References
- Galileo, Dialogues on the Two Chief World-Systems, Dialogue II.
- Wolfram Hogrebe, Prädikation und Genesis. Metaphysik als Fundamentalheuristik im Ausgang von Schellings “Die Weltalter”, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989.
- F.W.J. Schelling, Ages of the World, hereafter Ages, trans. J.M. Wirth, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Schelling's works will be referred to first according to Schellings sämtliche Werke, ed. K.F.A. Schelling, Stuttgart and Augsburg: Cotta, 1856–61, XIV vols., and then by translation. The Ages of the World appears in SW VIII, 195–344.
- F.W.J. Schelling, Initia philosophiae universae. Erlangen Vorlesungen 1820/21, ed. Horst Fuhrmans, Bonn: Bouvier, 1969, p. 222.
- This “would indeed be contradictory”, writes Schelling; but he resolves the contradiction not by demonstrating one false but both true: “it is not because there is thinking that there is being, but rather because there is being that there is thinking”, Grounding of Positive Philosophy, SW XIII, 161n, tr. Bruce Matthews, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007, p. 203n. The same line of reasoning, augmented, also appears in SW XI, 587.
- I draw the term ‘extainment’ from Gilles Châtelet's discussions of the role of the local division of inside/outside, the entrelacs, and the theory of knots in L'enchantement du virtuel, Paris: Editions Rue d'Ulm, 2010, hereafter L'enchantement, esp. pp. 75–81, where he refers to the work of Louis H. Kauffman, a ‘biologician’ working on the relation between living systems and formalism. His ‘Biologic II’, in eds. Nils Tongring and R.C. Penner, Woods Hole Mathematics: Perspectives in Mathematics and Physics, Singapore: World Scientific, 2004, pp. 94–132, describes “extainers [as] entities open to interaction and distinguishing the space that they are not” (95). A concept ‘extains’ just when what it excludes is consequent upon what it contains. Since many things may be extained, conceptual and otherwise, extainment integrates the concept into its environment at the point of the concept's emergence. In consequence, the fields of extainment are mutually indiscrete, such that overlaps and shared distributions are contained in its concept. It is by extainment therefore that the concept gains its discrete character or, as Kauffman suggests, it is due to the recursion of extainment on itself that containment arises as the extained of the extained. On the discrete and the indiscrete, see Wolfram Hogrebe, Metaphysik und Mantik, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992, ch. IV, esp. pp. 116–7.
- L'enchantement, p. 94.
- SW X, 143–4, trans. A. Bowie, On the History of Modern Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 147.
- This is, moreover, the basis of Schelling's criticism of Hegel in his History of Modern Philosophy, from where the above citation is taken. See SW X, 126–164; History, pp. 134–163.
- F.W.J Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung 1841/2, 3rd edition, ed. Manfred Frank, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993, p. 161. “Unprethinkable” occurs in bold type in the text.
- “Extainers” arise, according to Louis H Kauffman's ‘Biologic II’ (hereafter ‘Biologic’), in eds. Nils Tongring and R.C. Penner, Woods Hill Mathematics. Perspectives in Mathematics and Physics, Singapore: World Scientific, 2004, 94–132 in boundary mathematic, where there are no containers without extainers. The extainment/containment couple is therefore coextensive with the articulation of form, and their development demonstrates Kauffman's allegiance to the programme of investigating the “relationships of formal systems with biology” stemming from D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's On Growth and Form, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917, itself a development, according to René Thom, in Morphogenèse et l'imaginaire, Circé 8–9, Paris: Les Lettres modernes, 1978, 55, of the Naturphilosophie of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For a survey of recent contributions to this field, see Émile Noël, Les sciences de la forme aujourd'hui, Paris: Seuil, 1994.
- Kauffman, Biologic, p. 95.
- In Kauffman's formalisation: Let E =>< and C = <>; then EE = >< >< = >C< and CC = <> <> = <E>. See Biologic, p. 95.
- For examples, see L'enchantement, pp. 77–79.
- See L'enchantement, p. 78, where Châtelet notes the application of this topological function in quantum field theory.
- Roland Omnès, Quantum Philosophy. Understanding and Interpreting Contemporary Science, trans. Arturo Sangalli, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, p. 229.
