The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Nevertheless, the persistence of Naturphilosophie throughout the nineteenth century and in some twentieth-century figures is only one qualifying factor in the broader historical picture: that of its long-term decline as a living research program. This decline might suggest that the ideas of philosophers of nature can only hold historical interest for us today, and can no longer be taken seriously. That verdict would be premature. The last 20 years have witnessed significant regrowth of interest in Naturphilosophie, prompted especially by the spread of environmental problems.

  Plausibly, one source of these problems is that we moderns are prone to adopt a mistaken image of ourselves as separate from, rather than embedded in and dependent upon, nature. Plausibly, too, we have regularly failed to appreciate the ways in which nature is an interconnected whole, such that events affecting one part of it (for example, emissions of chemicals into the atmosphere in one place) have ramifications for others (when these chemicals react with atmospheric components and climatic patterns to generate acid rain in another place). Yet philosophers of nature in their various ways regard nature as an interconnected whole: as one organism or cosmos (Schelling, Humboldt) or as united in its rationality or will or élan vital (Hegel, Schopenhauer, Bergson). In their several ways, too, these philosophers regard human beings as an outgrowth of nature: as a realization of self-organizing or rational nature, or a manifestation of the omnipresent will.

  Philosophy of nature can thus give us an improved appreciation both of how nature is an interconnected whole and of the dependent place that we occupy within this whole—an appreciation that can help to motivate us to practice more environmentally sustainable ways of life. Old as many of the principal writings in the tradition of philosophy of nature are, then, they still address contemporary problems. This makes it important for us to revisit and revitalize the tradition of Naturphilosophie in the present day.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Beiser, Frederick, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2002).

  Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1960).

  Bowie, Andrew, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993).

  Cahan, David, “Helmholtz and the Civilizing Power of Science,” in Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. David Cahan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).

  Fichte, J. G., The Science of Knowledge, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

  Fichte, J. G., The Vocation of Man, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).

  Fichte, J. G., Foundations of Natural Right, trans. Michael Baur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

  Fichte, J. G., and Schelling, F. W. J., The Philosophical Rupture Between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and Correspondence, trans. Michael G. Vater and David W. Wood (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012).

  Gardner, Sebastian, “Idealism and Naturalism in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Alison Stone (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).

  Gödde, Günter, “The Unconscious in the German Philosophy and Psychology of the Nineteenth Century,” in The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Alison Stone (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).

  Goethe, J. W. von, Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

  Hegel, G. W. F., Philosophy of Nature, trans. M. J. Petry, 3 vols. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970).

  Heidelberger, Michael, “Force, Law, and Experiment: The Evolution of Helmholtz’s Philosophy of Science,” in Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. David Cahan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).

  Humboldt, Alexander von, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, trans. E. C. Otté, modern reprint of the 1849 edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

  Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929).

  Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).

  Kuhn, Thomas, “Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery,” in Critical Problems in the History of Science, ed. Marshall Clagett (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957).

  Liebig, Justus von, Reden und Abhandlungen (Heidelberg: Winter, 1874).

  Marquard, Odo, Transzendentaler Idealismus, Romantische Naturphilosophie, Psychoanalyse (Köln: Dinter, 1987).

  Millán-Zaibert, Elizabeth, “Saving Nature from Vicious Empiricism: Alexander von Humboldt’s ‘Romantic’ Science,” in Das neue Licht der Romantik, ed. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert and Bärbel Frischmann (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009).

  Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon, trans. David W. Wood (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007).

  Richards, Robert J., The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

  Rowlinson, J. S., “Le Sage’s Essai de chymie méchanique,” in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 57: 1 (2003): 35–45.

  Schelling, F. W. J., Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

  Schelling, F. W. J., Von der Weltseele—Eine Hypothese der Höhern Physik zur Erklärung des Allgemeinen Organismus, ed. Jörg Jantzen with Thomas Kisser, in Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe Reihe 1: Werke, vol. 6 (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2000), pp. 62–433.

  Schelling, F. W. J., First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith R. Petersen (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004).

  Schelling, F. W. J., System of Philosophy in General and of the Philosophy of Nature in Particular, in Idealism and the Endgame of Theory, ed. Dale Snow (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994).

  Schleiden, Matthias Jakob, Schellings und Hegels Verhältnis zur Naturwissenschaft, ed. Olaf Breidbach (Weinheim: VCH Acta Humaniora, 1988).

  Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols., trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966).

  Schopenhauer, Arthur, On the Will in Nature, in Two Essays, trans. Mme. Karl Hillebrand (London: Bell & Sons, 1889).

