Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
German Romantic and Idealist Accounts of Nature and Their Legacy
In this book I give an account of the development of ideas about nature from Early German Romanticism into the philosophies of nature of Schelling and Hegel. I explain how the project of philosophy of nature took shape and made sense in the post-Kantian context. I also show how ideas of nature were important to the philosophical and literary projects of the Early German Romantics, with attention to Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis and Friedrich Hölderlin. And I explore the contemporary relevance of these approaches to nature in terms of environmental ethics, debates about naturalism, and the politics of gender, race and colonialism.
In this first chapter, I give an overall account of my interpretation of Romantic and Idealist views on nature. The Romantics and Idealists, I argue, make metaphysical claims about nature – namely, under different versions, that it is a unified, self-organising whole. Schlegel and Novalis stress how nature's unity cannot entirely be captured by our understanding; Hölderlin stresses nature's self-dividing unity; Schelling stresses the polar forces through which nature organises itself into an ordered whole, and that nature is both creative and intelligible to us; and Hegel stresses the rationality with which nature organises itself.
Early German Romantic and Idealist ideas of nature originated during the period of intellectual ferment in German-speaking philosophy, which dated from 1781 to 1806 (see Förster 2012). But the ideas about nature which began to emerge then continued to be worked out over subsequent decades by Schelling, Hegel and others, along with their broader philosophical positions. Only over the last forty or so years have English-speaking philosophers come to appreciate the interest of these positions. But one aspect of German Romantic and Idealist thought which has received relatively little recent attention is their views of nature. Hegel and Schelling initiated and practised 'philosophy of nature'. This project fell into disfavour with philosophers and scientists around the mid-nineteenth century and, as Terry Pinkard bluntly says of Hegel's version in particular, 'It fell into ... disrepute ... after his death and has rarely been looked at since by anyone other than dedicated Hegel scholars' (2000: 562–63). This is unfortunate: even though philosophy of nature is probably not a project that any philosopher today can readily take up directly, it still offers us much to think about.
Philosophy of nature has two key aspects. First, in metaphysics, philosophers of nature hold that nature is not reducible to the sum total of the interactions amongst bits of matter in motion. Rather, they hold, nature is at a more fundamental level self-organising, dynamic, creative, vital, organic and/or a living whole (although different philosophers emphasise some of these qualities more than or instead of others). Second, in epistemology, philosophers of nature take it that insofar as nature has this vital, self-organising or holistic dimension, it must be understood using tools proper to philosophy as well as those of empirical science. For instance, for Hegel and Schelling a priori reason is needed if we are to grasp nature as a rationally interconnected whole. But whatever exactly philosophy's methods are taken to be, they are taken to differ from those of empirical science in ways that suit them for comprehending nature as more than merely a mechanical aggregate. To give a non a prioristic example, for Bergson the relevant philosophical method is intuition (Bergson [1907] 1960).
Philosophy of nature was initially articulated by Schelling in the 1790s, and Hegel pursued it into the 1820s. After gaining some popularity in the first half of the nineteenth century, the approach went into sharp decline with the later-century rise of harder naturalist and materialist approaches to nature. But philosophy of nature was only part of a wider family of approaches of nature within which we can include Early German Romantic ideas. As Novalis takes it, empirical scientific findings need to be integrated into a whole, but this can only ever be a whole-in-progress, never completed. What ought to guide our integrative efforts, for Novalis, is an aesthetic intuition into nature's unity, an intuition to which philosophical and conceptual, discursive knowledge can never be entirely adequate. Still, Schelling's and Hegel's philosophical approach and the Romantics' more aesthetic one are not sharply opposed. Philosophical systematising can be guided by aesthetic intuition – as Schelling thinks at times – or one may hold that philosophising must assume an aesthetic form – as Schlegel thinks at times. Or one might believe that our basic intuition into nature's unity is both aesthetic and philosophical at once, depending how one understands intuition. Thus, Romanticism and Idealism approach nature in a continuum of overlapping ways.
