Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature is a work of speculative philosophy from the German idealist tradition, first published in the late 1790s and expanded with extensive supplements in a second edition a few years later. It sets out to think nature not as dead mechanism but as a living interplay of forces, and it moves through the physical sciences of its day—combustion, light, air, electricity, magnetism, chemistry—reinterpreting each in dynamical terms. The book belongs to Schelling’s early period, written after he left the Tübingen seminary and immersed himself in medicine, physics and mathematics at Leipzig, and it carries the marks of that immersion on every page.
At its heart is a single wager: that matter, however inert it appears, is nothing but an equilibrium of opposed forces, and that this equilibrium, once disturbed, is what we call life and activity. Schelling takes the Kantian construction of matter from the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and pushes it further, insisting that attractive and repulsive forces are the very conditions of matter’s possibility rather than properties added to an already existing stuff. From this root he grows a whole physics, chemistry and physiology, and the book’s two Books divide the labour: the first works through the particular phenomena of heat, light, air, electricity and magnetism, while the second builds the general dynamical principles and applies them to chemistry and the qualities of bodies.
From the Phenomena of Fire to the Forces of Matter
The Making of a Natural Philosopher
Schelling’s Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature appeared at Easter 1797, and it marked a decisive turn in his intellectual life. Two years earlier he had left the theological seminary at Tübingen, where he had befriended Hegel and Hölderlin, and taken a post as tutor to an aristocratic family. In 1796 he moved with them to Leipzig, and there, studying medicine, physics and mathematics, he arrived at a picture of nature built around polarity and dynamism. That picture pulled him away from the Fichtean themes that had dominated his earlier writing, though he kept elements of them and tried to fit nature inside Fichtean idealism. On the World Soul followed a year later, and the two books brought him fame and Goethe’s backing, which secured him a professorship at Jena in 1798. By the second edition of 1803, with its extensive supplements, his framework was no longer Fichte’s dialectic of subject and object but his own neo-Platonic philosophy of the absolute.
Nature as a Balance of Opposed Forces
On the World Soul declares it the first principle of any philosophical doctrine of nature to seek polarity and dualism throughout all nature. With Heraclitus, Schelling ties nature to a balance of opposed forces; disturb the balance and you get strife and activity. In the Ideas he argues that matter, apparently dead and inert, is nothing but an equilibrium of opposed forces, brought to life when that equilibrium is disturbed. He sets himself against the Newtonian picture of hard, impenetrable, inert particles pushed around by external forces, insisting that “absolute inertness… is a concept without sense or significance” and that matter is an equilibrium of active forces in polar opposition.
Kant’s Construction of Matter
Schelling freely acknowledges how much of this he owes to Kant’s “construction” of matter in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science of 1786. The “Dynamics” chapter there argues that solidity and impenetrability derive from a repulsive force which must be balanced by attraction, lest matter “disperse itself to infinity.” Kant holds both forces essential, and against the “mathematico-mechanical” approach of atoms and the void he argues for a “metaphysico-dynamical” conception. This is the background to Schelling’s first six chapters of Book II, the central core of the work: attractive and repulsive forces are “conditions of the possibility of matter,” and “matter and bodies… are themselves nothing but products of opposing forces.” Like Kant, he contrasts this with Newtonian atomists who treat matter as independent of force.
