Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (review)

At a time when it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish the natural from the artificial, or the biological from the technological, it would seem that a "philosophy of nature" can only come across as naïve. For those in the sciences, such a project will seem not only antiquated—the sort of thing elderly Greek sages once worried about—but also far behind the latest advances in the ability to engineer nature at the molecular, genetic and quantum levels. For those members of the various cultural-studies tribes, any claims for a philosophy of nature will only elicit critiques concerning discourse and the "cultural construction of nature." Even science studies, that most diplomatic of orphan quasi-disciplines, will cautiously qualify each and every mention of the word "nature," often through the creation of new terms that exhibit a desire to have it both ways—nature "in itself" and nature as constructed, nature existing in itself but also there "for us" and because of us.

Against these albeit generalized notions of nature—nature as something quantifiable "out there," nature as subjectively constructed "in here," and nature as the co-production between self and world "here and there"—Iain Hamilton Grant's book Philosophies of Nature after Schelling proposes that we think about nature as irreducible to the entire dichotomous game of self and world, idealism and realism. Indeed, Grant argues for a reconsideration of "nature" in terms of the classical notion of phusis—this is a "physics" that is less concerned with quasi-verifiable, smallest units of matter and more a physics in the sense of a dynamical and ideational flux that pervades the very correlation of self and world, idea and thing.

Grant's book is thus a book of philosophy—it makes no claims about science, culture or any admixture of them. However, it also asks us to think about what a "naturephilosophy" would be like today, an era in which concerns over climate change, natural disasters, emerging epidemics and the like dominate both the "serious" culture of policy discussions and the "leisure" culture of popular disaster movies. Before we ask whether we have adequately assessed this or that aspect of water shortage or the etiology of an epidemic, before we dismiss the very idea of "nature" as romanticized, before we ask about the co-production of "nature-cultures" or "actants," before any of this, Grant's book poses the fundamental question: What is required a priori that something called "nature" be thinkable as such? To get at this question, Grant focuses primarily on the work of the German thinker Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, a figure often associated with German Idealism, Romanticism, or naturphilosophie, depending on who one asks. Schelling's works not only are wide-ranging but also function for Grant as a counter-point to the dominant epistemology of nature established by Kant.

As the title of his book indicates, Grant's main argument is that the real development of the concept of natureas phusis takes place in the cluster of 18th- and 19th-century developments in German thought, from Kant's antinomies of nature (and his famous question about whether we would one day see the equivalent of a "Newton of a blade of grass") to Fichte's "sequential" logic of natural striving to Lorenz Oken's dynamic, oozing "universal animal." Grant focuses on this period for good reason, for it is Kant who stands both as the decisive figure in framing the post-Enlightenment discourse on nature and as the figure that any philosophy of nature must ultimately overcome. It is Kant who attempts to settle the endless debates between realism and idealism by distinguishing between an inaccessible world out there (noumena) and the world as it appears to us as sensing, thinking subjects (phenomena). What results is what Grant calls a "two-world metaphysics," in which something called "nature" is eliminated from its thought, world from self, physics from metaphysics, phusis from...