1. Introduction: That a Universe ExistsFootnote ¹

If we take it to be true that thought and its objects occur in one and the same universe, what must a nature be in which the concept of nature may arise? We need not begin by asking whether such a nature is, since there is in fact at least one, namely, that in which the question of whether nature is can and does in fact arise. Nor will we stipulate in advance whether such a nature is reducibly ideal or transcendental, that is, a universe of thought only; or whether by contrast it consists in the irreducibility of its objects to the concepts formed of or from them. Rather, we take it as primary that the medium in which the question we posed is in fact posed shows an importantly recursive character, making nature into the object and the concept under investigation. That investigation therefore concerns the nature of nature, and is the province of the philosophy of nature.

This is the problem forged from the conclusions Kant reached regarding the domains of the concept and of freedom, that is, of nature and purpose, in the Critique of Judgment. Yet it is a problem recurrent wherever, as for example in McDowell,Footnote ² the transcendental constitution of nature – its irreducibly conceptual nature – is maintained, in part against those, such as for example Rescher,Footnote ³ who maintain a conceptual or explanatory idealism exceeded ontologically by objects irreducible to such explanations.

To begin to address these problems therefore makes an account of its first formulations, in the Naturphilosophie of Schelling, into a desideratum. The following paper therefore proposes to investigate the problems encountered by any transcendental account of nature by way of a detailed reading of Schelling's formulations of them in the Introduction to the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature. While often dismissed as ‘neomedievalising obscurantism’,Footnote ⁴ as the revenge of nature mysticism against the successes of the natural sciences, the philosophy of nature in fact asks precisely the question that the natural sciences cannot, but which they presuppose as their own fundamental orientation: what is nature? Yet Schelling's Naturphilosophie begins, as a critique of its transcendental resolution, from the question of how a concept of a nature may arise that is separate from the nature within which it does so and of which it is. In other words, it starts not with what I have elsewhere called an ‘eliminative idealism’Footnote ⁵ such as, for example, Moore, Burnyeat and Williams have influentially argued idealism to entail,Footnote ⁶ but from the very problem of conceiving thought as not arising from the nature it is of, both in the sense of having nature as its object and in that of belonging to or issuing from nature, in the manner later proposed, for example, by Peirce.Footnote ⁷

It is only, Schelling will argue, in separating thought from its initial conditions – in isolating its termini – that nature becomes a mere object, a Gegenstand for and against a subject, whether this object is, for example, conceptual or otherwise actual. Accordingly, the problem of the emergence of the separation of thought from the nature it is in and of remains insuperably primary with respect to either resolution of the nature of nature.

2. Invention and Identity

The problem I wish to address derives from the relative status of termini in transcendental arguments. A transcendental argument is a deduction of the conditions of possibility for some X, where X is anything actual.Footnote ⁸ Two stipulations should be made. First, the grounds for the satisfaction of a transcendental argument must include the complete discovery of the possibilisersFootnote ⁹ for any actuality = X, or their transcendental deduction will have no end. Second, if X means ‘anything actual’, then all objects, insofar as they are actual, can in principle be demonstrated to derive from the conclusions reached in a grounded, that is, an exhaustive, transcendental deduction. What cannot be achieved is a transcendental deduction of the transcendental deduction itself, or the stipulation of the conditions of possibility for the transcendental deduction of the source and origin of actual phenomena. The reflexive asymmetry of the transcendental deduction has the important consequence that the deduction itself is non-deducible, or only deducible once the totality of its conditions are exhausted, since it is only by ‘carrying the empirical synthesis [of conditions] as far as the unconditioned’ that reason ‘is enabled to render it absolutely complete; and the unconditioned is never to be met with in experience, but only in the idea’.Footnote ¹⁰ This means that there are no stipulated conditions of possibility for the emergence or conduct of a transcendental deduction.

These considerations are important because it is by way of such arguments that it is demonstrated that no nature in itself need exist in order that I experience. Hence the late Husserl's attempts to ‘re-Ptolemize’ the Copernican turn in accordance with experience.Footnote ¹¹ Hence also the arguments belonging to Fichte's Science of Knowledge, that ‘nature’ is only possible as a determination of the nicht-Ich by the Ich that so determines it.Footnote ¹² Hence also McDowell's argument that any ‘nature’ that can be conceived as being is a nature that only can be conceived to be, and as such, plays neither a fundamental nor even a necessary role in the explanation of the mindedness of the ‘world’ minds mentate about.Footnote ¹³ Yet since the extensions of transcendental arguments are ultimately conditioned by their termini, such that their conclusions cannot legitimately be extended beyond the immediate sphere within which they arose,Footnote ¹⁴ they limit only possible objects of judgments rather than stipulating what is not.