Le Sage Refuted and a Dynamical Chemistry
In Book II Chapter 3 Schelling takes apart Le Sage’s explanation of gravitation, which postulated an ether of minute particles moving in all directions at high velocity, so that two spherical bodies would screen each other from bombardment and the resulting disequilibrium would drive them together. Schelling objects that the particles’ motion is left unexplained, that indivisible primary particles are absurd, and that his dynamical conception makes the whole hypothesis redundant. Chemical properties fall under the same account. Matter in general is constructed from the equilibrium of the “basic forces” of attraction and repulsion; particular qualities arise when that equilibrium is upset and one force predominates, since otherwise the forces would cancel and neither be present to any determinate degree. Hence his “principle of dynamical chemistry”: “All quality of matter rests wholly and solely on the intensity of its basic forces.” The essential qualities are elasticity (repulsive force) and mass (attractive force), with colour and temperature depending on these, especially elasticity. He rejects Newtonian explanations of chemical affinity via ether or gravitational attraction, though he grants such conceptions may help turn chemistry into a mathematical science. Affinity, for him, occurs between bodies with opposite degrees of basic forces, which react to restore equilibrium; a reaction is set in motion by upsetting equilibrium, and the product is a median of the two bodies’ forces. Stern notes that this led Schelling to strange views—the paradigm reaction, for instance, being between a solid and a fluid—but that his account comes closer than the Newtonians’ to explaining affinity by opposed electrical charge.
Heat, Light, Air, Electricity, Magnetism
Book I rests the theory of heat and combustion on the same dynamic conception. Schelling rejects outright the calorific theory that treats heat as an imponderable fluid combining with warmed bodies: “to postulate a heat-matter as the cause of heat is not to explain the situation, but to pay oneself with words.” He likewise rejects mechanical explanations of expansion through vibrating atoms pushing one another apart. Heat is a particular degree of repulsive or expansive force, communicable until equilibrium is restored; it does not enter chemical combination but may cause it, as in combustion, where heating raises the repulsive force and enables combination with oxygen, “charged” with opposite attractive force. On light, he disallows a special “light-stuff” entering chemical combinations, though he allows this as a scientific fiction; light is “the highest degree known to us of the expansive force,” differing from heat in that only air can possess the degree of expansive force required to serve as its medium. Air interests him as the medium conducting light and heat to earth, and because the atmosphere displays the equilibrium and interaction of opposed moments: vital air, or oxygen, is given its counterpart in the remaining air.
The Introduction: Reflection as Spiritual Sickness
The Introduction opens by asserting that man is originally an absolute equilibrium of forces and consciousness, an equilibrium he can upset through freedom in order to reestablish it through freedom; only equilibrium of forces is health. Mere reflection is therefore a spiritual sickness in mankind, especially when it dominates the whole man and kills the germ of his highest being, spiritual life, which issues only from Identity. This evil accompanies man into life and distorts his intuition even of familiar objects. Reflection’s dissection reaches beyond the phenomenal world: separating the spiritual principle from it fills the intellectual world with chimeras beyond all reason and makes the separation between man and the world permanent, treating the world as a thing in itself unreachable by intuition, imagination, understanding, or reason.
Philosophy’s Task and Its Self-Destruction
True philosophy regards reflection merely as a means. It must presuppose the original divorce—without it there would be no need to philosophize—and assigns reflection only negative value; it proceeds from that divorce to reunite through freedom what was originally and necessarily united in the human mind, forever canceling the separation. Since philosophy was made necessary only by that separation, a necessary evil and a discipline of errant reason, it works toward its own destruction. The philosopher who pursues the philosophy of reflection through its endless dichotomizing to eliminate it in its ultimate ramifications would earn the most worthy place, a service respected equally with the highest even if he never sees philosophy resurrect itself self-consciously from reflection’s dismembering activities. The simplest expression of complicated problems is always best.
Light, Gravity, and the Limits of Immateriality
Schelling dismisses the “immateriality of light” as an empty, merely negative determination—one compatible even with Euler’s aether vibrations. The immaterialists wrongly assume matter is truly material, yet in their own sense matter is no more material than light is immaterial; higher definitions are needed. Light, he proposes, is that which in a positive way is the same in the ideal as matter is in the real. Neither ideal nor real is pure: the real is identity as the implanting of the ideal in the real—matter, where soul is revealed in colour, brightness, sound—while the ideal is identity as the resumption of the real into the ideal, light as the absolute schematism of all matter, the finite presented in the infinite. Gravity is the maternal, natural principle; light the generative, divine one. No immediate action of light on bodies, or bodies on light, is admitted; all relation is conceived through a third in which they are one, which on a higher level gravity attempts to synthesize. This collapses the arguments for light’s material nature drawn from chemical effects. The central body of each system is the source of light because there particularity is reshaped by gravity into the universal. Celestial bodies emanate from their centres like ideas from ideas, at once dependent and self-subsistent; the material universe is the revealed world of Ideas, bodies nearer the centre more universal and self-luminous, distant ones more particular and dark, each only relatively so.