- L'enchantement, pp. 87, 161, respectively.
- Bernard d'Espagnat, On Physics and Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 29, defines realism as near when its criteria are drawn from clear concepts. A near ontology therefore, consists in the identification of concept and being.
- SW IX, Über Faradays neueste Entdeckung’, p. 445.
- Novalis, Die Christenheit oder Europa und andere philosophische Schriften, ed. Rolf Toman, Köln: Könemann, 1996, p. 440. “Wo ist der Urkeim, der Typus der ganzen Nature zu finden? Die Natur der Natur?”
- The problem of the primal elements of nature preoccupied naturalists in the Romantic era. According to Goethe, the search therefore for the “primal plant” will conclude with precisely that plant from which all other plants derive. The “primal bone” will do the same for the skeleton. According to Steven Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977, this becomes the Mekkel-Serres Law that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, while according to Edwin Clarke and L.S. Yacyna, Nineteenth Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts, Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1987, it is the precursor of the “genetic problem”, the “search for the basal type of nervous organisation” (p. 18). For a discussion of the kinds of recapitulation theses current in the early nineteenth century, see my Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, London: Continuum, 2006, ch.4.
- Novalis, Werke (hereafter Werke), ed. Gerhard Schulz, München: Beck, 1987, p. 389: “Alles ist Samenkorn”.
- Werke, 446. The passage has considerable interest. “Die transzendentale Physik ist die erste aber die Niedrigste Wissenschaft—wie die Wissenschaftslehre. Eschenmayer nennt sie Naturmetaphysik. Sie handelt von der Natur, ehe sie Natur wird.”
- Werke, 558: “Die Natur geht auch a priori ad posterius—wenigstens für uns.”
- Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 72a7: “prior and more knowable in relation to us”. The point is repeated in the Physics (184a24–6) where Aristotle distinguishes between abstracta that may only consequently be cognizable and the concrete whole that is “more readily cognizable by the senses”.
- Werke, 323: “Wir suchen überall das Unbedingte, und finden immer nur Dinge.”
- Novalis, The Novices of Sais, tr. Ralph Mannheim, New York: Archipelago, 2005, hereafter Sais; Werke, 105.
- Novalis, Sais, 41–3; Werke, 105: “The effort to fathom [Streben nach Ergründung] the giant mechanism is in itself a move towards the abyss [ein Zug in die Tiefe], an incipient vertigo [beginnender Schwindel]” which ends with the “destruction of the organs of thought”.
- Novalis, Werke, 312: “Dem philosophieren liegt also ein Streben nach dem Denken eines Grundes zum Grunde. […] Alles Philosophieren muss also bei einem absoluten Grunde endigen. […W]enn dieser Begriff einer unmöglichkeit enthielte—so ware der Trieb zu philosophieren eine unendliche Tätigkeit.“
- Frank provides a rich and provocative reading of Novalis’ philosophy in Auswege aus dem Deutschen Idealismus, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007, pp. 30–35.
- Gilles Châtelet, Les Enjeuz du mobile, Paris: Seuil, 1993, p. 39.
- Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 75b9, “transfer to another field”.
- This prefigures Peter Rohs excellent project, in Feld-Zeit-Ich, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1996, pp. 6, 17, which conjoins a “field-theoretical transcendental philosophy” with a “field theory of nature” by means of a theory of time, freedom and the subject which, insofar as physics does not account for these latter, entails its essential incompleteness.
- SW X, 340, Exhibition of the Process of Nature.
- Schelling summarizes the problem of intelligible matter at the outset of lecture 19, SW XI, 433. It is matter, “because it assumes all determinations without itself being determinable, and intelligible because these determinations are determinations of pure thought.” Nevertheless, abstract space remains both “intelligible, but also material”, so that the determinations of pure thought, while they do not coincide with the determination of matter, are nevertheless themselves material.
- This nomenclature is explicit, for example, in the 1800 Universal Deduction of the Dynamic Process, SW IV, 1–79.
- SW XI, 445, citing Aristotle, On the Progression of Animals, herafter, Progression, 711a5–6, 712b18.
- “The crab is the only animal that moves not forwards but obliquely” because “its eyes can move themselves obliquely”. Aristotle, Progression, 712b16, 20.
