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Naturphilosophie
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Naturphilosophie (German for "nature-philosophy") is a term used in English-language philosophy to identify a current in the philosophical tradition of German idealism, as applied to the study of nature in the earlier 19th century. German speakers use the clearer term Romantische Naturphilosophie, the philosophy of nature developed at the time of the founding of German Romanticism. It is particularly associated with the philosophical work of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling[1] and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel[1]—though it has some clear precursors also. More particularly it is identified with some of the initial works of Schelling during the period 1797–9, in reaction to the views of Fichte, and subsequent developments from Schelling's position. Always controversial, some of Schelling's ideas in this direction are still considered of philosophical interest, even if the subsequent development of experimental natural science had a destructive impact on the credibility of the theories of his followers in Naturphilosophie.[2]
Naturphilosophie attempted to comprehend nature in its totality and to outline its general theoretical structure, thus attempting to lay the foundations for the natural sciences. In developing their theories, the German Naturphilosophen found their inspiration in the natural philosophy of the Ancient Greek Ionian philosophers.
As an approach to philosophy and science, Naturphilosophie has had a difficult reception. In Germany, neo-Kantians came to distrust its developments as speculative and overly metaphysical.[3] For most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was poorly understood in Anglophone countries. Over the years, it has been subjected to continuing criticism. Since the 1960s, improved translations have appeared, and scholars have developed a better appreciation of the objectives of Naturphilosophie.
Outline of development
The German Idealist philosopher Fichte had attempted to show that the whole structure of reality follows necessarily from the fact of self-consciousness. Schelling took Fichte's position as his starting-point, and in his earliest writings posited that nature must have reality for itself. In this light Fichte's doctrines appeared incomplete. On the one hand, they identified the ultimate ground of the universe of reason too closely with finite, individual Spirit. On the other, they threatened the reality of the world of nature by seeing it too much in the manner of subjective idealism. Fichte, in this view, had not managed to unite his system with the aesthetic view of nature to which Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment had pointed.
Naturphilosophie is therefore one possible theory of the unity of nature. Nature as the sum of what is objective, and intelligence as the complex of all the activities making up self-consciousness, appear as equally real. The philosophy of nature and transcendental idealism would be the two complementary portions making up philosophy as a whole.
German philosophy
Naturphilosophie translated into English would mean just "philosophy of nature", and its scope began to be taken in a broad way. Johann Gottfried Herder, particularly taken in opposition to Immanuel Kant, was a precursor of Schelling:
Later Friedrich Schlegel theorised about a particular German strand in philosophy of nature, citing Jakob Böhme, Johannes Kepler and Georg Ernst Stahl, with Jan Baptist van Helmont as an edge case.[5] Frederick Beiser instead traces Naturphilosophie as developed by Schelling, Hegel, Schlegel and Novalis to a crux in the theory of matter, and identifies the origins of the line they took with the vis viva theory of matter in the work of Gottfried Leibniz.[6]
Subsequently Schelling identified himself with Baruch de Spinoza, to whose thought he saw himself as approaching. The Darstellung meines Systems, and the expanded treatment in the lectures on a System der gesamten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere given in Würzburg in 1804, contain elements of Spinoza's philosophy.
Schelling
In a short space of time Schelling produced three works: Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur als Einleitung in das Studium dieser Wissenschaft, 1797 (Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature as Introduction to the Study of this Science); Von der Weltseele, 1798 (On the World Soul); and Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, 1799 (First Plan of a System of the Philosophy of Nature). As criticism of scientific procedure, these writings retain a relevance. Historically, according to Richards:
In System des transzendentalen Idealismus, 1800 (System of Transcendental Idealism) Schelling included ideas on matter and the organic in Part III. They form just part of a more ambitious work that takes up other themes, in particular aesthetics. From this point onwards Naturphilosophie was less of a research concern for him, as he reformulated his philosophy. However, it remained an influential aspect of his teaching. For a short while, he edited a journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für speculative Physik (bound volume 1802).[7]
Schelling's Naturphilosophie was a way in which he worked himself out of the tutelage of Fichte, with whom he quarrelled decisively towards the end of the 1790s. More than that, however, it brought him within the orbit of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, both intellectually and (as a direct consequence of Goethe's sympathetic attitude) by a relocation; and it broke with basic Kantian tenets. Grant writes:
Schelling held that the divisions imposed on nature, by our ordinary perception and thought, do not have absolute validity. They should be interpreted as the outcome of the single formative energy which is the soul or inner aspect of nature. In other words he was a proponent of a variety of organicism. The dynamic series of stages in nature, the forms in which the ideal structure of nature is realized, are matter, as the equilibrium of the fundamental expansive and contractive forces; light, with its subordinate processes (magnetism, electricity, and chemical action); organism, with its component phases of reproduction, irritability and sensibility. The continual change presented to us by experience, taken together with the thought of unity in productive force of nature, leads to the conception of the duality through which nature expresses itself in its varied products.
In the introduction to the Ideen he argues against dogmatism, in the terms that a dogmatist cannot explain the organic; and that recourse to the idea of a cosmic creator is a feature of dogmatic systems imposed by the need to explain nature as purposive and unified.[9] Fichte's system, called the Wissenschaftslehre, had begun with a fundamental distinction between dogmatism (fatalistic) and criticism (free), as his formulation of idealism.[10]
Beiser divides up the mature form of Schelling's Naturphilosophie into the attitudes of transcendental realism (the thesis that "nature exists independent of all consciousness, even that of the transcendental subject") and transcendental naturalism (the thesis that "everything is explicable according to the laws of nature, including the rationality of the transcendental subject").[11] He notes how Naturphilosophie was first a counterbalance to Wissenschaftslehre, and then in Schelling's approach became the senior partner. After that, it was hardly to be avoided that Schelling would become an opponent of Fichte, having been a close follower in the early 1790s.
We are able to apprehend and represent nature to ourselves in the successive forms which its development assumes, since it is the same spirit of which we become aware in self-consciousness, though here unconsciously. The variety of its forms is not imposed on it externally, since there is no external teleology in nature. Nature is a self-forming whole, within which only natural explanations can be sought. The function of Naturphilosophie is to exhibit the ideal as springing from the real, not to deduce the real from the ideal.