That is, transcendental arguments begin and end by reducing nature to experience; or, the alpha and omega of experience coincide in the elimination from mind of mind-independent nature. From this, two prospects open: the first is to accept the elimination which, since it would have the consequence that nothing that cannot be thought can exist, would result in what Kant would have called a dogmatic monism. In such a case, Schelling's judgment that ‘criticism is bound for self-annihilation just as much as dogmatism is’Footnote ¹⁵ would be correct, since there would no longer remain a thinkable that was non-intuitable, and therefore no discrimination, of the kind on which a critical philosophy relies, between legitimate and illegitimate judgments in accordance with their objects. Arguably, indeed, objects vanish altogether from such a perspective. The second prospect is to accept the identity of mind and nature. Since I agree with the relatively neglected German Idealist philosopher Schelling that ‘it is not because there is thinking that there is being but rather because there is being that there is thinking’,Footnote ¹⁶ I cannot agree with the first conclusion, so will argue for a species of the latter. Yet this much must be noted at the outset: though an Idealist, Schelling insists that being is the reason for thinking, not thinking for being. This means that any blanket dismissal of Idealism as the naïve sub-Berkeleyan caricature with which, for example, Moore and Burnyeat work their various refutations, misses its target, at least in this case. Contrary especially to Moore's account, Schelling's assertion shows that Idealism does not by definition propose the elimination of a mind-independent reality. The onus is on the anti-idealist to show that the idealist is committed to this elimination.

Before continuing, a caveat: the suggestion of an identity between mind and nature seems – but only seems – to entail a reciprocity between them, such as that, for instance, frequently ascribed to Schelling's desideratum that ‘Nature should be [soll] Mind made visible, Mind invisible nature’.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet the ‘should be’ entails – a point Hegel would make repeatedly against FichteFootnote ¹⁸ – that it is not. Reciprocity – Wechselwirkung or ‘operating by mutuality’ – amounts to a trap for identitarians regarding mind and nature, since it proposes that the two are reciprocally limiting and exhaustive of the whole. Reciprocity therefore maintains both (a) that everything in mind is in nature and (b) that everything in nature is in mind. Rejecting reciprocity without falling into dogmatic monism therefore means accepting (a) and rejecting (b), thus retaining as irreducible the asymmetry between being and thinking. Yet the onus falls upon such an account to formulate in what such an identity consists if its factors betray a priori differences. Lest the point be lost in jargon: if mind were not nature, what would it be?

There are two ways in which Kant accounts for transcendental arguments, two termini he provides for the satisfaction of their deductions. The first concerns the function of apperception, the source to which transcendental deduction leads and from which its legitimacy ultimately derives. The second, simpler in appearance, concerns the ‘manner in which concepts can relate a priori to objects’.Footnote ¹⁹ I will briefly address each in turn.

For Kant, a transcendental deduction is concluded just when a concept may be traced back to its originating faculties and the question of its legitimate usage thereby settled. Since, Kant claims, we enjoy – as a matter to be demonstrated as fact – possession of concepts that do not derive from experience, the terminus of the transcendental deduction necessary to demonstrating their source cannot terminate in the world as the object nor as the totality of objects of experience, but only in a transcendental function that unites concepts deriving from Sensibility (Sinnlichkeit) with those deriving from the Understanding (Verstand). It is the function of this function to forge experience. That is, we may say with Lyotard, that such a function is ‘subjective’ precisely and only in the sense that ‘the faculty that exercises it is the same one as invents it’.Footnote ²⁰ On this understanding, the subjectivity vital to transcendental philosophy is as much autonomic as autonomous. The generation of experience is what concepts do, even unto dreams; yet they must be apperceived, that is, grasped by a subject whose experience is thereby generated as that subject's experience.

