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Life, Lawfulness, and Contingency: Kant and Schelling on Organic Nature

Life, Lawfulness, and Contingency: Kant and Schelling on Organic Nature AbstractIn the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant calls purposiveness the “lawfulness of the contingent”. I argue that this should be interpreted not as lawfulness assumed in order to remove unacceptable mechanical indeterminacy, but rather as an additional kind of lawfulness which, in the case of organisms, inexplicably coincides with mechanical determination. Schelling adapts Kant’s notion of natural purposiveness in his own conception of the relation between mechanism and organism. He states in his 1798 work, On the World Soul, that nature is “lawless in its lawfulness, and lawful in its lawlessness”. This should be interpreted similarly: there is a coincidence of two orders of lawfulness in nature. However, while Kant maintains that the coincidence or unity of these two orders is inexplicable for beings like us, Schelling explains the unity by assigning these laws to distinct levels of operation in nature. Organic organization is generated by a second-order operation of an organic principle on the first-order mechanical forces that are characteristic of matter. Schelling thereby builds on Kant’s third Critique framework in a creative way in order to offer a more fully unified account of nature. In this account, mechanism and organism maintain distinct roles but are both grounded in a further, higher principle. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie de Gruyter

Life, Lawfulness, and Contingency: Kant and Schelling on Organic Nature

Fisher, Naomi
Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie , Volume 105 (1): 26 – Mar 31, 2023
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Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
ISSN
0003-9101
eISSN
1613-0650
DOI
10.1515/agph-2020-0108
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Abstract

AbstractIn the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant calls purposiveness the “lawfulness of the contingent”. I argue that this should be interpreted not as lawfulness assumed in order to remove unacceptable mechanical indeterminacy, but rather as an additional kind of lawfulness which, in the case of organisms, inexplicably coincides with mechanical determination. Schelling adapts Kant’s notion of natural purposiveness in his own conception of the relation between mechanism and organism. He states in his 1798 work, On the World Soul, that nature is “lawless in its lawfulness, and lawful in its lawlessness”. This should be interpreted similarly: there is a coincidence of two orders of lawfulness in nature. However, while Kant maintains that the coincidence or unity of these two orders is inexplicable for beings like us, Schelling explains the unity by assigning these laws to distinct levels of operation in nature. Organic organization is generated by a second-order operation of an organic principle on the first-order mechanical forces that are characteristic of matter. Schelling thereby builds on Kant’s third Critique framework in a creative way in order to offer a more fully unified account of nature. In this account, mechanism and organism maintain distinct roles but are both grounded in a further, higher principle.

Journal

Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie – de Gruyter

Published: Mar 31, 2023

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