Influence and critics of Naturphilosophie
Criticism of Naturphilosophie has been widespread, over two centuries. Schelling's theories, however influential in terms of the general culture of the time, have not survived in scientific terms. Like other strands of speculation in the life sciences, in particular, such as vitalism, they retreated in the face of experiment, and then were written out of the history of science as Whig history. But critics were initially not scientists (a term not used until later); rather they came largely from within philosophy and Romantic science, a community including many physicians. Typically, the retrospective views of scientists of the 19th century on "Romantic science" in general erased distinctions:
One outspoken critic was the chemist Justus von Liebig, who compared Naturphilosophie with the Black Death.[13] Another critic, the physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond, frequently dismissed Naturphilosophie as "bogus".[14]
Role in aesthetics
Isaiah Berlin summed up the reasons why Naturphilosophie had a wide-ranging impact on views of art and artists:
Philosophical criticism
Fichte was very critical of the opposition set up in Schelling's Naturphilosophie to his own conception of Wissenschaftslehre. In that debate, Hegel then intervened, largely supporting his student friend Schelling, with the work usually called his Differenzschrift, the Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie (The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy); a key publication in his own philosophical development, his first book, it was published in September 1801.[16]
Schelling's Absolute was left with no other function than that of removing all the differences which give form to thought. The criticisms of Fichte, and more particularly of Hegel (in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit), pointed to a defect in the conception of the Absolute as mere featureless identity. It was ridiculed by Hegel as "the night in which all cows are black."[17][18]
Other views in Romantic science
Ignaz Paul Vitalis Troxler, a follower of Schelling, later broke with him.[19] He came to the view that the Absolute in nature and mind is beyond the intellect and reason.[12]
Naturphilosophen
• Adam Karl August von Eschenmayer, engaged in controversy with Schelling from 1801, published Grundriss der Natur-Philosophie in 1832
• Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, an influence on Schelling's thinking, he was a founder rather than a follower, and a proponent of recapitulation theory
• Johann Friedrich Meckel[20]
• Lorenz Oken[21]
• Hans Christian Ørsted[22]
• Johann Wilhelm Ritter[22]
• Henrik Steffens
• August Ludwig Hülsen
• Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus[23]
• Karl Joseph Hieronymus Windischmann
Notes
1. Frederick C. Beiser(2002), German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism 1781–1801, Harvard university Press, p. 506.
2. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schelling/
3. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cohen/
4. http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.p ... ew/160/269
5. Paola Mayer, Jena Romanticism and Its Appropriation of Jakob Böhme: Theosophy, Hagiography, Literature (1999), p. 127.
6. Frederick Beiser, 'The Enlightenment and Idealism', pp. 21–42, esp. pp. 32–33, in Karl Ameriks (editor) (2000), The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism.
7. Online text
8. Grant p. 6.
9. Dale E. Snow, Schelling and the end of Idealism (1996), p. 83.
10. Beiser 2002, p. 261.
11. Beiser 2002, p. 483.
12. ^ Dietrich von Engelhardt, Romanticism in Germany p. 112, in Roy Porterand Mikulaš Teich, editors, Romanticism in National Context (1988).
13. Siegbert Prawer (editor), The Romantic Period in Germany (1970), Introduction by Prawer p. 5.
14. du Bois-Reymond, Emil (1912). Reden. Leipzig: Veit. pp. vol. 2: 143, 258.
15. Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Henry Hardy, editor) (2000), p. 89.
16. Terry Pinkard, Hegel (2000), p. 109.
17. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; (tr.), A. V. Miller (1998-01-01). Phenomenology of Spirit. Motilal Banarsidass Publ. p. 9. ISBN 9788120814738.
18. Hegel, Georg W. F. (2013-03-01). Phänomenologie des Geistes (in German). Meiner Verlag. ¶ 13. ISBN 378732464X.
19. http://www.fernuni-hagen.de/EUROL/Proje ... xler-e.htm
20. Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), p. 45.
21. Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), p. 39.
22. http://www.sil.si.edu/silpublications/d ... ecture.htm
23. http://www.hughdower.com/Haeckel.htm
References
19th century
• F. W. J. Schelling, Einleitung zu den Ersten Entwurf (Sämtliche Werke Vol. III) – the most accessible account of Naturphilosophie in Schelling's own work.
• Kuno Fischer, Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, Vol. VI, pp. 433–692 – a detailed discussion by a 19th-century historian of philosophy.
Contemporary
• Frederick C. Beiser (2002), German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism 1781-1801
• Robert J. Richards (2002), The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe
• Iain Hamilton Grant (2006), Philosophies of Nature after Schelling
• Slavoj Žižek (1996), The Indivisible Remainder: Essays on Schelling and Related Matters, London: Verso.
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CHAPTER THREE: Freud, Haeckel, and Jung
NATURPHILOSOPHIE, EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY, AND SECULAR REGENERATION
EVOLUTIONARY THEORY was the topic on everyone's tongue in the latter half of the nineteenth century after the publication of The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin (1809-1882) on 24 November 1859. With Darwin's work the field of evolutionary biology was born. Darwin's highly articulated mechanistic theories of evolution surpassed all previous efforts and stimulated an interest in origins, in the creative or regenerative processes of ontogeny (individual development), and in phylogeny (the evolution of an entire species, or the birth of new ones) from the perspective of scientific materialism.
Prior to Darwin, at least in the minds of many supposedly skeptical Enlightenment theorists, the only "origins" and "variations" were degenerations from perfect or ideal original types that had been created by the Judeo-Christian God. Between 1790 and 1830, several different schools of Naturphilosophie dominated the scientific community in German Europe, in which philosophical and literary speculation was combined with empirical science. These schools of Naturphilosophie have also been generically referred to as "essentialism" or "morphological idealism."
The word archetype was used in the mid-1800s in this Romantic biological context by the last great morphological idealist, Richard Owen (1804-1892) in his On the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton of 1848. For most early biologists, there was no descent, as species did not evolve -- especially not from one into another. The search for the Urform or original form (or Urtyp, the original type or archetype) of each species -- studied by comparing similar structures in the different organisms -- was known as the idealistic science (Wissenschaft) of morphology, a term coined by Goethe in 1807. Goethe used the terms Urbild or "primordial image" and Urtyp, and these were later borrowed by Jung. These archetypes were eternal and transcendent, shaping man and the natural world in mysterious, but observable, ways.
Some of Jung's earliest and most powerful influences were among the speculative and metaphysical Naturphilosophen of the Romantic era, who after 1800 increasingly confined their studies to medical theory and practice. C. G. Jung the Elder practiced medicine in this metaphysical Romantic mode. The most influential Naturphilosophen included F.W.J. Schelling (1775-1854), Goethe, Lorenz Oken (1779-1851), and a man that Goethe much admired, Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869), a comparative anatomist who insisted that the divine essence of life would only be recognized through initiation into these insights through spiritual development:Insofar as the idea of life is no other than the idea of an eternal manifestation of the divine essence through nature, it belongs among those original insights of reason that do not come to man from outside .... These insights open up in the inwardness of man; they must reveal themselves and, once a man has reached a certain level of development, they will always reveal themselves.
This view is precisely the affirmation of the belief of the Naturphilosophen that, as historian of science Timothy Lenoir succinctly puts it, "when properly trained in the method of philosophical reflection, the understanding is capable, primarily through a higher faculty of judgment, of penetrating and comprehending the structure of the life process itself." Thus, as living beings at the peak of the great chain of being (as historian of ideas Arthur O. Lovejoy called it), humans were uniquely capable of an intuitive grasp of the very pulse of life itself in its more elemental forms. Jung's twentieth-century psychological methods -- including that of "active imagination" -- are direct survivors of this Romantic praxis.