As Kant notes, the imagination does indeed become ‘very mighty when it creates a second nature’; but it can only do so ‘from the materials that first nature provides’.Footnote ²¹ Experience is therefore forged by transcendental means only given the participation of the paradoxical non-faculty of receptivity (Rezeptivität). Receptivity is not, strictly speaking, a faculty or Vermögen, but rather a capacity ‘to be affected by objects [Gegenstände]’ and that ‘necessarily precedes all intuition of these objects’.Footnote ²² Whence the ‘necessity’ with which this capacity ‘precedes all intuition’? The suggestion is that in order that conceiving experience not become a ‘frictionless spinning in the void’, it must be grounded in an antecedent to which the function of forging experience, remains open. So because receptivity, as the one remaining non-spontaneous power amidst the economy of the faculties – but not, for all that, transparent to natureFootnote ²³ – is necessary in order to generate experience, it follows that the transcendental deduction of experience yet requires a basis or ground lying outside itself and that this ground be set prior to experience. Nevertheless, Kant insists that an argument seeking its terminus in such a nature remains transcendental: ‘I entitle’, says Kant, ‘[t]he explanation of the manner in which concepts can relate a priori to objects, transcendental’.Footnote ²⁴ I thus turn to this second element of Kant's approach to transcendental termini.

Consider the statement Kant has just made: it involves a relation anterior to the relata, as the ‘manner in which concepts can relate a priori to objects’. It is this relatedness, then, rather than the nature and mind so related, that provides the ultimate ground of the subjective function of creating experience – a function, to remind ourselves, that transcendental philosophy paradigmatically fulfils by reciprocally isolating nature from abstraction. Nevertheless, the suggestion that there is an a priori relation between concept and object is a radical one, insofar as it proposes an oblique transection of transcendental autochthony, of the subjectivity attaching to the function by which experience is generated, a fundamental irreducibility of the object to the autonomy of the function.

By this account, transcendental philosophy may sustain the relation between mind and nature without stipulating their identity. Yet because the termini of transcendental deduction remain apperception in the first case and relation in the second, the prospect of a necessary antecedent to the autochthonous generation of experience begs the question as to the termination of arguments resulting in either. In the case of generation, regardless of the actual or experienced antecedence of that generation with respect to the subject's apperception of it, a ‘first nature’ remains necessary. In the second case, that of the a priori relation of concept and object, if they are so related, this relation is primary either with respect to their separation, or with respect to both subject and object. Neither first nature nor the a priority of relation have been deduced, which, as the Preface to the Critique of Judgment would make clear, required Kant to revisit the foundations of transcendental philosophyFootnote ²⁵ and, ultimately, to abandon the non-conceptual element in the interests of a wholly relative creation, abandoning epistemic support from anything extra-subjective.Footnote ²⁶

It is at this point that Schelling's investigations in the Introduction to the first, 1797 edition of the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature enter the picture. That text contains a prolonged critical analysis of the claims of transcendental philosophy with respect to the self-sufficiency or self-grounding Schelling denies it.Footnote ²⁷ Both there and in subsequent editions of this and other of his naturphilosophischen works, Schelling attempts to understand how it is possible that mind comes to be conceived as separate from nature. At this stage, then, we note that the form ‘how is X possible?’ is of course transcendental. Yet Schelling's investigation of this transcendentally formed problem is designed critically and precisely to demonstrate that the ground of transcendental inquiry cannot be closed against its ungrounding, and to supply the reasons for this. What follows will consider only one extended passage, to which I will return throughout.

Schelling's questions are then:

1. 1. How do ideas arise [entstand] and ‘get into us’, rather than how we invent or project representations

2. 2. Granting a capacity for arbitrary generation or relative creation, what necessarily underlies this capacity such as is shared by the entire species, transhistorically?

3. 3. Under what conditions would a merely contingent [zufällig] coincidence of mind and nature be conceivable?

4. 4. What follows if the identity of mind and nature is given?

5. 5. Why identity does not entail the elimination of concept or nature, nor their reciprocal or mutual maintenance. How does nature come to be conceived as external to us?

All of these problems culminate in the single question, requiring that the first five be developed before we address it. The culminating question is:

3. What is Nature?

Let us start with the first of these Schellingian problems, which pits emergence against projection, or creation against its relativized form. Schelling writes, ‘for we require to know, not how such a Nature arose outside us, but how even the very idea [Idee] of such a Nature has got into us’. At this point Schelling is not asking ‘how does Nature as such arise?’, since we do not, he says, ‘require’ to know this in order to solve the initial problem, namely how the idea of a Nature arises if it ‘gets into us [in uns gekommen sei]’Footnote ³⁰ from elsewhere. Two things are immediately apparent. Firstly, it is not the existence of nature that is at issue, nor whether it becomes or simply is, nor whether the laws of nature are fully formed and unchanging; nor whether the world is eternal; nor whether they arise and develop. This is, however, the subject of extended passages from the Introduction to the Ideas which we shall come to below.

