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Ian Hamilton Grant
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Ontogeny and Ontology in Schelling’s Naturphilosophie
Text.Serial.Journal
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2018-06-01
2023-08-08
2018-06-01
2023-08-08
35-45
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Ian Hamilton Grant
2018/06/01
10.13135/2036-542X/8031
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University of the West of England, Bristol
2036-542X
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Ontogeny and Ontology in Schelling’s Naturphilosophie
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                                                                                             – ISBN 978-88-255-1945-7
                                                                  DOI 10.4399/97888255194573 – pag. 35-45 (giugno 2018)




                                                  Ontogeny and Ontology
                                            in Schelling’s Naturphilosophie*
                                                                          I H G**




A: Philosophies of Nature after Schelling has two objectives. First, to
argue that a philosophy of nature becomes contemporarily viable once
lazy readings of it as pro or anti science are dismissed, and more nuanced
and philosophical accounts of the materials nature–philosophy draws on
and the conclusions it reaches are provided. Second, to reject a view of
Schelling’s philosophical oeuvre that does not make the Naturphilosophie, in
Schelling’s own terms, grounding. Should both succeed, Schelling’s overall
philosophical strategy is a contemporary one.
K: Schelling, Philosophy of nature, Ontology, Ontogeny, Nature


Full of wonder at Rodin’s fast sketches of the Cambodian dancers the
scupltor witnessed at Marseille’s  Exposition Coloniale, Rilke conceived a
series, echoing interminably backwards, yet forming an art that is “of ” its
subject not because it represents, but because it is sourced in and driven by
it to reconstitute the movement at its source into new forms in turn. These
sketches embody, writes Rilke,
    . . . a rare grasp of the most ungraspable: dance. Rodin had yearned to find a means
    to apprehend the dance–moves, which were the very essence of ancient cultures of
    rhythm, in their nuances, in the decisive nothing that conjoins two turns... (Rilke
    : )
      ∗
        A first version was published as the Preface to the Italian translation of my Philosophies of
Nature After Schelling (Filosofie della natura dopo Schelling, Turin, Rosenberg & Seiler, ). Publishing
the essay separately means that the gratitude I express to its translator is no longer appropriately
placed at the essay’s head. Since neither would it be appropriate to omit it altogether, I place it here. I
am honoured by the thoughtful labour Emilio Carlo Corriero has so generously put into rendering
this book into Italian. In addition to the long discussions concerning Schelling and contemporary
philosophy while he was a visiting scholar at my university in the UK, we enjoyed several clarifying
discussions of the present work during the translation process, out of which discussions the idea for
this preface arose. It is in gratitude to him, then, that I write this.
     ∗∗
        University of the West of England, Bristol; Iain.Grant@uwe.ac.uk.


                                                                                                                   
      Iain Hamilton Grant


    The grasp is rare not because it grasps the ungraspable, but because the
ungraspable is the source of the grasping. The movement is not arrested in
the dance, just as its apprehension through Rodin’s brush does not prevent
its comprehension through Rilke’s pen. Quite apart from the ‘any domain
whatever’ that may furnish arts with impetus, Rilke seeks not to arrest the
movements that drive him to arrest them, but only to be driven by them.
The result is never therefore a representation, but always a creation that
creates in its turn. Even when, although admittedly rarely, this is grasped, the
grasping is not the drive’s terminus but rather impetus to metamorphoses
in turn. These Protean figures almost naturally evoke Schelling’s name, so
often did Hegel scold or ridicule him for the mutability of his thinking. Yet
what was at stake for Rodin, Rilke and the Dancers, just as for Schelling,
is the formation of organisations or structures that have as their particular
nature necessarily various modes of apprehending or comprehending the
fact of their sourcedness in what those sources produce as their partial, and
therefore serial, expressions. Here, we will pursue this movement just as
Rilke remarked Rodin did those of the dancers.
    That nature should ground philosophy looks prima facie unobjectionable
when, as now, philosophy self–describes as “naturalist”, by which is meant
either (a) ontology’s content will consist in the issuances of the natural sciences;
or (b) in no field is an inquiry epistemically valid that does not operate by
scientific method (Putnam : –). This is neither what Schelling nor I
mean by ‘nature–philosophy’, nor is it what that term proposes. Nor yet do
we mean to take “philosophy” as entailing the equally prevalent ethicism that
is naturalism’s twin. Where naturalism makes ontology a scientific issuance,
ethicism renders it an ethical one; if naturalism proposes the elimination of
the supernatural, ethicism proposes that of nature.
    Both positions share poor division. If nature is what there is, then any-
thing that is, is nature. The first consequence of this is that nothing that is
can be not–nature, which means that naturalism and ethicism share straw
targets owing to their attachment to or rejection of the natural sciences.
While we might expect the resultant difference of opinion to hinge around
the attachment to or rejection of science as an epistemic arbiter, confusion
is introduced when an epistemic arbiter is raised to the status of an onto-