As Ellenberger and others have briefly pointed out, it is with these early Romantic Naturphilosophen that we feel closest to a living tradition -- albeit one that was driven underground -- that resurfaces in the work of Jung. Jung's own biological position and his fascination with the Urtyp seem to place him directly within the speculative or metaphysical schools of Naturphilosophie, despite his later attempts to integrate this idealism regarding mechanistic evolutionary concepts with his own phylogenetic theories. Jung mentions Carus throughout his life, in the same breath with von Hartmann, as a major influence on his idea of a collective unconscious, and he read both men during his student years. Jung was particularly taken with Carus's Psyche (1846). In Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955-1956), a late work that comprises CW 14, Jung says:the psychology of the unconscious that began with C. G. Carus took up the trail that had been lost by the alchemists. This happened, remarkably enough, at a moment in history when the apparitions of the alchemists had found their highest poetic expression in Goethe's Faust. At the time Carus wrote, he certainly could not have guessed that he was building the philosophical bridge to an empirical psychology of the future.
A few of the philosophical perspectives associated with Naturphilosophie (teleology, etc.) survived in the nineteenth-century biophysics movement that Freud and Jung both encountered as part of their medical training, Freud in the 1870s and Jung in the 1890s. Although psychiatric historian Iago Galdston has argued for a greater acknowledgment of the influence of the vitalism of the romantic Naturphilosophen on Freud through his influential friend Wilhelm Fliess and his vitalistic theories based on ideas of periodicity, polarity, and bisexuality -- all familiar concepts in romantic Naturphilosophie -- other scholars such as Frank Sulloway and Paul Cranefield have challenged this. Freud's first-degree intellectual ancestors were, in part, the reductionistic scientific materialists, including his beloved mentor, Ernst von Brucke. However, the affinities between the Naturphilosophen and Jung, as we have seen, were acknowledged repeatedly by Jung himself. It is tempting to speculate that the eventual incompatibility of ideas between Jung and Freud can be attributed to their very partisan participation in a greater battle in the biological sciences between vitalistic Naturphilosophie and mechanistic Naturwissenschaft.
This idealism of Naturphilosophie was eventually challenged and successfully replaced by the work of the Kantian "teleomechanists" or "vital materialists" such as Johann Blumenbach, Karl Kielmeyer, Johann Christian Reil, and Karl Ernst von Baer; by "scientific materialists" such as Karl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott, Ludwig Buchner, and Heinrich Czolbe; and by the mechanism of evolutionists such as Darwin and German zoologist Ernst Haeckel. It was Haeckel who, along with Freud (but in a different vein), took scientific renown one step further and designed secular paths of cultural renewal or regeneration that were greatly influenced by evolutionary biological training.
FREUD AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
It may seem outrageous to write a book on Jung without devoting considerable space to his relationship with Freud, but that relationship has been discussed in so many other volumes, and at such great length, that it would be impossible to do justice to yet another retelling of the Freud/Jung myth here. Perhaps the best such exposition is John Kerr's A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein. It is time to step out of this important -- but limiting -- intellectual context. Instead, I would like to briefly draw attention to some alternative perspectives on Jung's involvement with Freud and psychoanalysis that, to my knowledge, have not been adequately addressed. In particular, I am interested in the historical role of psychoanalysis as a type of Lebensphilosophie and revitalization movement in a fin-de-siecle world of degeneration and decay
In his autobiographical statements, seminars, and filmed interviews, Jung always acknowledges that Freud was a great man and his master. It would not be unreasonable to say that Freud was Jung's first experience of someone he considered a true living genius. In this regard, their relationship was analogous to Nietzsche's relationship with Richard Wagner, "the Master." In the presence of genius, both Nietzsche and Jung wisely observed, absorbed, and imitated. After repeated exposure to the genius and his ever-changing ideas (so true to the inconstant, mercurial nature of a genius!), however, the luster of divinity began to wear. In Jung's case, it was the seven weeks he spent with Freud on ships and in America in autumn 1909, each of them analyzing the other's dreams daily; for Nietzsche, it was the repeated personal contact with Wagner and especially the cult-like atmosphere the Meister himself encouraged at the first Bayreuth festival in 1876. Nietzsche's rupture with Wagner and Jung's dissociation from Freud are played out according to nineteenth-century scripts of "genius": once one recognizes the spark of genius in oneself, there is no longer any need for discipleship.
What attracted Jung to Freud and his ideas for so many years (1905-1912) and with such devotion? Volumes have been written trying to understand this relationship. In addition to Freud's charisma as a living exemplum of "genius," I propose that Jung was attracted to the practical aspects of Freudian psychoanalysis:1. as a way to overcome the onus of hereditary degeneration in his institutionalized patients (and perhaps in himself)
2. by its later role as an agent of cultural revitalization through its core Nietzschean themes of uncovering, bond-breaking, and of irrationality and sexuality.
Psychoanalysis was originally a supposedly medical and then a cultural movement that promised a better existence (freedom from symptoms, self-knowledge) for the successfully analyzed. Full access to memory was the key to revitalization. These memories were sexual, infantile, and above all personal. This was indeed the basic message of the work that drew the world's attention to Freud and his mentor Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria (1895).
It has been persuasively argued that Freud's conceptualization of psychoanalysis as a cultural movement was a "scientific" path (unlike political paths such as Marxism) to achieve liberal political revolution for marginalized groups such as Jews in an increasingly conservative and anti-Semitic Vienna. Yet we must remember that psychoanalysis was absolutely unknown to the common citizen of Austria-Hungary at the time. It is often still forgotten that although he named and began practicing what he called psychoanalysis in his Viennese office in the mid-1890s, until 1900 or so Freud, working in his "splendid isolation," was the psychoanalytic movement. By 1902 Freud found four Jewish physicians (primarily internists) -- Alfred Adler, Max Kahane, Rudolph Reitler, and Wilhelm Stekel -- who were interested enough in his ideas to meet with him weekly at 19 Bergasse at meetings dominated by his intellect. This was the famous Psychological Wednesday Evening Circle, which grew to seventeen members by 1906 (the year that Freud and Jung began their correspondence; they first met in early 1907). In 1908 the First International Congress was held in Salzburg, Austria, attended by forty participants from six countries and in that same year Freud's Wednesday group was renamed the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. In 1910 the International Psychoanalytic Association was founded, with Jung as its first president. By 1910 there were two official psychoanalytic journals.
The Viennese psychoanalytic movement grew rapidly in professional circles in Europe and America only after 1911 or so, but its first fateful success was the relative conversion of a group of eminent Swiss alienists (Bleuler, Jung, and their colleagues) at the Burgholzli by 1904 or so. Bleuler (1857-1939), as chief of the Burgholzli, also held the prestigious Chair in Psychiatry at the University of Zurich, which, along with the other such Chairs in Vienna and Berlin, made him and his clinic one of the top three centers of modern psychiatry in Europe -- indeed, in the whole world. When Bleuler and the Swiss took Freud seriously, others in Europe and elsewhere began to do so as well.