Secondly, that the access problem that bedevils transcendental philosophy and epistemology is inverted. The access problem is this: to what have we access if the form under which all representation is for us is insuperable? If, that is, no access-instance, since it would be our access-instance, can be independent of our makings, doings or expressings, then this must also apply to the objects we access – that we represent – since if it did not, this would disqualify the instance as one of access. While such a problem may be resolved by retreating ever further (or ever higher) into the orders of reference within a domain constituted as without an outside, this postpones, rather than resolves, the issue. For this reason, the access problem is ultimately a problem of how an ontology may be derived from an order of reference that is not ultimate but infinitely nested.Footnote ³¹ The Schellingian inversion takes place on a twofold basis: firstly, on that of an idea that does not arise from us but rather accesses ‘us’; whatever the idea might be it does not, that is, originate in us – mind, therefore, is only part of the idea's trajectory. Nor do we yet know what this ‘us’ might be. What we do know is that it is an ‘us’ rather than an ‘I’. We learn only later in our passage that the basis of the ‘us’ is Geschlecht – species, kind or ‘race’ in the sense of ‘human race’ and which delivers the ideation problem to the domain of nature, rather than delivering the domain of nature from the problem of ideation, which is the standard transcendental route.

The inversion of the access problem from ‘how can I know nature’ to ‘how does the idea of nature enter our species’ is therefore naturalistic in that it does not presuppose conceptual mastery of what precedes it. Schelling notes that nature grips or even ‘conceives’ (begriffen) those who investigate it.Footnote ³² The question therefore of the concept or Begriff by which nature in turn is grasped or conceived turns on the capacity of a part to conceive the whole – that is, to achieve for the concept an extension greater than that whole. The two routes by which this is possible are (1) reduction of the conceived to the content of the concept, and (2) maintaining the asymmetry between nature and its concept without the assumption of the limitation of the latter thereby.

A nature that produced a thought incapable of exceeding its point of emergence, a dead end, would not be a nature capable of the concept of nature, of the ‘universe in the universe’ as Schelling says elsewhere.Footnote ³³ Accordingly, the concept is not doomed by nature to reduction to the neuroanatomical event from which it emerges, or to limitation by just one side of the separations that produce it – object from intuition, cause from effect, the philosopher from herself.Footnote ³⁴ The concept must therefore conceive, grasp or contain the separations that inform it, including, ultimately, the difference separating the concept from nature.

The inversion of the access problem has the following ultimate consequence: it pits a naturalistic creation against the Kantian representation or Vorstellung. The action, that is, of ‘arbitrarily generating’ a representation disconnected not only from a nature outside me but also arising only within me, may have as its positive element the confident outlook of a nature to be produced in the bitter triumph of merely relative creation. But it is a production that can neither be accounted for from reality nor in terms of a reality finally made. The latter remains a desideratum and as such, acknowledges from the outset that it neither is nor can be an actuality issuing from the transcendental except as such a desideratum. This is why Fichte is correct to argue that all transcendental arguments issue ultimately in practical problems.

With this, we move to the second of Schelling's questions. The question does not concern a representation of nature such as we have arbitrarily generated, ‘but how and why it originally and necessarily underlies everything that our species [Geschlecht] has ever thought about Nature’.Footnote ³⁵ Granting that the capacity for ‘arbitrary’, i.e. non-necessary, generation exists, transcendental philosophy itself demands that we ask what necessarily underlies this capacity for invention. Insofar as anything necessary does underlie it, the arbitrary is its product; insofar as it does not, then whatever underlies representation has no relation whatever to representations, which therefore become arbitrary in the strong sense, i.e. that there is no reason for the arbitrary production of representations. Since this is precisely, as we have seen, what transcendental arguments set out to disprove, by arguing that there is an a priori relation between concept and object, some necessary basis, of whatever nature, is in fact assumed. This being the case, the question ‘what is its nature?’ leads to the following problem: either the necessity is a necessity that attaches simply to the function of forging experience, which does not prove but reiterates the claim that there are unmotivated productions of representations. Or the necessity is such as to withdraw the authority for their production from spontaneity – the function of forging experience – and to place it, as Schelling recommends, in the species. Accordingly, the thesis here is that it is in the nature of the species to generate representations, via the introduction of ideas of the same nature as those species into their members qua members of a species.

