Nunez De Caceres Gonzalez, Barbara; (2022) Nature's visibility: the metaphysical origin of living beings in F. W. J. Schelling's philosophy of nature. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis examines the philosophy of nature of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, with the aim of showing that the metaphysical framework of absolute identity makes possible a retrospective clarification of his early theory of living beings: in other words, that the 1790s Naturphilosophie is properly explained by Schelling’s conception of living beings as individuations of absolute identity. I show that Schelling’s early philosophical essays show him doctrinally independent from Fichte and projecting a path leading to the Identitätssystem of 1801. In order to support this continuity interpretation: (1) I show that the structural properties of organisation—identity, self-reference, metamorphosis, and purposiveness— presuppose the concept of absolute identity. (2) I suggest that the metaphysical origin of living beings is a function of absolute identity, which obtains according to a process of individuation in which the absolute’s two identical modes of being—viz., the infinite and eternal activity of self-positing, and its real being—are differentiated by a contingent limit imposed on the absolute. (3) I propose a strategy based on the perceptual Gestalt in order to support Schelling’s claim that a contingent limit can be introduced in the method of absolute construction. (4) I describe the metaphysical emergence of living beings as a contingent limit imposed by the finite factor, which captures and embodies a particular form differentiated from the eternal stream of absolute identity; this unleashes a dual process of metamorphosis [Ineinsbildung]—viz., progression to reach a unity and reversion to retain its form. (5) I explain the emergence of visibility as a universal mode of being that exists in potentia in nature, and which emerges when absolute identity becomes relative. Finally, I suggest that a stronger commitment to an ontological opposition is needed in order to give actuality to the subject-object structure that Schelling identifies in living beings.

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