An often unacknowledged advantage of Freud's psychoanalytic theory was its shift of etiological significance from biological hereditarian factors (degeneration) to psychodynamic ones (repressed traumatic memories, etc.) in its earliest theoretical formations. Thus one was not doomed by the fate of one's "bad blood" and indeed, one could be renewed through psychoanalytic treatment. This made psychoanalysis especially attractive to the "tainted," including those tainted in Central European culture by their ethnicity, such as Jews. According to psychiatric historian Sander Gilman, Freud "repudiated the model of degeneracy" despite the other dominant nineteenth-century biological assumptions of his theories.
The introduction of a method of treatment that seemed to bypass the biological fate of degeneration and perhaps even reverse its symptoms must have seemed particularly attractive to those -- like Jung -- who were toiling in institutions where hopeless cases seemed to be the rule and not the exception. Other than ordering and perhaps administering the usual somatic treatments (baths, electrotherapy, work therapy, opiates and barbiturates, muffs, camisoles, and other physical restraints), psychiatrists in such institutions engaged in typical medical examination and the diagnostic classification of patients. The claims that Freud was making about psychoanalysis circa 1905 would seem like a ray of hope to the psychiatrist confined with his patients in the back wards of asylums, which were storerooms of human degeneration. Dementia praecox, as Kraepelin first defined it in his famous textbook in 1893, was a degenerative psychotic disorder. Jung, despite his obvious philosophical nature, was always interested in the practical application of ideas in the form of therapeutic methods. Although in his writings at this time (1904-1905) Freud actually said very little about how one should perform psychoanalysis, Jung and his fellow physicians at the Burgholzli attempted to read between the lines of Freud's writings and practice psychoanalysis on their patients. It was the first step towards liberation from hereditary taint that Jung would complete with his own unique formulations in 1916.
The evolution of the psychoanalytic movement from one based on primarily clinical concerns to a totalizing cultural revitalization has been documented by Kerr. Conspicuously few scholars have dared to examine the psychoanalytic movement from the perspective of the sociology of religion even though, as Sulloway notes, "the discipline of psychoanalysis, which has always tapped considerable religious fervor among its adherents, has increasingly come to resemble a religion in its social organization" with its "secular priesthood of soul doctors."
No single study of Freud's branch of the psychoanalytic movement as a charismatic group has been conducted, although, indeed, during the rise of psychoanalysis that was precisely how many viewed the energetic efforts and genius-cult of the "secret committee" circle surrounding Freud and the worldwide movement they promoted. As many other charismatic groups did, following the urgings of the Lebensphilosophen, Freudians appealed to "experience." They believed and violently argued that one could only understand Freud or psychoanalysis after being analyzed by a Freudian psychoanalyst. This reliance upon a specialist elite -- initiated into secret, "occult" knowledge -- who proceeded by an essentially "intuitive" method, illustrates the basis of psychoanalysis in an "aristocratic epistomology." Ironically, given Freud's alliance with reductionist materialism and atheism, in the twentieth century the psychoanalytic movement took on a more than passing resemblance to the nineteenth-century German vitalistic or Lebensphilosophie traditions that left the confines of academia and became social and cultural movements of Lebensreform. The proselytizing Freudians did give Weber, the German "father of sociology," some serious concern, for in private correspondence as early as 1907 he singled out Freud's movement as a quasi-mystical charismatic group based on the personality and ideas of a charismatic leader who was considered to have almost divine qualities.
Others noted the cult-like nature of the psychoanalytic movement as well. Starting in 1909, after the Clark Conference, Freud and psychoanalysis took the American psychiatric community by storm. An apocryphal story about the 1909 ocean voyage to America has Freud turning to Jung and saying, as they arrive in New York harbor, "Don't they know that we're bringing them the plague?" History cannot deny that Freudianism began to infect the North American psychiatric community after this visit, but some critics were immune to the virus. The eminent Columbia University experimental psychologist Robert S. Woodworth charged Freudian psychoanalysis was an "uncanny religion." Another prominent American psychologist, Knight Dunlap, asserted in his early polemical work, Mysticism, Freudianism, and Scientific Psychology, that "psychoanalysis attempts to creep in wearing the uniform of science, and to strangle it from the inside." Many others also rejected psychoanalysis as an atheistic and materialistic cult.
HAECKEL, OSTWALD, AND THE MONISTIC RELIGION
Another European movement explicitly designed to be an "anti-Christian" path of Lebensreform was the "Monistic Religion" of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). From his post as professor of zoology at the University of Jena, Haeckel dominated German evolutionary biology in the second half of the nineteenth century and was the most prominent proponent of the social implications of Darwinian theory. Over the years Haeckel made many creative departures from Darwin, so many in fact that the tenets of Darwinism were occluded by the renovations of Haeckelism. Since he was a prolific author, and wrote books and articles for both the scholarly and popular presses, it has been said that he dominated the discussion of evolutionary theory in German Europe by providing "the most comprehensive surveys of the Darwinist position authored by a German."
Haeckel published his views on human evolution in 1868, before Darwin did so in 1871 with The Descent of Man. Darwin himself acknowledged Haeckel's priority by several years in formulating the theory of the descent of humans from simian ancestors. Historian of science and evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr credits Haeckel for being "perhaps the first biologist to object vigorously to the notion that all science had to be like the physical sciences or to be based on mathematics." Mayr says Haeckel was the first to insist that evolutionary biology was a historical science involving the historical methodologies of embryology, paleontology, and especially phylogeny.
In particular it was Haeckel's influential "Biogenetic Law" -- "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" -- based on the evidence of these historical methods in biology that eventually had profound implications not only for evolutionary biology, but for psychiatry and psychoanalysis, especially Jung's analytical psychology. Haeckel considered this law as a universal truth -- indeed, for much of his early career, perhaps the only universal truth. That the stages of individual development (ontogeny) could be shown to replicate, in order, the states of the development of the human race (phylogeny) was a compelling theory. Each adult human being, then, in both development and structure, was a living museum of the entire history of the species.
Taking this principle as a starting point, as early as 1866 Haeckel proposed a new "natural religion" based on the natural sciences, since "God reveals himself in all natural phenomena." In many later publications he promoted his pantheistic natural religion based on scientific principles -- a philosophy he called "Monism" -- as a way of linking science and religion. Haeckel was interested in theorizing about the driving natural force of life and evolution, which he insisted Darwin left out of his (therefore) incomplete theories. His somewhat quasi-vitalistic descriptions of monism provided that. However, his first specific recommendations for a monistic religion came in 1892 in a speech in Altenburg. He argued fervently for a monism as a new faith founded on a "scientific Weltanschauung," thus going beyond a mere substitution of atheistic materialism for Christianity (as he was generally perceived as doing by his contemporaries and even by many historians today).....