     . On contemporary philosophical naturalism, see The content and appeal of naturalism in Hilary
Putnam : –. See also the essays collected in de Caro and Macarthur, eds., Naturalism in Question,
Cambridge, Harvard University Press, .
     . See my discussion of the ethical process in ‘Being and Slime: the mathematics of protoplasm
in Oken’s Physio–Philosophy’, in Collapse IV (), pp. –. For an example of this ethicism in
contemporary Schelling studies, see Keith R. Peterson’s ‘Introduction’ to First Outline of a System of the
Philosophy of Nature. New York, SUNY, .
     . This is Putnam’s conclusion in. . . loc. cit.
                                  Ontogeny and Ontology in Schelling’s Naturphilosophie                 


logical one. Indeed, this confusion is evident in Quine’s naturalization of
epistemology, which proposes that we abandon the ambition for a ‘first
philosophy’ that would be in a position to arbitrate knowledge claims by
the sciences: since knowledge and its acquisition is goal of all branches of
genuine natural science, knowledge claims concerning knowledge should
only issue from those sciences. Naturalism, in consequence, is the ethos
adopted by a philosophy that, as a naturalistic artefact, is second in respect
to the sciences, and so ought to be derived from them.
    The confusion begins not with the slide into normativity in epistemic
questions, but with the equation of epistemology with first philosophy, when
according to Aristotle this last concerns the first to be and the causes, not of this
or that being, but rather of causes themselves. Aristotelian first philosophy thus
adds to this metaphysics of causality an ‘archeo–ontology’. Yet any philosophy
that claims, like Aristotle’s, to be “first”, will be subject to Schelling’s insight
that a first will not, because it is first, be prior to but rather consequent upon
a beginning having occurred. Because therefore, when a first is a first, it
presupposes a beginning prior (at least) to it, it will be at the earliest, so to
speak, only relatively or will be the “most original [ursprünglichste]”. We may
in consequence say that ontogeny precedes ontology (taking the latter as the
reason of however open or restrictive an ontic catalogue the reason allows) or
that ontology is a “local” state of ontogeny. Is ontogeny then the Schellingian
candidate for first philosophy? Not unless ontogeny itself constitutes a ‘first’
in the sense that its being is “perfected”, grammatically speaking, i.e. in the
past of any claim made concerning it — hence the opening sentence of Die
Weltalter: “the past is known”. Perfected ontogeny, additionally, is precisely not
ontogeny, but rather only a first once ontogeny has already ‘been’. Yet general
nature, whether conceived according to the “new era in natural history” or as
contrastive with “particular nature”, remains productivity and product rather
than either alone.

     . As for example Schelling says in the Erster Entwurf, SW, I/, p. .
     . Draw attention to Joe Lawrence’s comment on this point in his forthcoming translation of
Weltalter.
     . Joseph Lawrence, in his English translation of the first draft of Schelling’s The Ages of the World
(forthcoming SUNY, ), notes the importance to the substance of Schelling’s claim of the verb in this
sentence being wird (will become) rather than ist (is). The result: the past “will be known” emphasises
the genetic element in which the future of knowing will conceive a past state. Thus the Ages echoes
Schelling’s  System: “the lamp of the whole system of knowledge. . . casts its light ahead only, not
behind”. (SW I/, ) My thanks to Joe for allowing me to read an advance copy of his truly beautiful
translation.
     . Schelling distinguishes general from particular nature in Die Weltalter, SW, I/, p. : “the only
place in which a ground of determination can be sought for the precedence of one of them and the
succession of the other is the particular nature of each of the principles, which is different from their
general nature which consists in each being equally originary and equally independent and each having
the same claim to be that which has being”.
       Iain Hamilton Grant