Air, Water, and the Chemistry of the Atmosphere
The globe is surrounded by transparent elastic air, vehicle of life-giving forces; Nature admits nothing independent—everything exists through action and reaction. Air changes daily: the vegetable kingdom exhales the purest air, the animal kingdom breathes out unsuitable air; winds and storms convey materials to distant regions, and autumn and spring begin the great movements keeping air in equilibrium. Councillor Girtanner’s claim that nitrogen floats above oxygen in layers is refuted—one cannot understand why nitrogen would lie between, nor why pure azotic or vital air would not accumulate; an intimate chemical mixture must be assumed, effected by light keeping air in constant decomposition. Kinds of air differ by quantitative relations; mephitic non-inflammable airs are “oxidized,” inflammable ones “deoxidized.” Turning to water’s synthesis, Schelling questions modern chemistry’s “hydrogen”: burning inflammable air with vital air is ordinary combustion—oxygen drawn in, heat liberated, the residue condensing to liquid. Water arises because both elementary materials become mutually bound; the precipitated liquid shows an acid character whose basis is nitrogen when either air is impure or Priestley’s quantitative relation is not observed. Chemistry should not regard the basis of inflammable air simply as hydrogen nor azotic air merely as azote; meteorology must ask whether water is inactive in the atmospheric cycle. Heat acts mechanically in vapours, dynamically and chemically in air, penetrating particles as in warming bodies and melting water, whose fluid state has smaller volume; freezing expansion is departing heat’s last action.
De Luc, Lichtenberg, and the Electricities
A supplement on the history of water’s decomposition attacks French chemistry for drafting universal theory from particular experiments. In 1791 de Luc wrote to Fourcroy: if rain forms from air as such, not from oxygen and hydrogen meeting, then atmospheric air has water as its ponderable basis; the twelve ounces produced in the laboratory in no way proves water’s synthesis, having nothing in common with huge downpours in dry air. Lichtenberg held similar principles, perceiving in the Amsterdam experiment what was later recognized with the voltaic pile; in his lectures he asks whether electric matter decomposes, one part making inflammable air with water-vapour, the other dephlogisticated air. The Journal of Speculative Physics is quoted: negative electricity may be oxygen—not the ponderable part but what potentiates matter into material; Lichtenberg rightly said the combination of the two airs into water could be called a combination of two electricities. Hydrogen is positive electricity, having the opposite function to oxygen; the two are the permanent representatives of potentiated attractive and repulsive forces. J. W. Ritter then carried out voltaic-pile experiments raising hope of empirically observing this in water’s decomposition. It emerged that most physicists and chemists had not understood de Luc and Lichtenberg at all, and had been blind about their observed facts, holding the theory of facts to be knowledge of the inner process; the empty chemical experimentalism of the French was oppressive. Whoever asked what is involved in chemical dissolution would see that reducing water’s decomposition to one presentation and one substance under different forms applies to all decomposition: in the sense water is simple, so is all matter.
