Naturphilosophie

Always controversial, some of Schelling's ideas in this direction are still considered of philosophical interest, even if the subsequent development of experimental natural science had a destructive impact on the credibility of the theories of his followers in Naturphilosophie.

In developing their theories, the German Naturphilosophen found their inspiration in the natural philosophy of the Ancient Greek Ionian philosophers.

The German Idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte had attempted to show that the whole structure of reality follows necessarily from the fact of self-consciousness.

Nature as the sum of what is objective, and intelligence as the complex of all the activities making up self-consciousness, appear as equally real.

Johann Gottfried Herder, particularly taken in opposition to Immanuel Kant, was a precursor of Schelling: Herder's dynamic view of nature was developed by Goethe and Schelling and led to the tradition of Naturphilosophie [...][5]Later Friedrich Schlegel theorised about a particular German strand in philosophy of nature, citing Jakob Böhme, Johannes Kepler and Georg Ernst Stahl, with Jan Baptist van Helmont as an edge case.

Historically, according to Richards: Despite the tentativeness of their titles, these monographs introduced radical interpretations of nature that would reverberate through the sciences, and particularly the biology, of the next century.

The dynamic series of stages in nature, the forms in which the ideal structure of nature is realized, are matter, as the equilibrium of the fundamental expansive and contractive forces; light, with its subordinate processes (magnetism, electricity, and chemical action); organism, with its component phases of reproduction, irritability and sensibility.

[10] Fichte's system, called the Wissenschaftslehre, had begun with a fundamental distinction between dogmatism (fatalistic) and criticism (free), as his formulation of idealism.

We are able to apprehend and represent nature to ourselves in the successive forms which its development assumes, since it is the same spirit of which we become aware in self-consciousness, though here unconsciously.

But critics were initially not scientists (a term not used until later); rather they came largely from within philosophy and Romantic science, a community including many physicians.

[15] Isaiah Berlin summed up the reasons why Naturphilosophie had a wide-ranging impact on views of art and artists: if everything in nature is living, and if we ourselves are simply its most self-conscious representatives, the function of the artist is to delve within himself, and above all to delve within the dark and unconscious forces which move within him, and to bring these to consciousness by the most agonising and violent internal struggle.

In that debate, Hegel then intervened, largely supporting his student friend Schelling, with the work usually called his Differenzschrift, the Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie (The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy); a key publication in his own philosophical development, his first book, it was published in September 1801.

The criticisms of Fichte, and more particularly of Hegel (in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit), pointed to a defect in the conception of the Absolute as mere featureless identity.