Naturphilosophie

The claim

Nature is visible spirit and spirit is invisible nature. The same polar opposition — attraction and repulsion, positive and negative — structures magnetism, chemistry, life and consciousness alike.

What it held

Schelling's problem was Fichte's leftover. If the not-I exists only as the I's resistance, nature has no reality of its own — and that seemed obviously wrong. His answer was to give nature its own developmental history, running parallel to the mind's, and arriving at the same place.

The method was to look for polarity everywhere, on the assumption that one principle should show up at every level. Magnetism, electricity and chemical affinity were read as successive expressions of a single opposition, and organic life as its higher form.

This produced both nonsense and results. Oersted, who discovered electromagnetism, was a Naturphilosoph and was looking for exactly the unity he found. Goethe's work on plant morphology and colour belongs here. So does Carus, and the first serious European discussion of the unconscious.

It also produced a great deal of speculative anatomy that had to be cleared away, and by the 1840s German scientists were repudiating it forcefully. The judgement has softened since: it was a research programme with a heuristic, and heuristics are allowed to be wrong.

How it argued

Speculative construction from a single principle, tested against the science of the day and frequently ahead of it in ambition and behind it in rigour.

What it was arguing against

Newtonian mechanism as a complete account of nature, and Fichte's reduction of nature to the self's resistance.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether it is science or poetry. Whether its successes are evidence for the method or coincidences.

Common misconceptions

That it was uniformly worthless. Oersted's discovery came out of it, Goethe's morphology is still cited, and the concept of development in nature owes it a great deal.

How it began

Schelling at twenty-three, appointed to a chair at Jena on Goethe's recommendation, in a university town containing most of the interesting people in Europe.

What became of it

Repudiated by the generation of scientists that followed, and thoroughly out of favour by 1850.

Lasting influence

Romantic literature and medicine. Coleridge brought it into English. Oersted's electromagnetism. The idea that nature has a history, which Darwin gave a different mechanism.

Why it still matters

It is the clearest case of a metaphysical research programme producing a real empirical discovery, which makes it a standing problem for accounts of scientific method.

Put another way

A magnet, in which one thing has two ends and neither can exist alone.

Where to start

Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants. It shows the method working on something checkable.

The surprising bit

Oersted found electromagnetism because he was deliberately looking for a unity between electricity and magnetism that his metaphysics told him must exist. The metaphysics was mostly wrong and the prediction was right.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

German Idealism, Fichteanism

Opposed by

French Materialism

Influenced

Lebensphilosophie

The verdict

A speculative physics that was largely mistaken and occasionally, spectacularly, not.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy