The Unity of Nature in Schelling’s World Soul

Abstract

The Unity of Nature in Schelling’s World Soul Naomi Fisher I Written in the middle of Schelling’s early period in the philosophy of nature, his 1798 On the World Soul offers an account of nature that is both a response to Kant’s Critique of Teleological Judgment as well as an example of the emphasis on natural and philosophical unity that dominates the post-Kantian philosophy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This 1798 work impressed Goethe and was one reason for Schelling’s appointment to a professorship at Jena.1 It has not, however, been a focus of interpretive work on Schelling. 2 That Schelling attempts to offer an organically [End Page 527] unified conception of nature in his early philosophy of nature is well known, but the manner in which he does this is underexplored. Some have maintained that Schelling construes all organization organically, including mechanical systems; 3 others consider such unity to be posited [End Page 528] as a requirement of subjectivity, that is, established primarily through transcendental arguments.4 Rather, Schelling’s assertion of the organic [End Page 529] unity of nature as a whole—indicated by the term “world soul” (Weltseele)—must be understood in the context of the main claim of this work: There is an organizing principle of nature, operating at various levels and in various ways, that grounds every kind of organization in nature; the world soul is one manifestation of this principle. It is primarily this organizing principle that grants nature its unity. It is not obvious how to characterize organizational unity or how organic unities in nature relate to mechanical laws. In what follows I offer an account of the unity of nature as presented in Schelling’s World Soul. I will show that the unity of nature in this work is characterized by a principle of organization that operates in a reflexive and iterative way: The results of the principle at one level are operated on by that principle iteratively at a higher level to produce different levels of organization. The lowest such level is matter-as-such, and the laws governing matter-as-such are universal; the highest level in nature is nature as a whole, and is singular and all-encompassing. Crucially, for Schelling, the very same principle is productive both of the overarching unity of an object and the elements that comprise this unity. This implies that the principle that guarantees unity does not unite originally disparate or independent elements but is always, even in the case of mechanical laws, productive of those elements. Far from being an ad hoc metaphysical principle that constitutes a mere assertion of unity, the organizational principle not only unifies various elements or features of nature into a cooperative organic system but also provides a metaphysical ground and explanation of those various features. What emerges from this picture is a conception of natural organization that can be summed up in the following way: The distinct iterative operations of the principle of organization give rise to distinct levels of organization. Such levels increase in particularity with each iteration, from the most general mechanical laws to the singular unity of the world-whole. All organization in nature is grounded in the principle of organization, including both organic and mechanical organization. The principle of organization can be articulated as follows: It is characterized as the opposition of positive and negative forces or principles, the unity of which—both in the sense of that which brings them together and in the sense of that which grants them the status of a singular principle—can be given only in the undifferentiated Absolute, which cannot be [End Page 530] accessed discursively.5 In other words, one must keep distinct the unity conferred by the principle within nature, to mechanism and organism, and to the universal organism, on the one hand, and the unity of the principle of nature, which cannot be grasped discursively, on the other. I will explain this last point in the final section of the paper. I will first lay out the structure and explanatory framework of the World Soul (section 2), showing how the positive and negative...