Summing up so far, ideas access species susceptible to them, and that species is one: nature. It is within this one species that the question underlying the difference between arbitrary and necessary generation arises, namely, the question of generation itself. Amongst the aims of the ‘Introduction’ to the Ideas is that ‘philosophy become genetic’.Footnote ³⁶ Accordingly, a philosophy must demonstrate itself in ‘arising before our eyes’ and be tested according to its capacity for ‘development’.Footnote ³⁷ The question Schelling poses to the transcendental concept of nature is twofold: firstly, what ‘reality’ belongs to its ‘concept of nature’Footnote ³⁸ and secondly, from what does it derive, on which the answer to the former depends.

Since Schelling cannot eliminate reality from the transcendental concept of nature without undermining his argument, some reality must attach to it. It is the reality of reflection, which rests in turn on the ‘activity of separation [zertrennendes Geschäft]’ proper to it.Footnote ³⁹ Such separation arises from the doubt that the nature I grasp and that grasps me is nature in itself or merely for me; but this doubt is in turn parasitic upon the activity of reflection from which it issues. While what reflection separates is conceptual content – concept from thing, or intuition from object – separation is an activity disturbing an ‘equilibrium of forces’ original only with respect to the reflection that disturbs it. The theory of action underwriting the withdrawal of force from acting in a world whose forces in turn we feelFootnote ⁴⁰ rests in turn upon dynamics as the ‘grounding science’ of Naturphilosophie.Footnote ⁴¹ At its root, therefore, is the community of forces necessary in order that there be separation at all and, since no force is possible that is not limited by another,Footnote ⁴² such separation can only be for reflection. The reflective separation of mind from nature is therefore actual precisely insofar as it effects a redistribution of forces affected by dynamic activity in a common nature.

These considerations give rise to the third of Schelling's problems, namely, how are arbitrary or ‘chance coincidences’ conceivable? Since, as we have seen, these conditions belong not to spontaneity in isolation from nature, but to a production Schelling must claim to be natural, this question concerns how nature is capable of arbitrary production. Even if reflective production is ‘arbitrary generation’ only for itself, that is, to the extent that it acknowledges no means to ‘borrow its own reality from actuality’,Footnote ⁴³ surely this only defers resolving the problem of natural arbitrariness on the basis of epistemic limitation? It should be noted that at no point does Schelling dismiss the reality of reflective separation or its products. He only notes the energetic cost of its production. We may say therefore that production is demonstrably arbitrary to the extent that it becomes incapable of development, stalling upon its encounter with the separation at its root. The test of arbitrariness therefore is the reality attaching to its consequences.

It should be noted, however, that Schelling is not attempting to demonstrate natural arbitrariness but rather to reject the assumption that rests on it, namely, that coincidence is conceivable. The specific ‘coincidence’ Schelling problematizes is that of nature and mind. To what extent is such a coincidence conceivable as arbitrary? Firstly, we must note that the passage does not demonstrate that the coincidence occurs, nor even stipulate how it might occur. It aims rather to demonstrate that such a coincidence remains inconceivable if it is brought about by some ‘third intermediary’. Kant gives us an example of such a third in the concept of relation that underlies the coincidence of nature and mind without causing it. Coincidence, on this view, remains coincidence solely and exclusively if the coincident elements remain (a) capable of non-coincidence such that the bond between them is not one that necessitates; and (b) separable therefore from the bond that unites them.

In his excellent book All or Nothing,Footnote ⁴⁴ Paul W. Franks argues that German Idealism was motivated to respond to the sceptical challenges it encountered from neo-Humean and other sources. Franks describes the form these challenges take as the Agrippan TrilemmaFootnote ⁴⁵: to the question ‘Why X?’ all answers will either (a) lack justification; (b) supply a justification that retriggers the Why-question rather than resolving it, creating a regress, or (c) presuppose what they seek to establish. Thus, when Hume seeks to demonstrate the inconclusiveness of relying on reason to explain nature, he has Philo ask ‘What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought that we must make it the model of the whole universe?’Footnote ⁴⁶ Philo's question seeks to demonstrate, contrary to Schelling's account, that there is no reason to assume what is true of the part to be true of the whole. The coincidence, in other words, between thought and the universe, is absolute in the sense of pure mere coincidence. It renders any attempt to argue a necessity, for instance, between the causal patterns involved in the production of thought and those involved in the production of other events or entities, (a) unjustified; (b) retriggers the why question (a); and (c) is regressive. On this basis, no demonstration of coincidence as other than absolute could succeed. The only positive conclusion, therefore, is the impotence of reason on the cosmic scale.