What possible contemporary relevance could such Idealist and Romantic ideas have? First, these ideas speak to issues presented by environmental crisis. Is nature an overarching whole, and, if so, are human beings merely dependent parts of this whole along with everything else, or do human agents in some way 'stand out' from this whole in ways that make for human/nature disharmony? Romantic and Idealist thinkers offer their own answers to such questions. Second, these ideas of nature can prompt us to rethink what we understand by naturalism, as I'll elaborate below. Third, these thinkers provide distinctive accounts of how human freedom is both located within nature and yet remains freedom in a strong sense, as a power of spontaneous self-determination: for self-determining human agency realises to a higher level the same power of self-organisation already found within non-human nature.
Fourth, engaging with Romantic and Idealist views of nature can help us to reflect upon and re-assess what we understand by nature in the first place. We can helpfully put these views in contrast to the distinction between two senses of 'nature' which is made, following David Hume ([1739] 1978: III.i.ii: 474), by John Stuart Mill in his essay Nature (1874: 8–9). In one sense, Mill says, nature means everything that exists, all of it subject to natural laws, there being no supernatural agencies such as the Christian God or supernatural events such as miracles. That is, nature just means reality. In another sense, Mill says, nature means not everything but, more narrowly, everything non-artificial: everything that has not been produced, manufactured or transformed by voluntary, intentional human agency. For Mill, we can speak of nature in this second sense without having to presume that human volitions, intentions and actions really 'stand out' metaphysically from the domain of nature, such that what gets shaped by the human mind thereby gets put into a different metaphysical class than it was in before. On the contrary, Mill is a naturalist: he sees the human mind as part of the natural world in sense one. We do not have any mysterious or 'spooky' powers or faculties that cannot be explained, in principle, by the empirical sciences. Neither the mental nor the artificial are 'supernatural' vis-à-vis physical or non-artificial things; rather, the natural/artificial distinction under nature's second sense arises within reality; that is, nature's first sense.
It is in Mill's second sense of nature that we might see the countryside as particularly natural (see Soper 1995: 18). Yet the UK countryside – and pretty much the entire world – bears the stamp of human agency. For some, therefore, there is no more nature. But we should not overhastily assimilate all the things and places that bear humanity's stamp – say, putting plastics factories and sheep farms on a level. We can distinguish degrees of naturalness depending on how far human agency is responsible for the character of an entity – partially, totally, only marginally and superficially, and more.
Hegel might at first seem to be concerned with nature in Mill's second sense – the non-artificial (or, at least, relatively non-artificial). This is despite Hegel's overall philosophical outlook differing hugely from Mill's. Hegel's mature system as distilled in his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences has three parts: Logic, Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Mind. The latter concerns the human mind and the products of intentional, mindful human activity, including social and political institutions, belief-systems, and works of art and culture. Conversely, the philosophy of nature deals with the processes and items studied by the natural sciences of physics, chemistry and biology. And the Logic deals with general metaphysical principles and structures – such as becoming, difference, and causality – which obtain in different concrete forms in both nature and mind. Apparently then, 'nature' in Hegel's Philosophy of Nature refers not to everything but to the particular region of the world which, unlike the human mind's products, is non-artificial, all its components being as they are independently of any exercises of human agency.