    There are therefore two reasons why ontogeny is not first philosophy:
first, were it prior to beings i.e. to products, the latter would by definition
not be nature but something else, unless nature were to exclude products.
Were it to do so, however, in what would its productivity consist? Nature
cannot therefore be either alone because, second, the hypothesis of products
without productivity is as self–eliminating as that of “consequent without
consequence”: if there are products, there is productivity. Neither, though,
do products exhaust productivity, i.e. bring nature to an end, since we would
again have the problem of conceiving consequents without consequence.
    In brief therefore, ontology remains first philosophy, but () philosophy
is not first in general, because () it is local or has a “particular nature”, and
() the general nature amongst which ontology and other particular natures
are consequent is ontogenetic. Philosophy’s every conceiving of beginning
is consequent on its own beginning being conceived as local with respect
to beginning as such. Therefore, as Die Weltalter demonstrates, ontogeny
conjointly entails archaeo–ontology and philosophical futurism, because
the beginning recedes with each additional claim concerning it contributing
to what will become its future. Accordingly, the future will seek to know as
past the beginning that a beginning will become, but that beginning will
always be the object of future claims.
    Regardless — this is worth stating to show the unorthodox ethos of our
current orthodoxy — it is clear that first philosophy most certainly is not an
epistemology or ‘theory of science’, a Wissenschaftslehre, as both Quinean
naturalists and Fichtean ethicists such as Levinas contend. To conclude
that it is, additionally conflates epistemically normative science (whether
we are Levinasian or Quinean about it) with ontology. Thus, whether we
account first philosophy a metaphysical or an ontological undertaking, it
is clear that neither is reducible to the species of normative epistemology
that Quine’s conflation of philosophical with scientific goals recommends.
Additionally, its normative content renders Quine’s just as much an ethicism,
since the latter accepts the evaluation of the sciences’ epistemic superiority
as a precondition of rendering ethics as first philosophy. The result is that
both Quineans and ethicists abandon “nature” to the sciences. Since, more-
over, as book Gamma of Aristotle’s Metaphysics reminds us, the sciences
address discrete departments of being and so must ignore being prior to the
various determinations its divisibility entails, the abandonment of nature
paradoxically shared by naturalistic and ethicist first philosophy severs the
tie between ontogenetic and ontological questions on which Naturphiloso-
phie thrives. Contrastively, the inseparability of ontogeny and ontology —
which Schelling early theorised as the asymmetric co–implication of inex-

     . Schelling gives this “law of consequence” in the Freiheitsschrift (SW, I/, p. ).
                                  Ontogeny and Ontology in Schelling’s Naturphilosophie               


haustible productivity and product entailed just if natural production ‘takes
time’ — “unthings”, taking ‘unbedingt’ in its transitive verbal sense, nature
in a phase prior to its acquisition of determinacy or, again in Schelling’s
terms, ‘particularity’.
    This is precisely why the second consequence of the claim that there is
nothing that is that is not nature has bite. For it follows from it that there
is no (one) thing that nature is. If nature is thus irreducible, under archeo–
ontological investigation, to some supposedly primary elements (because
nature consists also in their consequents, and they are themselves, if ele-
ments or particulars at all, necessarily consequent on their not–having–
been), then it cannot be the case that ‘nature’ can be equated with any entity
nor with any group of entities. There is no ontic answer, that is, to Novalis’s
abrupt question: “what is the nature of nature?” (Novalis : ) It is
because Schelling draws his method from it, that he considers Kielmeyer’s
theory of natural history, the beginning of a “new era”. It consists not just in
what became known as the “Mekkel–Serres Law”, nor in attempting to dis-
cover a solution to the “genetic problem”, but in a theory of recapitulation
all the way down.
    This too has consequences. Firstly, if we construe metaphysics as the
study of what it is that beings are, then it follows that, when so defined,
Naturphilosophie cannot be reduced to such a metaphysics, since it is not
reducibly concerned with what it is that is. Secondly, if we consider ontology
to be the theory of being, then it is clear that neither is nature a synonym
for being nor does it constitute a being itself, nor again a domain thereof.
When in this context we read Schelling’s demand that “the concept of
original being is to be “eliminated” from nature–philosophy”, the outline
of ontogeny’s role in Naturphilosophie above makes clear the reason for this:
being is not original because it is not “first”. This means either: something else
than being is original, or: origination precedes any candidate “first”. Since in
the first case, there can be no candidate “first” that is not, it may be dismissed
on the grounds that it is question begging. Not being is prior to being only
once being is and therefore only if it was not. If therefore origination is prior

      . “Where is the primal germ, the typus of all nature, to be found? The nature of nature?”
Novalis also avers, however, that “Alles ist Samenkorn” (N ; ; N, : ). It is
Schelling who combines them: “everything is primal germ or nothing is [Alles ist Urkeim oder nichts
ist].” (SW, I/, p. ). See my ’Everything is primal germ or nothing is. The deep field logic of
nature’, Symposium . (): -.
     . See PNS chapter  for the contrast between Kielmeyer’s ‘natural history of the unthinged’
and “the genetic problem”. I address ‘Recapitulation all the way down’ in my contribution to Lydia
Azadpour and Daniel Whistler, eds., Kielmeyer. Forthcoming, London, Bloomsbury, .
     . Schelling argues that when “der Begriff des Seyns als eines Ursprünglichen soll aus der Natur-
philosophie (eben sowie aus der Transscendentalphilosophie) schlechthin eliminirt werden”, we have nature
“unthinged [unbedingt]” (SW, I/, p. ).
      Iain Hamilton Grant