  * * *

  1 For instance, the early German Romantic philosopher-poet Novalis worked on an encyclopedia, the so-called Allgemeine Brouillon, mapping the parallels between different natural and mental phenomena. Composed in 1798–9, this draft is translated as Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon by David W. Wood (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007). A major influence on many early contributors to Naturphilosophie was Goethe: Goethe championed empirical investigation of nature, yet he held that we can directly observe the fundamental shaping forms and structures—the Urphänomene—within natural appearances. See his Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 307.

  2 Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797), trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 172. All quotations are from standard English translations when available, sometimes amended without special notice in light of the German originals.

  3 This formulation may suggest that philosophy of nature is inherently opposed to naturalism, if naturalism is defined as the view that the methods of philosophical inquiry should be continuous with those of the empirical sciences. But it all depends on how “continuity” is interpreted. For Schelling and Hegel, philosophers of nature should use a priori reasoning, but it can be continuous with empirical inquiry in the sense that the two can work together.

  4 Although Schelling continued to write on nature
after 1801, he did so within the new framework of his identity-philosophy (from which he later moved away). I regard his 1790s works as giving his “classic” formulations of the project of philosophy of nature, its initial aims and scope.

  5 See Schelling, Ideas, p. 269.

  6 Le Sage wrote a prize-winning 1758 Essai de chymie méchanique, to which Schelling refers, as to the 1788 essay De l’origine des forces magnétique by le Sage’s disciple Pierre Prévost. See Schelling, Ideas, book II, ch. 3.

  7 See Rowlinson, J. S., “Le Sage’s Essai de chymie méchanique,” in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 57: 1 (2003), pp. 35–45.

  8 Schelling, Ideas, p. 161.

  9 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788), trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 79; Ak. vol. 5, p. 94. ‘Ak’ refers to the Akademie edition pagination corresponding to that of the translations cited from the Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgment.

  10 Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790/93), trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), pp. 14–15; Ak. vol. 5, pp. 175–6).

  11 Schelling, Ideas, p. 36.

  12 See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87), trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), p. 534, A645/B673.

  13 See Fichte, The Science of Knowledge (1794), trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), §1.

  14 Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right (1796–7), trans. Michael Baur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 18.

  15 Foundations of Natural Right, p. 20.

  16 Fichte, The Vocation of Man (1800), trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 83.

  17 Fichte and Schelling (1800–2), The Philosophical Rupture Between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and Correspondence, trans. Michael G. Vater and David W. Wood (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), p. 64.

  18 “The first presupposition of all knowledge is that the knower and that which is known are the same”; Schelling, System of Philosophy in General and of the Philosophy of Nature in Particular (1804), in Idealism and the Endgame of Theory, ed. Dale Snow (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 141.

  19 Schelling, Ideas, p. 36.

  20 Schelling, Ideas, pp. 41–2.

  21 Schelling, Ideas, p. 221.

  22 Schelling, Ideas, pp. 176–7.

  23 Schelling, Ideas, p. 30.

  24 In the Critique of Judgment, Kant argued that organisms must be understood not exclusively mechanistically but as if they were purposive wholes, in which the internal purpose (or plan or principle) of the whole, which specifies its functions, explains why all its parts arise and interconnect as they do. He says that this purpose must be thought of as analogous to a concept (Begriff), yet cannot really be a concept because natural things do not have intentions (Kant, Critique of Judgment, pp. 263–4, Ak. vol. 5, pp. 383–4). Schelling goes further: “Every organic product carries the ground of its existence in itself…Thus a concept lies at the basis of every organization, for where there is a necessary relation of the whole to the part and of the part to the whole, there is concept. But this concept lives in the organization itself…[which] organizes itself, unlike an art-work” (Ideas, p. 31). But whereas for Kant we cannot know whether or not organisms really are self-organizing, for Schelling organisms, including the organism of the whole of nature, really organize themselves, and we can know this. Although they do not organize themselves intentionally, it is concepts that direct their organization: that is, non-material plans.

  25 Schelling, First Outline (1799), trans. Keith R. Petersen (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004), p. 32.

  26 Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 36.

  27 Schelling, First Outline, p. 141.

  28 Schelling, First Outline, pp. 198–9.

  29 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature (1830), trans. M. J. Petry, 3 vols. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970), §246A; vol. 1, p. 201. In references to Hegel, paragraph number (when applicable) precedes volume and page number; A indicates an addition, R a remark.

  30 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, vol. 1, p. 193.

  31 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §246A; vol. 1, p. 202.

  32 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §251; vol. 1, p. 216.

  33 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §252; vol. 1, p. 217.

  34 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §249R; vol. 1, p. 212.

  35 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §251; vol. 1, p. 216.

  36 Schopenhauer, On the Will in Nature, in Two Essays, trans. Mme. Karl Hillebrand (London: Bell & Sons, 1889), p. 216.

  37 Schopenhauer, On the Will in Nature, p. 219.

  38 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1966), vol. 1, p. 123.

