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Thesis Final A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick Permanent WRAP URL: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/80030 Copyright and reuse: This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: [email protected] warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications From Nature to Spirit: Schelling, Hegel, and the Logic of Emergence Benjamin Berger A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Warwick Department of Philosophy January 2016 !1 Acknowledgements 5 Declaration 7 Abstract 8 Abbreviations 10 Introduction: Why Idealist Naturphilosophie? 11 Part I: Schelling 27 Chapter 1: The Commencement of Speculative Physics 28 1.1. Introduction 28 1.2. The Interpretive Difficulty of Protean Thinking 28 1.3. Speculative Physics after Kant 32 1.4. Nature as Impersonal Subject 35 1.5. Reason in Nature 38 1.6. Two Models of Nature-Spirit Identity 49 1.7. Dynamic Physics and the Fundamental Forces of Nature 56 1. 8. Magnetism, Electricity, and the Chemical Process 66 1. 9. Life Between Nature and Spirit 74 Chapter 2: The ‘Originary Identity’ of Nature and Spirit 92 2.1. Introduction 92 2.2. Indifference as Absolute identity 94 2.3. The Logic of Emanation 99 2.4. Powers: Qualitative and Quantitative 103 Chapter 3: Primordial Night and the Emergence of Spirit 109 3.1. Introduction 109 3.2. Identity Reconsidered 109 3.3. Ground and Existence 114 3.4. Nature Philosophy and the Freedom Essay 118 3.5. Indifference 123 3.6. Freedom for Evil 129 3.7. The Eternity of Freedom 138 !2 3.8. Freedom and Necessity 143 3.9. Being as Longing 147 3.10. The Emergence of Originary Identity 154 Part II: Hegel 158 Chapter 4: The Idea as Nature 159 4.1. Introduction 159 4.2. Objective Idealism in the Differenzschrift 164 4.3. The ‘Mature’ Hegel 169 4.4. From Nature’s Powers to its Logical Process 172 4.5. An Ontology of Movement 185 4.6. The ‘Release’ of the Absolute Idea 187 4.7. Logos and Physis in Idealism 201 4.8. The Place of Spirit in the System 205 4.9. Nature’s System of Stages 213 4.10. Emergentism contra Organicism 217 4.11. Speculative Physics and Empirical Physics 234 Chapter 5: The Self-Formation of Matter 246 5.1. Introduction 246 5.2. Space 249 5.3. Time 258 5.4. Matter in Motion 267 5.5. Falling Bodies 275 5.6. Celestial Motion and the Mechanical Stirrings of Freedom 287 5.7. Self-Formation as Qualitative Differentiation 296 5.8. Emergent Immateriality: Light 301 Chapter 6: Life and the Self-Liberation of Spirit 309 6.1. Introduction 309 6.2. Chemical Processes and ‘The Chemical Process’ 310 6.3. The Earth: Proto-Organism 313 6.4. The Plant: The Emergence of Life as Such 318 !3 6.5. The Animal: Life Coming Into Its Own 325 6.6. Death and the Spirit as Phoenix 331 6.7. The Inner Unity of Spirit 339 6.8. Thought 345 6.9. Nature-Spirit Identity: Continuity and Emergence 354 Part III: Conclusion 364 7. The Logic of Emergence and Natural History 365 7.1. Introduction 365 7.2. The Late Schelling’s Critique of Hegel 366 7.3. Two Senses of ‘Becoming’ 376 7.4. Nature’s Past 392 Appendix: Accounting for Schelling’s Spiritualism 398 Bibliography 406 !4 Acknowledgements This thesis was researched and written with the support of a Chancellor’s International Scholarship from the University of Warwick (2011-2014) and a postgraduate bursary from the Royal Institute of Philosophy (2014-2015). My thanks to the people behind the scenes who decided to fund this project. My supervisor, Stephen Houlgate, has been an inspiration throughout every stage of my research. I could not have had a more thoughtful and encouraging mentor. Aside from his attention to the details of my thesis and his support along the way, Stephen has served as a model of intellectual and pedagogical integrity during the course of my postgraduate studies. A number of other faculty members at Warwick have influenced my research in important ways. I would like to thank Miguel de Beistegui, Keith Ansell-Pearson, and Peter Poellner in particular. I would also like to thank Sally Sedgwick and Ned Lukacher for everything they taught me about reading and writing philosophy and for encouraging me to continue the study of philosophy beyond my undergraduate education. Over the past four years, I have had the pleasure of discussing philosophical issues directly and indirectly related to my thesis with a number of my peers. My particular thanks to the following people who have influenced my understanding of the history of philosophy in important ways: Charlotte Alderwick, David Allen, Adam Arnold, Lydia Azadpour, Brock Baines, Stephen Barrell, Beth Cykowski, Matthew Dennis, Juan-Camilo Espejo-Serna, Sarah Flavel, Dino Jaku"i#, Michael Jaworzyn, Philon Ktenides, Justin