Electricity, Storms, and the Unity of Principles
On electricity, a new phenomenon appears where activity arises against activity, force against force; whether one original force divided against itself by a third cause, or two originally contending forces held bound by a third, is unknown. No phenomenon has been observed so precisely; swift evanescence compelled artificial means—the machine exciting greatest electricity, the semi-conducting plate detecting weakest, the resin block restraining it. Where vapours and mists arise or condense, a disintegration of the air occurs—heat expended in the first case, liberated in the second. This decomposition is partial and to that extent mechanical, much like that excited by friction; it occurs far more often than imagined, for lightning breaks from the smoke plumes of Vesuvius. An electric storm never arises without clouds; where vapours condense as clouds, electricity can be generated both in the region of condensation and in lower levels, explaining opposite electricities in the atmosphere. The most beneficial effect of great electrical explosions is the decomposition they cause: the lowest air is full of alien ponderable components driving purer air upwards, whence the sultriness before a thunderstorm. The refreshing coolness after a storm is partly due to attenuated air and partly to heat expended for the copious downpour.
The hypothesis is not entirely new. Priestley claimed the electric spark causes a phlogistical process, conjecturing electricity is phlogiston itself or contains it; Schelling notes he explained an unknown phenomenon by a more unknown principle, though his remark that phlogiston is the common constituent of conductors retains value as fact. Henly held electric matter is neither phlogiston nor fire but a different modification of both—all phenomena being states through which one principle runs—concluding phlogiston, electricity and fire are different states of the same element. Light’s appearance in electrical experiments was Nature’s directive to seek unity between the two phenomena. De Luc distinguishes the fluidum deferens of electricity from electrical matter; Kratzenstein allegedly declared electrical matter consists of phlogiston and an acid; Lichtenberg proposed making it consist of oxygen, hydrogen and caloric. Van Marum’s experiments showed caloric present in the electric fluid—a thermometer bulb in an electric current rises—and that non-elastic fluids are converted by electricity into elastic ones, proving the electric fluid is not simple.
The Immeasurable Degrees of Force
Schelling presses the claim that the basic forces of matter cannot be pictured as bounded. Beyond any degree of such a force a higher one is always possible, and between any given degree and zero lies an infinity of intermediate grades. The measure of a basic force is nothing more than the degree of external force needed to compress a body or break the cohesion of its parts. Expansive force is what we call elasticity, and all matter is originally elastic. He separates absolute from relative elasticity: in the customary, relative sense, a body’s elasticity cannot by itself measure its expansive force, since volume and mass must enter the reckoning—twice the volume at the same mass counts as equivalent, in quantity of expansive force, to twice the mass at the same volume.
Because every body is originally elastic, matter can be compressed without limit but never penetrated, since penetration would presuppose the total destruction of the repulsive force. Expanded to infinity, that force becomes infinitely small; compressed to a point, infinitely large. Neither extreme can occur if matter is to exist at all, so an infinite number of degrees must be assumed between every state of compression and penetration, and equally between every state of expansion and infinite extension. This saves him from the atomists’ ultimate particles, whose impenetrability has no ground, and from the postulate of empty spaces once thought indispensable for explaining why materials differ. Matter arises only through the interaction of forces, so infinite compressibility and extensibility remain possible down to zero intensity. And since matter is nothing but the product of an original synthesis of opposed forces in intuition, the old sophisms about infinite divisibility dissolve: one need not say matter consists of infinitely many parts, nor put a limit on the imagination’s division. If matter is originally my synthesis, I can carry that synthesis on forever; to insist it consists of an infinity of parts lends it an existence independent of my presentation and lands in the contradictions of matter as thing-in-itself. Nothing proves more plainly that matter cannot exist for itself than its infinite divisibility. That matter is made of parts is a mere judgement of the understanding—it consists of parts if and for as long as I choose to divide it, but originally, in productive intuition, it arises as a whole from opposing forces, and only through that whole do parts become possible for the understanding.
The difficulty of attractive force acting at a distance through empty space vanishes once we recall that matter is originally actual only through attraction, and that no body can be thought without already assuming another body outside it, by which it is attracted and toward which it directs its own attraction. On these dynamical principles the possibility of a mechanics rests: the movable would have no power of moving through movement, through impact, if it did not originally possess moving forces. Mechanical physics is thus undermined at its foundations—a topsy-turvy mode of philosophizing that presupposes what it sets out to explain.