Schelling's strategy, however, is to argue not from coincidence, since, as we have seen, coincidence presupposes a separation the concept is not required to remain on one side of. Rather, he argues from the necessity attaching to the production of thought that Philo's opening gambit itself acknowledges: given that such a coincidence occurs – that thought and nature coadvene, so to speak – then no explanation can satisfy the phenomenon unless it is necessitated not at the level of content, but rather of event, by the nature that underlies its possibility. To this extent, Schelling argues in strict transcendental mode, asking after the conditions of possibility attaching to the coincidence of thought and nature.

However, the passage goes on to stipulate the requirements for satisfying the question: nature is nature when and only when ‘she herself, necessarily and originally […] not only express[es], but even realize[s], the laws of our mind’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Nature is nature only if it is capable of realizing and expressing the laws of mind. The passage does not state the conditions under which this might occur, since it articulates as fundamental a condition that is not a terminus to a deduction, but rather opens the conditions attaching to the laws of mind to a naturalism whose basis is given neither in experience nor in ‘pure thought’. The cost, in other words, of the absolutisation of coincidence is the abolition of absolute termini, and therefore of a spontaneity that can be restricted to a single domain of being: if there is spontaneity at all, it belongs to all nature.

What we do learn, however, is that a nature for which mind is not possible is not a nature at all. It does not follow from this that there could be no nature that did not produce mind, but only that, if mind exists, the nature it considers could not be nature if it were considered incapable of mindedness. As he writes in the System of Transcendental Idealism, ‘the concept of nature does not entail that there must also be an intelligence that is aware of it. Nature, it seems, would exist, even if there were nothing that was aware of it’. Footnote ⁴⁸ In consequence, the nature of the problem changes from ‘what is the nature of mind’ to ‘how does intelligence come to be added to nature, or how does nature come to be presented?’ (SW III, 345; System 5).

The nature that produces mind belongs at once to the nature of species and to that of ideas that access species. Accordingly, if the identity is given – question four – what follows? Firstly, that nature philosophizes, so to the extent that idea and nature are separated, this must be a derivative rather than an original condition. If minds conceive themselves to be other than nature, this too must be a product of natural history, philosophy as ‘a discipline of errant reason’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Secondly, insofar as nature is capable of the idea, no thought is not a natural occurrence. Thirdly, insofar as there is thought of whatever kind, because it obtains in one domain of being, it cannot be impossible that it obtains also in others. Fourthly, just as we cannot lay claim to the thesis that anything capable of arbitrariness is therefore universally arbitrary, nor can we claim that the identity of thought and nature is incapable of their dichotomy: nature must be equally capable both of their identity and their dichotomy.

Our penultimate Schellingian problem therefore concerns the nature of identity, and its consequences as regards the apparent equivalence or non-decidability of unity over dichotomy, or necessity over arbitrariness. When we consider thought and nature as coincident, and seek reasons for their identity as advening consequently upon their separate natures, such reasons remain arbitrary additions that demand explanation rather than offering any, since such a conception of identity presupposes what it seeks to explain. Moreover, there is something of a paradox in the claim that X and Y are identical, since if they were, then either X is not X but Y, or Y is not Y but X.

On the contrary view, that identity is antecedent to particulars, it can never be the case that particulars are identical one to another. In fact, as Schelling writes in Presentation of my System of Philosophy (1801), ‘Everything that is, is absolute identity itself’.Footnote ⁵⁰ On the one hand this affirms a univocal account of identity, that is, to the extent that everything is, it is identity; on the other, it is in that everything is that it is, i.e. cannot not be, identity itself. We may say that for Schelling therefore identity attaches to being rather than to beings or that unity is antecedent to duplicity. In other words, identity differentiates rather than integrates.Footnote ⁵¹

As a provisional answer, therefore, to the question posed at the head of this section we may say that nature is precisely the identity that dichotomizes, or that self-differentiates into the totality of entities, the universe.