- Schelling, SW XI, 435–6, puts the point simply: “we call ‘right’ what corresponds to our left, ‘before’ what is opposite to what is behind us, ‘behind’ what is turned away from us, without there being such distinctions in the objects themselves; for if we turn around, what is right becomes left, and what was behind becomes in front of us.”
- SW XI, 442: “This ‘under’ is therefore one with that so-called prime matter that is the primum subjectum (proton hypokeimenon) that serially grounds and is concealed in everything corporeal, one with what is relatively nothing or that which does not have being [eins mit jenem relativen nichts oder nicht-Seyenden] from which everything becomes, with the contingency from which everything that has become from it acquires the character of the past; it is at any rate difficult to conceive precisely because it can be conceived only as the starting point, but is therefore not inconceivable, for something is inconceivable only if it is regarded as being an original, whereas for us it is something conceived, because it is derivative or consequent.”
- SW XI, 435. The magnet returns in Schelling's last work, the Presentation of Pure Rational Philosophy, XI, 435.
- SW IV, 137; trans. Michael Vater and David W. Wood in The Philosophical Rupture Between Fichte and Schelling, hereafter Rupture, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012, p. 159.
- It is in this sense that Carl August Eschenmayer's Experiment in the A Priori Derivation of Magnetic Phenomena, Tübingen: Heerbrandt, 1stst edn. 1795, 40, passim, provides the prototype of Schelling's diagram. Following Châtelet's reconstruction in Enjeux, 138, it reads: Here, the symbol indicates (a) the location of the empirical magnet and (b) the derivation of the total magnet from a pre-magnetic field. Eschenmayer's Versuch takes this as the unconditioned form of dynamics in general, before proceeding to deduce the categories of Kant's philosophy of nature from that unconditioned form. Schelling's excitement at Eschenmayer's work is evident in his 1797 Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, SW II, 313–4n, trans. E.E. Harris and P. Heath, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 249.
- Schelling's reference to Bacon is to the experimentum crucis, which is crucial not merely in deciding between (at least two) theories, as Karl Popper puts it in Conjectures and Refutations, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963, p. 112, but insofar as it constitutes an enfolding of the empirical into the theoretical, or of nature into reason.
- Now called ‘electron-transfer’ experiments.
- “Spirit neither has being nor does not have being. It only has being in relationship to what is Being to it. It does not have being in itself.” SW VIII, 264; Ages of the World, trans. J.M. Wirth, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000, p. 46.
- SW VII, 409, “the One essence divides itself in actuality into its two operative modes, in one of which there is only the ground of existence, and in the other only essence [daβ Eine Wesen in seinen zwei Wirkungsweisen sich wirklich in zwei Wesen scheidet, daβ in dem einen bloß Grund zur Existenz, in dem andern bloβ Wesen ist]”. Neither Gutmann's nor Love and Schmidt's translations capture the recursive characterization of Wesen, all the more important given the centrality of the latter to the late philosophy's distinction between the ‘what’ and the ‘that’ of being.
- SW IV, 430, Rupture 155. The Inquiries contains an extended discussion of the “law of the ground” according to which finite being is “necessarily in another” (SW VII, 340), so that an individual is “something that has become, only through another” (SW VII, 346).
- SW VII, 333. This claim, common throughout Schelling's nature and identity philosophy up to and including the Freedom essay, becomes progressively more complex, so that in the Faraday lecture, Schelling argues that the actions of the Voltaic Pile demonstrate that ponderable matter is reducible to forces, that is, to what is “ecstatic or spiritualizing in the Pile” (SW XI, 441), i.e. “spirits or powers” (SW XI, 445).
- Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989, pp. 49–50: “We know the forces in the atomic nucleus that are responsible for the emission of the a-particle. But…if we wanted to know why the a-particle was emitted at that particular time we would have to know the microscopic structure of the whole world including ourselves, and that is impossible.”
- David Bell's essay, ‘Transcendental arguments and non-naturalistic anti-realism’, in Robert Stern, ed. Transcendental Arguments. Problems and Prospects, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 192, accounts an ontology “parochial” when it adheres to the following, critical injunction: “The transcendental argument must not invalidly infer objective and/or unrestricted conclusions from purely subjective and/or parochial premises.”