For Hegel, though, unlike Mill, this difference between the domains of nature and mind is metaphysical, for in Hegel's view the human mind really does, to an extent, 'stand out' from nature. Admittedly his statements on this seem inconsistent: 'mind has for its presupposition nature' (EM §381, 8), yet mind 'differentiates itself [sich unterscheidet] from nature' (§381A, 11). Hegel seems to say both that the mind is in and of nature and that it breaks from nature. To understand this, we need to consider the metaphysical dimension of nature on his account. For Hegel, nature is organised by 'the idea' – the rational, organised structure of basic metaphysical principles that orders reality as a whole and is described in his Logic. But in nature, the idea is 'outside itself', external to itself – partially lost in the mass of material particulars: 'In nature ... the idea is in the form of externalisation [Entäußerung]' (EL §18R, 42). Consequently, nature has a material aspect and a rational or 'ideal' aspect. In some natural items, the idea is more lost in the details, while in others it does more to organise those materials, above all in living organisms, where the function and character of each part is shaped by its place in the whole system. When a further step occurs and the 'idea' comes to organise materiality more pervasively, we enter the realm of mind. Mind thus piggybacks on living organism and so arises within some organisms, specifically human ones. Leaving aside exactly what it means for the idea to organise materials such that mind arises and takes successive forms, we can now see how Hegel's apparently conflicting statements on nature and mind fit together. Mind stands out from nature insofar as it is constituted by a higher level of organisation of materials by idea, higher than any level found within nature. But mind is also within nature, both because mind takes to a higher level the same organisation of materials by idea which occurs to varying degrees in nature, and because mind thereby realises more fully what was already occurring in nature.
For Hegel, nature is structured by the idea; for Mill, nature in sense one contains nothing supernatural, hence presumably, one might think, no such metaphysical structuring principles as the idea. Mill's position is often said to be 'naturalistic', so we might wonder whether Hegel rejects 'naturalism'. But this depends what naturalism means, and here, although most contemporary philosophers endorse naturalism, there is little consensus. In this book, I adopt a cluster-based view, that the cluster naturalism has various strands and one can be more or less naturalist depending on how many of these strands one embraces and to what degree. One strand of naturalism is the belief that philosophy ought to be continuous with the empirical natural sciences. Another is the rejection of supernatural powers and often, as part of this, of any causes other than efficient ones. A third strand is the treatment of the human mind and its powers as just one amongst all the other parts of nature. On all these, Hegel takes a middle position between the two extremes of full-blown anti-naturalism and 'hard naturalism' (as I'll call it, following Sebastian Gardner). He thinks that philosophy must learn from the empirical natural sciences but also subject their findings to a priori reconstruction; he admits formal and final causes, but he regards them as being completely intelligible by reason, and he holds, as we saw above, that mental powers are both continuous with and set apart from natural powers.
For Hegel, then, mind emerges out of nature as mind's particular powers and features do not reduce to anything found at preceding levels of nature. This view makes sense within the context of Hegel's hierarchical account of nature, according to which its main gradations are the mechanical, physical and organic levels and, within the organic level, those of the earth, plant and animal life. Those stages are ranked hierarchically by how far they involve the idea organising matter: the more organisation, the higher a level of nature ranks in the progression. Some might deny that this position is naturalistic at all, since it involves belief in a metaphysics of organising form and the idea. But one might reply that it is naturalistic insofar as it treats the mind as arising out of nature in stages and in ways that can be fully rationally explained (where the explanations of how each stage of mind arises are provided in Hegel's Philosophy of Mind). A cluster picture of naturalism allows us to say that Hegel's view of mind and nature is naturalistic to a degree, although not as much as many self-professed naturalists would want.
Admittedly, Hegel's metaphysics of the idea is at odds with hard naturalism: he thinks that the world is structured by 'substance-kinds' (Stern 1990) and that these are manifestations of 'the idea' as the overall system of organising structures. Further, for Hegel, the idea is a rational system in that each structure within it resolves tensions or conflicts within its lower-level structures – the idea, like nature, is hierarchically configured. To this extent, for Hegel, the world is rational in itself, which is what makes it capable of being understood by us using our reason. Furthermore, the idea organises itself rationally in that each of its stages resolves tensions within preceding ones, and this is so independently of and prior to any rational thinking about the world in which we, minded beings, may engage. Or, at least, such are Hegel's views if we interpret him 'metaphysically' (as do such Hegel interpreters as Stern, Kreines, Houlgate, Beiser and others). That said, the non-metaphysical interpretations of Pippin and Pinkard especially are very popular. But I lean towards a metaphysical reading, as offering the best way to make sense of Hegel's approach to nature.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Nature, Ethics and Gender in German Romanticism and Idealism"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Alison Stone.
Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
