Abstract
Nineteenth-century theories of nature were fiercely debated in philosophical circles. These debates emerged from a wider dispute between advocates of formalist theories of matter such as Kant’s and dynamic theories of matter inspired by Spinoza. The contributions that Friedrich Schelling’s Naturphilosophie has made to this debate have been overlooked. In the Naturphilosophie Schelling advances a framework he calls speculative physics, which argues that the most basic substrate of nature is not matter, but unlimited activity. I outline some of the key features of Schelling’s speculative physics in the context of new materialist philosophies, demonstrating their mutual entanglements. I argue that Schelling provides both conceptual antecedents to new materialisms and a resource upon which new materialisms may draw.
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Notes
- 1.
In Coole’s own chapter in the same volume, she mentions Schelling in passing as belonging to the romanticised theories of nature exemplified by early German Romanticism (Coole and Frost 2010, 99–100). My analysis of Schelling’s speculative physics will in part be a response to this characterisation.
- 2.
In The History of Western Philosophy Bertrand Russell writes of Schelling that “philosophically, though famous in his day, he is not important. The import and development from Kant’s philosophy was that of Hegel” (1996, 690). This is one of only two mentions of Schelling in the nearly 900 pages of Russell’s book.
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- 4.
- 5.
Kant’s quasi-mystical concept of a “universal ether” in the Opus Postumum is the only real attempt, which itself remains incomplete.
- 6.
Compare CPR, Kant 2007, Bxx–xxi; B383; A471/B499.
- 7.
Exactly how hidden this assumption is in Kant can of course be debated, but suffice to say here that Schelling hones in on the fact that Kant presupposes a subject that cannot be properly grounded, either in absolute self-consciousness or in absolute nature (here meaning nature as productivity).
- 8.
The full title is Introduction to the Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, or, on the Concept of Speculative Physics and the Internal Organization of a System of this Science. This introduction was originally released separately from the First Outline, although both in 1799. The translation of the Introduction is found in Keith R. Peterson’s translation of the First Outline (2004, 193–232).
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Moffat, L. (2019). Anticipating New Materialisms Through Schelling’s Speculative Physics. In: Carruthers, J., Dakkak, N., Spence, R. (eds) Anticipatory Materialisms in Literature and Philosophy, 1790–1930 . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29817-3_4
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