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  • Two Protocols for NatureA Note on Hegel and Schelling
  • David Farrell Krell (bio)

The relevance of either of these early nineteenth-century philosophers for this collection, which is in search of another, different relation to nature, seems dubious. I will assert their relevance by claiming that Hegel is what we do today, Schelling what we wish we could do today, with nature.

The two were roommates at college, and as young scholars they even wrote a kind of protocol for all of philosophy, including philosophy of nature. They were joined in this endeavor by a third roommate, Hölderlin. Together they composed “The Oldest Program Toward a System in German Idealism” (ca. 1796–1797). Their shared youthful attitude toward nature looms large in this early protocol, written in the first-person singular, as though the three divines were one:

The first idea is of course the representation of me myself as an absolutely free creature. At the same time, along with the free, self-conscious creature, a whole world comes to the fore—out of nothing—the sole true and conceivable creation out of nothing.—Here I shall alight on the fields of physics; the question is: How must a world be fashioned for a moral creature? To our sluggish physics, advancing laboriously with its experiments, I would like to lend wings once more. Thus—if philosophy provides the ideas, while experience supplies the data, we can finally get in general outline the physics I expect from later epochs. It does not seem as though our current physics could satisfy a creative spirit, such as ours is, or ought to be.

Whereas Hölderlin and Schelling pursue this physics with wings—the first in poetry, the second in philosophy, both with less and less attention to the “moral”—Hegel determines to reduce nature to a subordinate place in his dialectical system. Nature, he decides, is monstrous, marred by irrational excess. [End Page 185] It must be studied and mastered down to its marrow, and it must be systematized as fully as reason will allow. The shifty Proteus, he says, must be forced and fettered. Nevertheless, in his lectures on the philosophy of nature, Hegel emphasizes that there is a great deal of unsalvageable trash in nature (Abfall), much that is the result of frightful accident and sheer contingency (Zufall). A philosophy of reason should not expect to be able to make sense of it all.

Not that Hegel does not try. No corner of nature is alien to his investigative spirit, from sidereal Earth to the Earth’s seas and continents, from crystals to plant and animal organisms. If you are willing to listen, Hegel will tell you why your urine is so pungent soon after you enjoy a meal of asparagus. And if you are still willing to listen, he will explain why a woman’s breast is essentially “digestion turned to the outside” and why a man’s proudest part is best described as an “upswelling heart and active brain.” You laugh? You must first attend the lectures of the leading anatomical expert on hermaphroditism of your own time, as he did, then study Hegel’s lectures of 1805–1806 at Jena, whereupon your laughter will dissolve in awe.

There is no gainsaying that Hegel’s dialectics of nature represent one of the most powerful exercises of reason in the West. And if there are weaknesses there, they are not so much Hegel’s as our own, weaknesses pandemic in our own time, which undertakes to conquer all the things it cannot understand.

In the end, perhaps because of his growing sense of nature’s monstrosity and his resistance to all the Abfall and Zufall with which an ordered and ordering reason cannot contend, Hegel announces that nature is to be ignited to combustion: from the holocaust of nature arises spirit, Geist, precisely as consciousness rises from the fevers of a fatal illness. The Phoenix-bird ascends from the ashes of a universal conflagration, and so must spirit ascend—as fumes, as essence—from a furiously consummated and consumed nature.

Schelling, for his part, refuses to light the match. He too recognizes the monstrosity of nature, all...

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