In 1911 Nobel-laureate Wilhelm Ostwald of Leipzig University, a physical chemist, became president of the Monistenbund and founded a "monistic cloister" devoted to initiating Social Darwinian cultural reforms in the areas of eugenics, euthanasia, and economics. An elite devoted to the preservation of the Monistic Religion clustered around the charismatic Ostwald and his volkisch metaphysical works. Indeed, it is these works of speculative philosophy (Ostwald even embraced the term Naturphilosopllie for this exercise) that made him an international figure long before his 1909 Nobel Prize, and many considered him a prophet of the modern age. [/size][/b]
We know that Ostwald was a significant influence on Jung in the formation of his theory of psychological types. Jung mentions Ostwald's division of men of genius into "classics" and "romantics" in his very first public presentation on psychological types at the Psychoanalytical Congress in Munich in September 1913 (published in a French translation in December of that year in Archives de Psychologie). The classics and romantics correspond, according to Jung, to the "introverted type" and the "extraverted type" respectively. Long quotations from Ostwald appear in other of Jung's works between 1913 and 1921 -- precisely the period of Ostwald's most outspoken advocacy of eugenics, nature worship, and German imperialism through the Monistenbund. An entire chapter of Jung's Psychological Types is devoted favorably to these same ideas of Ostwald. Except for a one-sentence comment that "the concept of energy in Ostwald's monism" is "an example of the superstitious overvaluation of facts," Ostwald is often cited at length and frequently favorably. We have evidence that Jung read the Annalen der Naturphilosophie that Ostwald founded in 1901 and that contains some of his essays on his vitalistic "modern theory of energetics," which may have influenced Jung's own later theoretical work on "psychic energy." ....
The best documented [volkish] circle is the Guido von List Society, founded in Vienna in March 1908. Von List (1848-1919) was a Viennese mystic and magician who, among many other activities, participated in ancient German pagan rites in a Hungarian castle with his colleague Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels and playwright August Strindberg. As a youth List had an unusual experience in a cathedral that he later interpreted as his call to become an initiate into the mysteries of the ancient Teutons. He experienced a pagan mystery initiatory experience, he claimed, as a fourteen-year-old exploring the subterranean crypt of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. Through visionary experiences, the secret wisdom of the ages were passed down to him from the ancient Aryan brotherhood of spiritual beings known as the Armanen. The similarities between this idea and Blavatsky's secret doctrine and brotherhood are many, for indeed List and his closest followers had extensive connections with Eckstein's Vienna Theosophical Society and other Theosophical groups.
Among the important information imparted to List was the true occult interpretation of the Nordic runes. Also, since the "life-force" of the universe flowed from nature, List believed that being close to nature brought one closest to "truth." List trained his closest disciples to enter trances and attempt to listen to nature and "see with one's soul." The highest initiates in the hierarchical List society were said to possess the capacity to communicate directly with the spiritual Teutonic brotherhood of the Armanen. In "Ariosophist" organizations such as this, then, volkisch utopian theories are pursued with practical methodologies derived from spiritualism and Theosophy.
"We must read with our souls the landscape which archeology reconquers with the spade," List often said about his method of achieving "Intuitionen," according to his biographer Joseph Baltzli. Such a methodology finds similarities with those of the Romantic Naturphilosophen, Blavatsky circa 1875 and, circa 1916, Jung and his technique of "active imagination."....
Like any educated Germanic European from this era with interests in Lebensphilosophie in its manifold forms, Jung's personal library contains many volumes published by the Eugen Diederichs Verlag, including editions of the Eddas and books by one of the analysts of the Zurich School who defected with Jung in 1914, Adolph Keller. Indeed, Diederichs was perhaps the most important disseminator of Lebensphilosophie in Central Europe from 1896 to 1930. Diederichs personally chose the types of volumes he wished to reprint and that he felt should be read by his contemporaries, and his agenda was to deliberately resurrect the vitalism of the Lebensphilosophen to "help [it] achieve a greater contemporary effect." Not surprisingly, many of the topics converge remarkably with the sources of Jung's intellectual influences. For example, in 1901 Diederichs began printing a multivolume series under the title Gott-Natur (God-Nature) that reprinted the works of Giordano Bruno, Paracelsus, Lamarck, Goethe, Carus, and other early nineteenth-century proponents of speculative Naturphilosophie upon which Jung built his theory of the archetypes.....
BODENBESCHAFFENHEIT: VOLKISCH LANDSCAPE MYSTICISM
In a symbolic gesture of the volkisch sympathy between Jung and Keyserling, Jung wrote an essay on how the "earthly environment" shapes the human soul specifically for a book that Keyserling edited, Mensch und Erde (1927). By this point Jung had already moved away from a purely biological or racial model of the unconscious mind (in fact, he had done so by 1916 when he proposed a collective unconscious) and instead embraced the more transcendental claims of mysticism and old Romantic Naturphilosophie. However, as we saw, the volkisch movement, with the prominent backing of Haeckel, continued to embrace quasi-Lamarckian notions of Darwinian pangenesis that gave scientific justification for such environmental influences.
The idea of Bodenbeschaffenheit gained further scientific credibility in an age of increasing materialism through a volume by the German natural scientist Bernhard von Cotta, Deutschlands Boden: Sein Bau und dessen Einwirkung auf das Leben der Menschen (Germany's Soil: Its Construction and Effect on the Life of Humans), published in 1853. Cotta's thesis was to demonstrate "what influence the geological structures of countries have on their peoples." The union of Volk with landscape, of Blut und Boden, was supported by Cotta's vision of "ideal natural regions" that were interpreted by other volkisch commentators as justification for the idea of a German nation-state as an organic, natural body. Such "soft inheritance" was still a credible idea in some German scientific circles at the turn of the century. Sounding very much like Keyserling in his Travel Diary, Jung makes the following claims of pangenesis:Just as, in the process of evolution, the mind has been molded by earthly conditions, so the same process repeats itself under our eyes today. Imagine a large section of some European nation transplanted to a strange soil and another climate. We can confidently expect this human group to undergo certain psychic and perhaps also physical changes in the course of a few generations, even without the admixture of foreign blood.
As evidence, Jung cites the "marked differences" between Spanish, North African, German, and various Russian "varieties of Jews." He then goes on to predict the "Indianization of the American people," who were originally a "predominantly Germanic people." As evidence, Jung recalls watching "a stream of workers coming out of a factory" in 1912 in Buffalo and remarking to a friend that "I should never have thought there was such a high percentage of Indian blood." His American friend laughingly told Jung there wasn't a drop of Indian blood in any of them. Backpedaling, Jung deduced that it must have been the geography that shaped their phenotypic expression, not "Mendelian units" (genes). In an effort to further back up this typically volkisch logic, Jung cites the anthropometric work of the noted American anthropologist Franz Boas, whom Jung claims "has shown that anatomical changes begin already in the second generation of immigrants, chiefly in the measurements of the skull."
