German Idealism And Nature Fichte And Schelling
German idealism developed out of Immanuel Kant's philosophy. The German idealists endorsed Kant's view that human beings are autonomous, capable of breaking from causal determination to set their own values and thoughts. However, Kant thought that human beings not only are autonomous but also appear empirically—in everyday experience—to be part of nature, which he understood as the fully determined causal order of Newtonian science.
On the basis of these Kantian views, Fichte held that the self's freedom conflicts with its empirical status as a natural, embodied person whose sensations are causally determined. This conflict prompts the self to strive to overcome its determination by nature and become completely free. The self therefore endlessly strives to dominate and impose its will on nature (Fichte 1987 [1800]). The more the self succeeds in "determining" or shaping the character of nature through its activities, the more the self, in being determined by nature, actually remains self-determined.
Schelling reacted against Fichte's insistence on the conflict between self and nature. Schelling argued that human freedom is possible only if it emerges out of and depends on a preexisting form of freedom within nature. In his First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (2004 [1799]) he maintains that nature is free in the sense that it originally consists in a pure "productivity" or creativity that fixes itself in a succession of particular natural objects.
Schelling devised his account of nature partly through a priori reasoning about what nature must be like for human freedom to be possible and partly by drawing together the results of the empirical sciences of his time, such as contemporary chemistry, which seemed to reveal creative, self-transforming energies in nature. Naturphilosophie—"philosophy of nature''—was what Schelling called his partly speculative, partly empirical form of inquiry into nature, which became popular among early nineteenth-century scientists and led to some real discoveries, such as electromagnetism. Although midcentury scientific materialists repudiated Naturphilosophie, insisting that scientific inquiry must be purely empirical, Naturphilosophie influenced forerunners of ecology such as Ernst Haeckel.
Outside Germany, contemporary environmental philosophers seldom discuss Schelling. However, he anticipated environmental ethics with his rejection of Fichte's advocacy of human domination over nature, contrasting emphasis that human freedom depends on the freedom of nature, and replacement of mechanistic views of nature with the idea of nature as a creative whole.
Post a comment