We have seen that opening transcendental inquiries to termini sequestered in particular domains of being remains inconsistent unless it is absolutised, so that such a transcendental philosopher could claim that ‘there is being because there is thinking’ or ‘what being there is is thought-being’. We have not yet seen that nature supplies other termini, but that it replaces one set of terms with a ground that recedes from epistemic or transcendental access precisely where thought and nature separate. What this means is that whatever grounds is not merely logically nor chronologically prior to what is grounded, but rather that there is always an ontogenetic antecedent for any product or event that accesses us, despite our inability to recover it. This is what nature is for German Idealism: at once unlimited production and its ruins, the World-Phoenix, as Kant and Carlyle have it,Footnote ⁵² antecedent to the production of thought it necessitates and accordingly unlimitable save through all its possible productions and their source. As to these termini ad quo or ad quem, these limits or sources can never be recovered by a thought that remains, after all, an additional product of these same sources. Therefore the terminus of transcendental philosophy is the philosophy of nature precisely because the latter alone can demonstrate there is no terminus that is not conditioned by a separation antecedent to it.

4. The Universe in the Universe

Having examined the five questions Schelling poses regarding the relation between nature and the concept, we turn finally to the character and function of the concept of nature Schelling recommends. If conception is consequent upon division, how is nature capable of a concept of the divisions antecedent to its emergence – that is, of a ‘natural history of mind’?Footnote ⁵⁴

It is difficult to conceive how a local product, actual as such, may enjoy an extension greater than its initial locus if the locus – the point of ‘coincidence’ or of separation between mind and nature – is explanatorily sufficient. A naturalism pursuant of neurophysiological reduction therefore could have no account of the concept as such but only its cause, leaving the concept beyond nature's capacities altogether if it consists in anything other than an echo of its cause. Or, if consistent, a naturalism of the concept would seem to condemn it to an extensionlessness in a manner not even Descartes envisaged for thought, making the concept a point insuperably less than its productive context, the creation within which it figures.

While the image of the point-concept retains the asymmetry necessary to overturning eliminative idealism, it simultaneously functions as the limit of nature, its nec plus ultra, in that nature does not continue after, but only up to, this point. Yet it is precisely what a concept is that it conceives something. The problematics of nature and history – which together exhaust ‘applied philosophy’Footnote ⁵⁵, Schelling tells us – alter the conception of nature, and the concept of the concept, in accordance with dynamics, the ‘basic science [Grundwissenschaft]’ of the philosophy of nature.Footnote ⁵⁶ While the asymmetry of nature and the concept remains, or while the separation at the latter's root remains actual, the history of a concept is always catching up with the concept from which natural-historical inquiry began and which issues from that inquiry. It is precisely in that conceiving has its history in the separation from the nature that conceived it to begin with that the concept acquires an extension that, while necessarily insufficient to recover its antecedents, is also additional to them, that is genuinely consequent upon them. Since, moreover, the concept begins its career neither arbitrarily in mind alone nor coincidentally between mind and nature, but asymmetrically in the nature from which it issues, the concept's history already conceives the separations that form it. The concept's extension, therefore, is always greater than consciousness of it, and what it conceives is its own nature, that is, the nature from which it issues. Accordingly, Schelling will later consider the concept's extension to be subject to ‘powers’ as instancing its basic recursive function.

It is for this reason that Schelling gives, as the test of a concept, not adequacy to a thing, but operative range, that is, whether it ‘admits of development’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Only insofar as it does so does it exceed antecedence just as the idea – the concept of the concept – enjoys only part of its career in mind.Footnote ⁵⁸ Indeed, Schelling is at pains to stipulate that concepts do not have prior limits, and defines the idea therefore as the ‘infinite’ or ‘unlimited concept’ which is itself ‘the concept of the universe’.Footnote ⁵⁹

The philosophy of nature does not propose to eliminate nature or concept but, in seeking a concept of nature capable of the concept, changes the form in which nature's antecedence is thought into the movements proper to the conceiving operative in nature. A concept is not a thing, an object, nor an abstract container, but a form of movement overcoming its beginning in pursuit of the history of which it is consequent.

German Idealism therefore confronts philosophy both with the insuperability of the philosophy of nature, and with the necessity of its application to mind. A consequent outcome of such a programme would consist therefore in the demonstration of the forms in which nature casts the thinking it produces, a demonstration that cannot acquire the terminus Kant demanded transcendental philosophy satisfy precisely because for it, what precedes mind is the nature that is its own, nonrecoverable history. If the philosophy of nature were inapplicable to ideation of all sorts, it would not be a philosophy of nature, but rather of something incapable of mindedness. I take it no naturalist would wish to be in such a position.