Idealism and the Absolute Act of Knowledge
The supplement to the fifth chapter takes up the idealist construction of matter and insists that relative idealism is only one aspect of absolute philosophy: it grasps the absolute act of knowledge from its ideal side alone, omitting the real. In the absolute both aspects are one and the same act and can never be joined by a causal relation. The in-itself of the soul, or of knowing, produces the real in an ideal fashion—not as though nothing were outside it, but because there really is nothing outside it. Idealism, as genuinely transcendental, integrates ideal unity through the real but only in the ideal; it fails to know the in-itself of the absolute knowledge-act as the same in-itself of the real, and so never arrives at true absolute identity. Since the undivided act transmits what is grasped in it in the same forms on both sides—objectively there, subjectively here—every possible construction of the two aspects is at bottom one and the same. Idealism, even one-sided, leads more directly to the essence of things than a realism bereft of all light of the ideal. On transcendental idealism’s ground, only one step remained to present the whole system of absolute philosophy.
A further supplement recalls that the two forces Kant employs as factors of matter, in his purely analytical deduction, are merely formal factors; thought as real, they must be conceived on the analogy of our two unities, one embracing and including the other—hinted at in the preceding chapter’s remarks on mutual presupposition, reciprocal subordination, and the impossibility of grasping one without the other. The preceding construction shares Kant’s defect in that the necessity of the third principle, gravity, eludes it—a principle since installed in its rights by Franz Baader in The Pythagorean Square, or the Four Quarters of Nature. Equating attractive force with gravity, and conversely, is merely a consequence of that first defect. No less significant: all reality is located in the repulsive force, just as the whole basis of form is lodged in attraction; neither is a real entity. The only real is what comes third—for appearance, but in itself first—absolute indifference, the unity of universal and particular in and for itself. To form belong the particular and the universal themselves: the former as the expansion of identity into difference under repulsion, the latter as the conversion of difference into identity, resembling attraction. Both belong merely to form.
Quality, Chemistry, and the Degrees of Sensation
Turning to the contingent determinations of matter, Schelling argues that the mind relates the real in sensation, which is contingent, to an object as such, which is necessary. The contingent determines the mind absolutely, making consciousness determinate and material rather than general and formal. This determinacy must seem contingent: the real in sensation can rise or fall indefinitely, possessing a specific degree between which and zero an infinite sequence of grades can be imagined. We feel only the more or less of elasticity, heat, brightness—never these themselves. The creative imagination projects a common sphere from original and reflected activity, and this sphere is the necessary ground on which the understanding founds every conception of an object. The real in the object is a contingent, an accidens, relative to that sphere; we try in vain to derive it a priori. The real exists only insofar as I am affected; there is no concept of an object, only consciousness of passivity. A spontaneous power relates what I sense to an object in general, giving the object determinacy and the sensation duration. Quantity and quality are necessarily connected. To transform what is sensed into concepts robs it of reality, since it has reality only at the moment of its effect on me.
These principles carry over to the quality of bodies. The necessary that the understanding sets at the foundation of our conceptions of individual things is a manifold in time and space—an undetermined product of attractive and repulsive forces, a mean of possible relationships. Force is present only in our concept; force as such affects us, and what affects us is real. Every quality must have a specific degree, since force as such can affect us only with a particular degree; in absolute equilibrium neither force has one. For matter to acquire qualitative properties, its forces must deviate from equilibrium. The understanding gives the sphere, sensation the boundaries; the former the necessary, the latter the contingent.