The first indication of Jung's fascination with the idea of Bodenbeschaffenheit that was used so extensively by members of the Volkstumbewegung (especially by its most racist and anti-Semitic elements) is a report in a letter to Freud dated 6 April 1910 that he is reading a book by Maurice Low, The American People: A Study in National Psychology (1909), that "holds the climate largely responsible for the frequency of neurosis in America." Although the effect of climate in causing psychopathology is an idea dating to the ancient Greeks, Jung then gives it a decided volkisch twist by surmising, "Perhaps a harshly continental climate really is ill-suited to a race sprung from the sea." Such logic could be reversed to argue that Jews whose ancestors were Semites from an arid, dry desert land do not fit in in Europe. Although Freud does not respond to Jung's comment, he was acutely aware that such logic was a major element in anti-Semitic rhetoric at this time....
Jung's use of the geological metaphor of the fiery magma of the earth's core as the central fire that connects all life, human and nonhuman, is related to an image that Jung invokes frequently during this period: that of the sun as the core of the human personality. This image of the psyche is represented in Jung's very first mandala drawing of 1916. Indeed, geographical diagrams depicting a cross-sectioning of the earth and its magma core can indeed be seen as representing a fiery sun or star embedded at the center of the earth. If one accepts the theory that the earth was originally jettisoned from the sun, then indeed the hot core of the Earth is truly "sun." In a sense Jung owes this metaphor of the human personality, in part, to the Naturphilosophen for whom the earth was an anthropomorphized entity with its own soul or, indeed, psyche. Psychotherapy could thus be imagined as a mining expedition or geographical exploration to reach the central source of life at the "core." As we shall see in a later chapter, this was indeed the case in the analysis of Hermann Hesse by one of Jung's disciples.
Both scientists and occultists have proposed a dynamic hot core similar to a sun deep within the planet. The French naturalist and philosopher the Comte de Buffon (1707-1788) believed that the earth had once been a fireball flung off from the sun, and that the crust was therefore the cooling exterior of a still volatile and extremely hot core of star matter. The material of the human body, it could thus be claimed, was made of star matter, making us all Sonnenkinder, "children of the sun." The often-cited maxim of the alchemists that was so dear to Jung, "as above, so below," thus takes on new meaning, as does another of Jung's favorite images -- the account of Apuleius (through the character Lucius) in Metamorphoses (Book 11) who claims "I saw the sun in the middle of the night" ("nocte media vidi solem") during a subterranean Isaic mystery-cult rite of initiation. Naturalists since the eighteenth century cited the worldwide prevalence of volcanoes and their lava flows as compelling scientific evidence of a hot molten core beneath the earth's crust, and the hypothesis of central heat or a central fire was a primary assumption of the vulcanist or plutonist school of geologists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Geophysics and Naturphilosophie commonly overlapped at many junctures.
Thus, cross-sectional images of the planet since that time show a mandala-like sequence of concentric circles, indicating the Earth's various geological strata, with a central glowing spherical core of intense heat at its center. Such illustrations were common in the German popular-science journals that began to appear in the 1850s and would have been familiar images to the adolescent Jung. Jung's "geology of the personality" is hence based on a vulcanist or plutonist geophysical vision borrowed from his training in the natural sciences.
Also significant in Jung's 1925 lecture is his clear statement that he does not consider the collective unconscious to be solely inside the brain and nervous system. Since it can be located outside the brain, Jung says that "on this basis the main body of the collective unconscious cannot be strictly said to be psychological, but psychical." This is an early appearance of a theoretical distinction Jung would make later in his career (in 1946) about the transcendental, quasi-physical, quasi-psychological, "psychoid" nature of the archetypes. Jung borrowed the term "psychoid" (as an adjective, not a noun) from the twentieth-century version of speculative Naturphilosophie and vitalism expounded by Bleuler, on "the natural history of the soul." Both Bleuler and Jung attempted to distinguish themselves from the more nakedly vitalistic use of the term "die Psychoide" by Hans Driesch (1867-1941). Jung's own full return to Naturphilosophie is never so clear as when he remarks,....We cannot repeat this distinction too often, for when I have referred to the collective unconscious as "outside" our brains, it has been assumed that I meant hanging somewhere in mid-air. After this explanation it will become clear to you that the collective unconscious is always working upon you through trans-subjective facts which are probably inside as well as outside yourselves.
By documenting this phylogenetic layer of the unconscious mind one also learns about the earliest origins of the human race. Therefore, we learn something new about not only archaeology, but evolutionary biology. What Jung doesn't explicitly say -- but it is fundamental to his project to demonstrate the utility of psychoanalysis as the new Wissenschaft -- is that we also learn about the origins of the very planet we live on, and that this method can add to our knowledge of the earth sciences. The strong implication by Jung, especially after a brief flirtation with the cultural stages of Bachofenian theory circa 1912-1913, is that (1) the universality of solar symbolism in material from the phylogenetic unconscious and (2) evidence of still-existing sun worship in primitive societies around the world (which Jung would one day see for himself in Africa and in the American Southwest) are expressions of prephylogenetic memories from our inanimate history. As the earth sprang from the sun and took many millions of years to cool off before life emerged from nonlife and began the process of evolution, these memories of being torn from the sun must somehow be in the very matter that comprise our physical bodies. This is one of the areas in which Jung's line of thought parallels Henri Bergson's ideas and indeed may have been informed by them, for Bergson's hypothesis of a biological unconscious in which humans can intuit the memories of their evolutionary past was put forth in his books Mattiere et Memoire (Matter and Memory) in 1896 and L'Evolution Creatrice in 1907. Libido, Bergsonian elan vital, Lebenskraft (the old term of the Naturphilosophen and the vitalists for the "force of life"), and the sun are therefore indeed one.....
Jung never deviated from vitalism throughout the remainder of his career. It was with the vitalistic school of evolutionary biology and it origins in the Naturphilosophie of the Romantics that Jung was always to remain -- even when new discoveries in genetics and other areas seemed to legitimize the predominant scientific worldview in the twentieth century that includes a biology based only on mechanistic materialism. As we shall see, Jung was most modern in his scientific worldview during these student years, after which his ideas slowly retreated further back into a philosophy that more closely resembled early nineteenth-century biological science and its Romantic idealism.....
1917-1919: A RETURN TO ROMANTIC "NATURPHILOSOPHIE"
Besides Jung's vigorous rejection of the Christian god and his guerilla war against the organized Judeo-Christian religions of his day, Jung also rejected the science of the early twentieth century and instead embraced the world view and methodologies of early nineteenth-century romantic conceptions of science. With the creation of his religious cult and its transcendental notions of a collective unconscious in 1916 Jung had already left the scientific world and academia, never to really return (despite later pleas for the scientific nature of his analytical psychology). The adoption of the additional theory of dominants or archetypes completed this break and formally allied Jung with Goethe, Carus, and the morphological idealists of the romantic or metaphysical schools of Naturphilosophie that reigned supreme between 1790 and 1830 in German scientific circles.....