Laleh, Federico Orsini, Thom Ryan, and Irina Schumski. Thanks also to Sue Podmore and Sarah Taylor for their administrative support throughout my time at Warwick. My research has greatly benefited from my attendance at two summer schools on German idealism, the first at Duquesne University in 2013 and the second at the University of Bonn in 2014. My gratitude to the organisers, speakers, and participants. I have also benefited from a number of reading groups directly related to my research. In particular, the Warwick reading group on Hegel’s Doctrine of the Concept, the Berlin reading group on Schelling’s First Outline, the Chicago reading group on Schelling’s philosophical development, and the Leuven reading group on Schelling’s Freedom essay have all been truly helpful—my thanks to everyone involved. It is difficult to imagine how this thesis would have turned out were it not for the fact that my doctoral research has coincided with something of a boom in Schelling scholarship. This has proven invaluable as I’ve had the opportunity to engage with an international community of scholars who concentrate on a figure that has seldom been taken seriously as one of the great thinkers of the modern age. In my first year of doctoral study, I had the chance to present a paper at the First Annual Meeting of the North American Schelling !5 Society (NASS), and in my third year I returned to meet an incredibly diverse group of Schellingians. My gratitude to all the members of NASS, particularly Bruce Matthews, Sean McGrath, Tilottama Rajan, and Jason Wirth for making these events a possible. My thanks also to the following scholars, who have either commented on or otherwise encouraged my research during various stages of my doctoral study: Iain Grant, Lore Hühn, Christopher Lauer, Daniel Whistler, and Rainer Zimmermann. A special thanks to Rainer Zimmermann for inviting me to a number of workshops on Schelling and contemporary philosophy of nature, and to Iain Grant for making available his unpublished translations of Schelling at the Duquesne summer school. The philosophers to whom this thesis is most indebted are my closest friends, each of whom has contributed substantially to the thought contained in this study: to Carmen De Schryver, Matt Hackett, Richard Lambert, Alex Tissandier, and Graham Wetherall, my deepest appreciation. During the final stages of writing, I have had the pleasure to participate in the philosophical activities at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. My thanks to Karin de Boer and Henning Tegtmeyer for welcoming me into their research groups. I am also grateful to Karla and Philippe, along with the rest of the De Schryver and Waegeman family members, for their generous hospitality and friendship, particularly during the final stages of my writing when their home became a second home for me. My own family, especially my sister, Jessica, and my grandparents, Rita and Marv Chernoff, have been a constant source of support and encouragement. By challenging me to translate my work into layman’s terms, they have continually reminded me of the guiding questions and purpose of my research. I could not have completed this thesis without the patience, love, and companionship of Carmen De Schryver. My gratitude for the joy she brings into my life. I dedicate this thesis to my mother and father, Arlene and Craig, whose love, generosity, and confidence in my ability have made this thesis, and the years of philosophical study leading up to it, possible. !6 Declaration This thesis is my own work and has not been submitted for a degree at another university. !7 Abstract This thesis is a study of the relationship between ‘nature’ and ‘spirit’ in the philosophies of F.W.J. Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel. I aim to show that Schelling and Hegel are involved in a shared task of conceiving spiritual freedom as a necessary outcome of nature’s inner, rational development. I argue that by interpreting spirit as ‘emergent’ from nature, the absolute idealists develop a ‘third way’ beyond Cartesian dualism and monist naturalism. For on the idealist account, nature and spirit are neither ontologically discontinuous, as if separated by an insurmountable ‘gap’, nor are they identical, as if spirit were simply a ‘second nature’. Rather, according to both Schelling and Hegel, spirit emerges from nature as its ontologically distinct and non-natural telos. What makes Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophies of nature so unique, however, is not simply that they present spiritual freedom as dependent upon nature, but that the ontological specificity of spirit is shown to be rationally necessary.
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