Destruction or Collapse?

As Schelling argued, nature’s destruction takes effect under the combined principles of oikos and telos, or economic teleology,^[1] in which nature is conceived as a “fixed, and self-enclosed existence.”^[2] This concept of nature reflects the condition of “reason and the human race,” which, as Schelling argued in one of his public polemics, has become in itself unable to develop.^[3] Today, a cetain concept of ‘development’ is summoned by formal systems of highly rationalized order of things, amid the continuing risks of systems collapse across the libidinal and material economy, the climate emergency, not to mention the banality of post-truth in the hyper-information age. 

Incidentally, insofar as the notion of development serves the interest of reason, its semiotic power to deflate or neutralize a crisis reveals a negative concept of collapse. Schelling, by contrast, embraces a positive idea of destruction, an irrevocable ruin concerning the known world. Collapse is the primary goal of the philosophy of nature, which does not merely proceed from “thinking to knowledge, but rather also beyond knowledge in general … to the intuition of reality and the complete collapse of the world known by us with the world of nature.”^[4] It is at this point in the progress of reason where finally, as Schelling emphatically concludes, “the ideal has become real” and the “world of thought [has become] the world of nature.”^[5] Ideally, this intuitive collapse should result in ‘ethical requirements’ attaining their highest objective fulfillment, which is to say: they no longer appear to finite consciousness as thoughts, “as commandments, but rather have become realities in the nature of [the] soul.”^[6]

The nature that we know, however, must first be constructed a priori “with corresponding external intuitions.”^[7] This already suggests that the terms of understanding, as laid out by Kant’s groundbreaking critique, necessarily inhibits nature in the precise sense of nature as being thought not determining in advance “the organism as subject,”^[8] otherwise, if nature can predetermine which organism can be a subject, it would make any organism non-excitable, and therefore, unreachable by an external source. Its exact correlate in the domain of existence is that freedom would be impossible. But as Iain Hamilton Grant contends, the concept that inhibits nature in the aforementioned sense is not the nature from which the concept is supposed to originate, but rather the nature that is necessarily thought as more than itself in thought that the concept, therefore, cannot contain. This is precisely how nature originates as a matter of a priori construction– conceiving is always transformed by the unconceived, that which extains what the concept contains, which in Schelling, is called the unprethinkable, or the indivisible remainder.^[9]

In this sense, construction de-constructs nature, re-realizes it from its autonomous realm, only in order to generate an observable experience of fluidity. Nature re-realizes itself as an a priori construction to the extent that we can see nature, as if abandoned to itself, in “a life of loathing and anxiety, a fire that incessantly consumes itself, and unremittingly produces itself anew.”^[10] By no means does these constructionist terms suggest, however, that nature’s innate drive to transition its products to non-excitability (that is to say, other than making them excitable in the first place which places them within the dynamics of creation) rendering them finally incapable of being reached by an external source, in a word: their extinction, can be successfully inhibited by consciousness. In the ultimate sense, it does suggest that extinction can be observed in its finite localizable form, which can only be derived from a constructed, or borrowing a Kantian jargon, schematically palpable sense of nature. This may mean that the concept in which nature is conceived, that is, in terms of exceeding its purpose to put things into order, approaches the meaning of a true concept: “Thinking about nature,” as Grant explains, always involves more nature than can be thought.”^[11]

But how we construct nature varies. From a Schellingian perspective, the proper understanding of nature and how the world collapses in the correct sense is less about the question of access to nature than it is about constructing a positive system, a naturephilosophy. In a nutshell, this means that the access problem becomes inverted: “to what have we access if the form under which all representation is for us is insuperable?”^[12] As Schelling states, “[b]ecause to philosophize about nature means as much as to create it, we must first of all find the point from which nature can be posited into becoming.”^[13] Here, Schelling takes notes of the power of the natural antecedent to allow the construction of nature to the extent that it becomes a natural rule that thought, like an organism, always “constructs itself under duress from an outer world.”^[14] This much is verified in the empirical field. As Schelling reiterates, “[j]ust as there is a path from the logical to the empirical, there is also a path from the empirical to the logical that arrives at the innate and indwelling logic of nature.”^[15] 

Nature’s logic is such that it is revealed when the very conception of nature “extains more than it contains,”^[16] when its being thought means that “it is not nature insofar as it is from it that the concept arises.”^[17] Thus, a more advanced expression of the ancient ‘phusis kruptesthai philei’ lies in the nature of nature to retroactively originate everything in primordial duplicity, in the arcane indifference of that is: it is, but it is not.

---

^[1] F.W.J. Schelling, Statement on the True Relationship of the Philosophy of Nature to the Revised Fichtean Doctrine: An Elucidation of the Former (1806), trans. Dale E. Snow (New York: State University of New York Press, Albany, 2018), 13. See also Bruce Matthews’ book Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy: Life as A Schema of Freedom (New York: State University of New York, Albany, 2011), 275, n. 16.

^[2] Schelling, Statement on the True Relationship of the Philosophy of Nature to the Revised Fichtean Doctrine, 30.

^[3] Ibid.,7.

^[4] Ibid., 30.

^[5] Ibid. 

^[6] Ibid.

^[7] F.W.J. Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith Peterson (New York: State University of New York Press, Albany, 2014), 19.

^[8] Ibid., 106.

^[9] F.W.J., Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johaness Schmidt (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), 29.

^[10] F.W.J. Schelling, The Ages of the World(Fragment) from the handwritten remains, Third Version (c. 1815), trans. Jason M. Wirth (New York: State University of New York Press, Albany,2000),46.

^[11] Iain Hamilton Grant, “How nature came to be thought: Schellings paradox and the problem of location,” in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 44 1 (2013): 28.

^[12] Iain Hamilton Grant, “The Universe in the Universe: German Idealism and the Natural History of Mind, in  Harvi Carel and Darian Meacha (eds.),  Phenomenology and Naturalism: Examining the Relationship Between Human Experience and Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013),  106. 

^[13] Schelling, First Outline, 5.

^[14] Schelling, First Outline, 106.

^[15] F.W.J. Schelling, The Grounding of Positive Philosophy: The Berlin Lectures, trans. Bruce Matthews (New York: State University of New York Press, Albany, 2006), 161.

^[16] Grant, “How nature came to be thought: Schellings paradox and the problem of location,” 25.

^[17] Ibid.