Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature

This chapter deals with the basic outlines of Schelling’s conception of living nature. It had a profound influence on the development of biology, particulary in Germany, and many of its parts are highly inspirational to this day. The first part presents Schelling’s general approach to explaining phenomena from living nature. His goal was to find a middle way between materialism, which tends to reduce life to mechanical and chemical processes, and vitalism, a position that assumes special principles and forces applying solely to living organisms. Schelling’s position on this subject could be thought of as dynamic monism, according to which organic and inorganic nature are in effect different stages of development of one and the same principle. In the second part of this chapter, we have a look at what is, in Schelling’s view, specific to the living stage of nature. We focus mainly on his theory of organism as an autopoietic, internally organised, self-sustaining whole characterised by relative autonomy and independence of its environment. The third and final part of this chapter is dedicated to Schelling’s concept of evolution: he was the first thinker to use this term, which originated in the context of embryology, in the new context of evolution of species.