On the three basic types of Naturphilosophie (transcendental, romantic, and metaphysical Naturphilosophie) see Timothy Lenoir, "The Gottingen School and the Development of Transcendental Naturphilosophie in the Romantic Era," in William Coleman and Camille Limoges, eds., Studies in the History of Biology, Volume 5 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 111-205. See also the following: D. M. Knight, "The Physical Sciences and the Romantic Movement," History of Science 9 (1970): 54-75; H.A.M. Snelders, "Romanticism and Naturphilosophie and the Inorganic Natural Sciences, 1798-1840. An Introductory Survey," Studies in Romanticism 9 (1970): 193-215; Charles Culotta, "German Biophysics, Objective Knowledge and Romanticism," Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 4 (1975): 3-38; Elke Hahn, "The Philosophy of Living Things: Schelling's Naturphilosophie as a Transition to the Philosophy of Identity," in Woodward and Cohen, World Views and Scientific Discipline Formation pp. 339-50; L. H. LeRoy, "Johann Christian Reil and Naturphilosophie in Physiologie" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1985); Helmut Muller-Sievers, "Epigenesis: Wilhelm von Humbolt und die Naturphilosophie" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1990); and Gunther B. Risse, "Kant, Schelling and the Early Search for a Philosophical Science of Medicine in Germany," Journal for the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 27 (1972): 145-58. Two useful essays on Naturphilosophie appear in the volume edited by G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980): Simon Schaffer, "Natural Philosophy" (pp. 55-91), and J. L. Heilbron, "Experimental Natural Philosophy" (pp. 357-87). The best collection of essays on Naturphilosophie, however, can be found in Herbert Harz, Rolf Lather, and Siegfried Wollgast, ed., Naturphilosophie van der Spekulation zur Wissenschaft (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1969).
-- The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement, by Richard Noll
Naturphilosophie (German for "nature-philosophy") is a term used in English-language philosophy to identify a current in the philosophical tradition of German idealism, as applied to the study of nature in the earlier 19th century. German speakers use the clearer term Romantische Naturphilosophie, the philosophy of nature developed at the time of the founding of German Romanticism. It is particularly associated with the philosophical work of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling[1] and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel[1]—though it has some clear precursors also. More particularly it is identified with some of the initial works of Schelling during the period 1797–9, in reaction to the views of Fichte, and subsequent developments from Schelling's position. Always controversial, some of Schelling's ideas in this direction are still considered of philosophical interest, even if the subsequent development of experimental natural science had a destructive impact on the credibility of the theories of his followers in Naturphilosophie.[2]
Naturphilosophie attempted to comprehend nature in its totality and to outline its general theoretical structure, thus attempting to lay the foundations for the natural sciences. In developing their theories, the German Naturphilosophen found their inspiration in the natural philosophy of the Ancient Greek Ionian philosophers.
As an approach to philosophy and science, Naturphilosophie has had a difficult reception. In Germany, neo-Kantians came to distrust its developments as speculative and overly metaphysical.[3] For most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was poorly understood in Anglophone countries. Over the years, it has been subjected to continuing criticism. Since the 1960s, improved translations have appeared, and scholars have developed a better appreciation of the objectives of Naturphilosophie.
Outline of development
The German Idealist philosopher Fichte had attempted to show that the whole structure of reality follows necessarily from the fact of self-consciousness. Schelling took Fichte's position as his starting-point, and in his earliest writings posited that nature must have reality for itself. In this light Fichte's doctrines appeared incomplete. On the one hand, they identified the ultimate ground of the universe of reason too closely with finite, individual Spirit. On the other, they threatened the reality of the world of nature by seeing it too much in the manner of subjective idealism. Fichte, in this view, had not managed to unite his system with the aesthetic view of nature to which Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment had pointed.
Naturphilosophie is therefore one possible theory of the unity of nature. Nature as the sum of what is objective, and intelligence as the complex of all the activities making up self-consciousness, appear as equally real. The philosophy of nature and transcendental idealism would be the two complementary portions making up philosophy as a whole.
German philosophy
Naturphilosophie translated into English would mean just "philosophy of nature", and its scope began to be taken in a broad way. Johann Gottfried Herder, particularly taken in opposition to Immanuel Kant, was a precursor of Schelling:
Herder's dynamic view of nature was developed by Goethe and Schelling and led to the tradition of Naturphilosophie[...][4]
Later Friedrich Schlegel theorised about a particular German strand in philosophy of nature, citing Jakob Böhme, Johannes Kepler and Georg Ernst Stahl, with Jan Baptist van Helmont as an edge case.[5] Frederick Beiser instead traces Naturphilosophie as developed by Schelling, Hegel, Schlegel and Novalis to a crux in the theory of matter, and identifies the origins of the line they took with the vis viva theory of matter in the work of Gottfried Leibniz.[6]
Subsequently Schelling identified himself with Baruch de Spinoza, to whose thought he saw himself as approaching. The Darstellung meines Systems, and the expanded treatment in the lectures on a System der gesamten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere given in Würzburg in 1804, contain elements of Spinoza's philosophy.
Schelling
In a short space of time Schelling produced three works: Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur als Einleitung in das Studium dieser Wissenschaft, 1797 (Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature as Introduction to the Study of this Science); Von der Weltseele, 1798 (On the World Soul); and Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, 1799 (First Plan of a System of the Philosophy of Nature). As criticism of scientific procedure, these writings retain a relevance. Historically, according to Richards:
Despite the tentativeness of their titles, these monographs introduced radical interpretations of nature that would reverberate through the sciences, and particularly the biology, of the next century. They developed the fundamental doctrines of Naturphilosophie.
In System des transzendentalen Idealismus, 1800 (System of Transcendental Idealism) Schelling included ideas on matter and the organic in Part III. They form just part of a more ambitious work that takes up other themes, in particular aesthetics. From this point onwards Naturphilosophie was less of a research concern for him, as he reformulated his philosophy. However, it remained an influential aspect of his teaching. For a short while, he edited a journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für speculative Physik (bound volume 1802).[7]
Schelling's Naturphilosophie was a way in which he worked himself out of the tutelage of Fichte, with whom he quarrelled decisively towards the end of the 1790s. More than that, however, it brought him within the orbit of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, both intellectually and (as a direct consequence of Goethe's sympathetic attitude) by a relocation; and it broke with basic Kantian tenets. Grant writes:
Schelling's postkantian confrontation with nature itself begins with the overthrow of the Copernican revolution ...[8]
Schelling held that the divisions imposed on nature, by our ordinary perception and thought, do not have absolute validity. They should be interpreted as the outcome of the single formative energy which is the soul or inner aspect of nature. In other words he was a proponent of a variety of organicism. The dynamic series of stages in nature, the forms in which the ideal structure of nature is realized, are matter, as the equilibrium of the fundamental expansive and contractive forces; light, with its subordinate processes (magnetism, electricity, and chemical action); organism, with its component phases of reproduction, irritability and sensibility. The continual change presented to us by experience, taken together with the thought of unity in productive force of nature, leads to the conception of the duality through which nature expresses itself in its varied products.