  39 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, pp. 117–19.

  40 Schopenhauer, On the Will in Nature, p. 258.

  41 Odo Marquard, quoted in Günter Gödde, “The Unconscious in the German Philosophy and Psychology of the Nineteenth Century,” in The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Alison Stone (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), p. 209. The source of the quotation is Marquard, Transzendentaler Idealismus, Romantische Naturphilosophie, Psychoanalyse (Köln: Dinter, 1987), p. 199.

  42 Kuhn, “Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery,” in Critical Problems in the History of Science, ed. Marshall Clagett (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957).

  43 See David Cahan, “Helmholtz and the Civilizing Power of Science,” in Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. David Cahan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 564–5.

  44 In 1847 in Über die Erhaltung der Kraft, Helmholtz wrote: “The phenomena of nature are to be reduced to movements of bits of matter with unalterable moving forces that depend only on their spatial relations”; quoted in Michael Heidelberger, “Force, Law, and Experiment: The Evolution of Helmholtz’s Philosophy of Science,” in Hermann von Helmholtz, ed. Cahan, p. 464.

  45 Liebig, quoted in Frederick Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 507 Liebig, Reden und Abhandlungen (Heidelberg: Winter, 1874), p. 24.

  46 Matthias Jakob Schleiden, Schellings und Hegels Verhältnis zur Naturwissenschaft (1843), ed. Olaf Breidbach (Weinheim: VCH Acta Humaniora, 1988), p. 51.

  47 Sebastian Gardner, “Idealism and Naturalism in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Stone, p. 92.

  48 Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, trans. E. C. Otté, modern reprint of the 1849 edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 36.

  49 Humboldt, Cosmos, p. 36.

  50 Humboldt, Cosmos, p. 17. On Humboldt’s view of nature, see also Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert, “Saving Nature from Vicious Empiricism: Alexander von Humboldt’s ‘Romantic’ Science,” in Das neue Licht der Romantik, ed. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert and Bärbel Frischmann (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009).

  51 Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

  52 Humboldt, Cosmos, pp. 2–3.

  53 Consequently, Humboldt was willing to affiliate himself to philosophy of nature, in a letter of 1836 (see Humboldt, Cosmos, p. xvi), provided that this meant arranging data in light of rational ideas and not vainly trying to deduce data from ideas.

  CHAPTER 17

  PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

  FREDERICK GREGORY

  17.1 INTRODUCTION

  TO attempt a summary of the philosophy of science in nineteenth-century Germany presents challenges on several fronts. We can meet one at the very outset by declaring that in what follows we are referring to the philosophy of natural science, not science in the general sense of Wissenschaft that many nineteenth-century Germans would hav
e assumed. Even then, however, we must be careful since what a modern reader understands by natural science only emerged after the middle of the nineteenth century in Germany. It was only then that a practitioner of natural science, a Naturwissenschaftler, was distinguished from a general investigator of nature, a Naturforscher. And it was only in the 1820s when the empirical investigation of nature sufficiently identified with an experimental methodology that Naturwissenschaft was able to separate for most from the larger enterprise of nature philosophy, Naturphilosophie, that had been in vogue since the beginning of the century.

  As Paul Ziche has noted,1 the term Wissenschaftstheorie was new when Ernst Mach and Wilhelm Ostwald raised systematic questions about the foundation of scientific ideas at the end of the nineteenth century. Mach, in fact, is sometimes credited with originating the specific discipline of philosophy of science.2 Since philosophy of science in the twenty-first century has a specific connotation that does not fit most of the nineteenth, the choice of subject matter in this chapter has been dictated by the philosophical issues that were of primary concern to those living in the nineteenth century. They involve matters such as the nature of scientific theory and explanation, the nature and role of induction, the philosophy of organism, and the relationships among science, philosophy, and worldview. Our tour through the nineteenth century begins, then, in the more philosophical context that dominated the early decades.

  17.2 THE INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE OF IMMANUEL KANT

  The conception of scientific explanation that emerged from Kant’s critiques depended on judgment—the joining together of the particulars of sense experience. There were two kinds of judgment, determinative and reflective. Determinative judgment was dependent on what Kant called categories of the understanding. Categories such as substance and causality, for example, exist prior to the exercise of determinative judgment, they therefore determine or constitute how we put the particulars of sense experience together even though they do not generate the content of our experience. Kant inferred from this analysis that scientific explanation should be equated with causal accounts, especially as found in causal mechanisms like those of Newtonian science that could be captured in mathematical analysis. In the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science of 1786 Kant wrote that natural science was only genuine (eigentliche) science to the extent that a description of nature was expressed mathematically.3