Life, Lawfulness, and Contingency: Kant and Schelling on Organic Nature
Abstract
In 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.
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© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Articles
- Temperance and Epistemic Purity in Plato’s Phaedo
- Categories in Topics I 9: A New Plea For a Traditional Interpretation
- Aristotle’s First Moves Regarding Perception: A Reading of (most of) De Anima 2.5
- Kant on Civil Self-Sufficiency
- Kant’s Argument for Transcendental Idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic Revisited
- Life, Lawfulness, and Contingency: Kant and Schelling on Organic Nature
- Book Reviews
- Muratori, Cecilia. Renaissance Vegetarianism: The Philosophical Afterlives of Porphyry’s On Abstinence. Cambridge: Legenda 2020, xiv + 276 pp.
- Abazari, Arash. Hegel’s Ontology of Power: The Structure of Social Domination in Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2020, xvii + 218 pp.
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Articles
- Temperance and Epistemic Purity in Plato’s Phaedo
- Categories in Topics I 9: A New Plea For a Traditional Interpretation
- Aristotle’s First Moves Regarding Perception: A Reading of (most of) De Anima 2.5
- Kant on Civil Self-Sufficiency
- Kant’s Argument for Transcendental Idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic Revisited
- Life, Lawfulness, and Contingency: Kant and Schelling on Organic Nature
- Book Reviews
- Muratori, Cecilia. Renaissance Vegetarianism: The Philosophical Afterlives of Porphyry’s On Abstinence. Cambridge: Legenda 2020, xiv + 276 pp.
- Abazari, Arash. Hegel’s Ontology of Power: The Structure of Social Domination in Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2020, xvii + 218 pp.