Reflection as Sickness, Philosophy as Cure
The book opens, before any physics, with a diagnosis of the human condition. Man is originally an absolute equilibrium of forces and consciousness, Schelling writes, and only equilibrium is health; mere reflection is a spiritual sickness, a dissection that separates the spiritual principle from the world and makes the rift between man and nature permanent. Philosophy, on this account, is a necessary evil born of that separation—a discipline of errant reason that works toward its own destruction, since its task is to reunite through freedom what was originally united by necessity. The philosopher who pursues reflection through its endless dichotomizing until it cancels itself earns the highest place, even if he never lives to see philosophy resurrect itself from the dismembering.
This is not decoration. It explains why the book keeps returning to the act of questioning itself. The moment I ask how ideas of external things arise in me, I have already stepped out of the series of my ideas and become a being free with respect to all ideation—a being that surveys cause and effect from above rather than submitting to them. Schelling turns this insight against the Kantian school that tried to have it both ways, letting concepts of causality arise only in the mind while still having things cause ideas in us. Once I am free in that sense, I am not a thing at all, and it is inconceivable how any external cause could affect me. The whole dynamical construction of nature that follows is meant to be read in the light of this freedom: the philosopher who has raised himself above the interconnection of things can then ask how that interconnection itself became possible.
The Organism and the Two Unities
Against the cruder materialisms of his time—thought from chance collisions of particles, the body as hydraulic machine or chemical laboratory—Schelling holds that life cannot be explained by sensibility and irritability alone, nor by any Life-force conceived as a finite force among forces. A force is thinkable only as limited by an opposing force, and between opposing forces there is either equilibrium or perpetual conflict requiring a third to keep it going, which is not itself a force. What rules in the organism is the absolute unification of Nature and Freedom in one being: the organism is a product of Nature, yet an ordering, coordinating mind rules in it, the two absolutely simultaneous, neither before nor after. Remove that internal conjunction and you get two opposed systems, neither refuting the other, both destroying the idea of life.
This is where the book’s metaphysics of matter and its philosophy of the organism meet. The same absolute identity that appears as the equilibrium of forces in dead matter appears as form wholly matter and matter wholly form in the living body. Schelling’s construction of the world-body runs through three potencies: the embodiment of unity into multiplicity, whose forms are the dimensions of space; the return of particularity into universality, which appears as light and as the dynamic process; and the organism, where universal and particular are wholly indifferent, matter entirely light and light entirely matter. Even there the first type returns in the three forms of organic life—reproduction, irritability, sensibility—so that cohesion and magnetism, electricity, and the chemical process are raised into the functions of a living being. The universe, on this view, is the revealed world of Ideas, and every body in it repeats the act of embodiment in its own way.
What the Book Leaves Behind
The Ideas is a young man’s book, and its strangeness is part of its interest. Schelling’s dynamical chemistry led him to claims that look odd beside the laboratory practice of his contemporaries—that the paradigm reaction is between a solid and a fluid, that all quality rests wholly on the intensity of a body’s basic forces—yet in some respects his instinct that chemical affinity is bound up with opposed electrical charge was closer to the truth than the Newtonian explanations he rejected. His refusal to multiply principles, his insistence that Nature works by the greatest simplicity of laws amid the variety of effects, is the temper of a philosopher who wants one account of fire, light, air, electricity and magnetism rather than five unrelated ones.
The book also records a genuine intellectual struggle with the chemistry of its day. Schelling attacks the French chemists for drafting a universal theory from particular experiments, quotes de Luc’s objection that the laboratory synthesis of water proves nothing about the vast downpours of a dry atmosphere, and follows Lichtenberg in suspecting that the combination of the two airs into water might be called a combination of two electricities. He is often wrong in detail and sometimes reckless in speculation, but the questions he asks—what is oxygen in itself, apart from its effect on our organ; whether light is a stuff or a modification of matter; how the atmosphere keeps its mixture in equilibrium—are questions a later science would have to answer. What remains, after the errors are set aside, is a picture of nature as activity rather than substance, and a conviction that the philosopher’s task is to think that activity from within rather than to stand outside it and describe a corpse.
