Biological Agency, Process and the Organism-Environment Relationship in Schelling's Philosophy of Nature

Abstract

In this thesis I undertake a close analysis of Schelling’s theory of the organism as it is elaborated across key texts of his Naturphilosophie. The purpose of this analysis is to uncover aspects of Schelling’s philosophy that may be fruitfully brought into dialogue with contemporary “organismcentred” perspectives in analytic philosophy of biology. Key resonances and continuities include the centrality of nature as a process, able to internally differentiate itself into particular forms and entities, as well as the organic unity and systematicity of nature as a whole. In Schelling, the organism is theorised as a process stabilised in the flow of natural productivity by its activities of self-organisation. Through these activities, life separates itself from the world and thus constitutes itself as a structure of interiority and exteriority, or subject and object. During biological development, the organism harnesses the productivity of nature as a means of propagating a formative process of individuation and progressive self-differentiation, realising its “ideal” form in interactive relation with its materiality. Schelling’s concept of nature as a systematic whole also enables some proto-ecological considerations, particularly in his analysis of the instincts and behaviours of animals. As a German idealist, the “ideal” figures prominently in his description of the activities of life, but is everywhere considered through its modes of realisation in nature. The biological organism, as an especially privileged structure of nature’s processual self-movement, is constitutively purposive and agential, as well as sensible and world-forming. From this perspective, I claim, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie does not belong to a speculative and metaphysical “pre-history” of biology, but provides the conceptual resources for a “dialectical” biology in the present day.