in Hasler 1981, 73^76; 1982,
57
grant
350) and Peterson (2003, xxvff.) propose
a ‘‘logogenetic’’ approach even to Schellingian
Naturphilosophie, which Lo«w (in Hasler 1981, 103)
summarises thus:
If modern, mathematico-physical philosophy
of nature shows us a real-genetic image of
actuality, which men are neither familiar
with nor can form concepts of, then
Schelling’s transcendental construction
characterized the countervailing interests
of reason: how must nature be thought so
as to conceptualize actuality on the one
hand and on the other, so that man can
understand himself as an intellectual and
moral being? Hermann Krings has intro-
duced the concept of logogenesis for such
a construction.
Meanwhile, Roland Omne's, rather than
giving a logocentric naturephilosophy, undertakes
a naturephilosophical examination of Logos in
Quantum Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton UP,
1999) 275: ‘‘Unlike reality, Logos never offers itself
in a concrete form, even if it is present everywhere
[. . .] We may not know much about Logos, but we
possess a sort of living mirror of it: the brain,
which [. . .] carries a trace of its matrix as a
meteor carries that of an inaccessible planet.’’
Thus biocentrism and logocentrism share the
same formal insufficiency, and both hinge around
an essentially phenomenological approach to
nature.
23 See, for example, Gernot Bo«hme’s
‘‘Introduction’’ to Pha«nomenologie der Natur
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), esp. 41f.:
‘‘The phenomenology of nature is nature-knowing
as self-knowing.’’
24 The project retreats at moments of great
tension to the French-Heideggerian rubric of
philosophical ‘‘discourses’’ (2003, 2), thus supplying
a general validation of the empirical accuracy
of Bernouilli and Kern’s (1926, viii) division of
Naturphilosophie into the biocentric and the
logocentric.
25 Such relations might be further explored in
the context of the renewed interest in Bergson
and Nietzsche from the point of view of the
life sciences. In both instances, Keith Ansell
Pearson has blazed trails that may bear fruitful
comparison with a properly understood
Schellingian naturalism.
 systems of philosophy
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Iain Hamilton Grant
School of Cultural Studies
University of the West of England
Frenchay Campus
Bristol BS16 1QY
UK
E-mail: Iain.Grant@uwe.ac.uk