In the introduction to the Ideen he argues against dogmatism, in the terms that a dogmatist cannot explain the organic; and that recourse to the idea of a cosmic creator is a feature of dogmatic systems imposed by the need to explain nature as purposive and unified.[9] Fichte's system, called the Wissenschaftslehre, had begun with a fundamental distinction between dogmatism (fatalistic) and criticism (free), as his formulation of idealism.[10]
Beiser divides up the mature form of Schelling's Naturphilosophie into the attitudes of transcendental realism (the thesis that "nature exists independent of all consciousness, even that of the transcendental subject") and transcendental naturalism (the thesis that "everything is explicable according to the laws of nature, including the rationality of the transcendental subject").[11] He notes how Naturphilosophie was first a counterbalance to Wissenschaftslehre, and then in Schelling's approach became the senior partner. After that, it was hardly to be avoided that Schelling would become an opponent of Fichte, having been a close follower in the early 1790s.
We are able to apprehend and represent nature to ourselves in the successive forms which its development assumes, since it is the same spirit of which we become aware in self-consciousness, though here unconsciously. The variety of its forms is not imposed on it externally, since there is no external teleology in nature. Nature is a self-forming whole, within which only natural explanations can be sought. The function of Naturphilosophie is to exhibit the ideal as springing from the real, not to deduce the real from the ideal.
Influence and critics of Naturphilosophie
Criticism of Naturphilosophie has been widespread, over two centuries. Schelling's theories, however influential in terms of the general culture of the time, have not survived in scientific terms. Like other strands of speculation in the life sciences, in particular, such as vitalism, they retreated in the face of experiment, and then were written out of the history of science as Whig history. But critics were initially not scientists (a term not used until later); rather they came largely from within philosophy and Romantic science, a community including many physicians. Typically, the retrospective views of scientists of the 19th century on "Romantic science" in general erased distinctions:
Scientific criticism in the nineteenth century took hardly any notice of the distinctions between Romantic, speculative and transcendental, scientific and aesthetic directions.[12]
One outspoken critic was the chemist Justus von Liebig, who compared Naturphilosophie with the Black Death.[13] Another critic, the physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond, frequently dismissed Naturphilosophie as "bogus".[14]
Role in aesthetics
Isaiah Berlin summed up the reasons why Naturphilosophie had a wide-ranging impact on views of art and artists:
if everything in nature is living, and if we ourselves are simply its most self-conscious representatives, the function of the artist is to delve within himself, and above all to delve within the dark and unconscious forces which move within him, and to bring these to consciousness by the most agonising and violent internal struggle.[15]
Philosophical criticism
Fichte was very critical of the opposition set up in Schelling's Naturphilosophie to his own conception of Wissenschaftslehre. In that debate, Hegel then intervened, largely supporting his student friend Schelling, with the work usually called his Differenzschrift, the Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie (The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy); a key publication in his own philosophical development, his first book, it was published in September 1801.[16]
Schelling's Absolute was left with no other function than that of removing all the differences which give form to thought. The criticisms of Fichte, and more particularly of Hegel (in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit), pointed to a defect in the conception of the Absolute as mere featureless identity. It was ridiculed by Hegel as "the night in which all cows are black."[17][18]
Other views in Romantic science
Ignaz Paul Vitalis Troxler, a follower of Schelling, later broke with him.[19] He came to the view that the Absolute in nature and mind is beyond the intellect and reason.[12]
Naturphilosophen
• Adam Karl August von Eschenmayer, engaged in controversy with Schelling from 1801, published Grundriss der Natur-Philosophie in 1832
• Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, an influence on Schelling's thinking, he was a founder rather than a follower, and a proponent of recapitulation theory
• Johann Friedrich Meckel[20]
• Lorenz Oken[21]
• Hans Christian Ørsted[22]
• Johann Wilhelm Ritter[22]
• Henrik Steffens
• August Ludwig Hülsen
• Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus[23]
• Karl Joseph Hieronymus Windischmann
Notes
1. Frederick C. Beiser(2002), German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism 1781–1801, Harvard university Press, p. 506.
2. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schelling/
3. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cohen/
4. http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.p ... ew/160/269
5. Paola Mayer, Jena Romanticism and Its Appropriation of Jakob Böhme: Theosophy, Hagiography, Literature (1999), p. 127.
6. Frederick Beiser, 'The Enlightenment and Idealism', pp. 21–42, esp. pp. 32–33, in Karl Ameriks (editor) (2000), The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism.
7. Online text
8. Grant p. 6.
9. Dale E. Snow, Schelling and the end of Idealism (1996), p. 83.
10. Beiser 2002, p. 261.
11. Beiser 2002, p. 483.
12. ^ Dietrich von Engelhardt, Romanticism in Germany p. 112, in Roy Porterand Mikulaš Teich, editors, Romanticism in National Context (1988).
13. Siegbert Prawer (editor), The Romantic Period in Germany (1970), Introduction by Prawer p. 5.
14. du Bois-Reymond, Emil (1912). Reden. Leipzig: Veit. pp. vol. 2: 143, 258.
15. Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Henry Hardy, editor) (2000), p. 89.
16. Terry Pinkard, Hegel (2000), p. 109.
17. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; (tr.), A. V. Miller (1998-01-01). Phenomenology of Spirit. Motilal Banarsidass Publ. p. 9. ISBN 9788120814738.
18. Hegel, Georg W. F. (2013-03-01). Phänomenologie des Geistes (in German). Meiner Verlag. ¶ 13. ISBN 378732464X.
19. http://www.fernuni-hagen.de/EUROL/Proje ... xler-e.htm
20. Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), p. 45.
21. Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), p. 39.
22. http://www.sil.si.edu/silpublications/d ... ecture.htm
23. http://www.hughdower.com/Haeckel.htm
References
19th century
• F. W. J. Schelling, Einleitung zu den Ersten Entwurf (Sämtliche Werke Vol. III) – the most accessible account of Naturphilosophie in Schelling's own work.
• Kuno Fischer, Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, Vol. VI, pp. 433–692 – a detailed discussion by a 19th-century historian of philosophy.
Contemporary
• Frederick C. Beiser (2002), German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism 1781-1801
• Robert J. Richards (2002), The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe
• Iain Hamilton Grant (2006), Philosophies of Nature after Schelling
• Slavoj Žižek (1996), The Indivisible Remainder: Essays on Schelling and Related Matters, London: Verso.