to any candidate first, then being becomes such that ontology is consequent on
ontogeny.
    What then is nature–philosophy? Is it then ontogeny, if not as first phi-
losophy, then as the philosophy of firstness? Returning to the account of
Aristotelian first philosophy as “archeo–ontological”, I would like to follow
the lead Wolfram Hogrebe established in attending both to the role played
by propositional form in Schelling’s philosophy and to the recapitulation
of cosmogony (i.e., of cosmogenesis) in epistemogenesis, which Hogrebe
memorably parses as “the auto–epistemic structure of the world” (Hogrebe
: –). I propose to do this by drawing, as Hogrebe does, on principles
Schelling makes use of in beginning Die Weltalter — which, I suggest, along
with the Freedom essay, forms a pivotal contribution to Naturphilosophie.
These principles concern Schelling’s experiments in the form of the copula,
begun in the essay added to the second and third editions of On the World
Soul and entitled ‘On the Proportion of the Real and the Ideal in Nature or
On the Development of the First Principles of Nature–Philosophy from the
Principles of Gravity and Light’. The title is important insofar as it casts
the real and ideal not in the form of an exclusive disjunction (as ‘either nat-
uralism or ethicism’), but as proportional one to the other. Moreover, while
the object of the essay is to present the first principles of Naturphilosophie,
these are, the title makes clear, derived from gravity and light, and so are
themselves exhibited (dargestellt) as consequent upon nature. Nature and
philosophy are connected by the copula in judgment, which “doubles” or
“recapitulates” the bond between them, which bond is actual whenever
there is philosophizing resulting in a judgment. That is, following the Free-
dom essay’s recasting of the elements of the proposition from ‘subject’ and
‘predicate’, to ‘antecedent’ and ‘consequent’, “nature–philosophy” states ()
that nature–as–subject is antecedent to the philosophy that is predicated of it
in that science’s name; and () because “nature–philosophy” is to this extent
itself a proposition, its expression is consequent upon the nature antecedent
to it. Philosophy will always be in the future of the nature that is its past,
just as it is that of other things.

     . Edinburgh University Press will shortly publish an English translation of this ground–
breaking work by myself and Jason M. Wirth.
     . In using “proportion” rather than, as Dale Snow renders it in her welcome and helpful trans-
lation of Schelling’s ‘Treatise on the Relationship of the Real and the Ideal in Nature’ (International
Philosophical Quarterly () : –), I am drawing attention to the commonality between this
work, added to the  and  editions of the Weltseele, and the so–called ‘Identity Philosophy’ he
is sometimes said to be working on to the exclusion of the Naturphilosophie in the first decade of the
new century. This is not only in keeping with Schelling’s own judgment that all his work prior to the
Freedom essay was Naturphilosophie (SW, I/, p. ), but also makes sense of statements such as the
following, from the Presentation of My System §. , “The empirical magnet must be treated as the
indifference point in the total magnet.” (SW, I/, p. ).
                                   Ontogeny and Ontology in Schelling’s Naturphilosophie                  


   That the first three phrases of The Ages of the World are contributions to
Schelling’s ongoing investigations of propositional form, is evident from
their abrupt, undeveloped presentation at the outset of that work:

    “Das Vergangene wird gewußt, das Gegenwärtige wird erkannt, das Zukünftige wird
    geahndet.”

    Schelling’s German makes clear his experiments with the elements of
the proposition, following those with the subject and predicate performed
in the Freedom essay. Here the copula is no longer an articulation of sein
but of werden, not of being but becoming. This suggests that the book thus
introduced is a work of ontogeny, echoing Hogrebe’s auto–epistemologizing
cosmos. What then nature “is” is supplanted by the question: “what will it
become?” because whatever any x “is” will be consequent upon x’s genesis.
In Die Weltalter’s terms, that the past will be known closes the gap between
science (Wissenschaft) and prescience (Ahnung), with only this structural
change: science is science when it follows or is consequent upon what it
knows, or upon its having a past. This is, if you will, Schelling’s ontogenetic
version of Johann Wilhelm Ritter’s definition of Wissenschaft as that “was
das Wissen überhaupt schafft”. Accordingly, Die Weltalter systematizes the
consequent bonding of science to creation that remains individualized in
‘the art of physics’ for Ritter.
    If it is true that the past is what will be known, there will never be a
science capable of including the proposition in which knowledge of the past
is formulated, in the included past. In consequence, every knowledge claim
is a contribution to ontogeny, or itself an instance of creation. Prescience or
Ahnung occurs when this epistemic type precedes the object of its claims. It
is “pre–science” therefore in two ways: first, because it is the science that
upsets the law of antecedence articulated by the first propositional phrase
of the book by placing what is its object in the position of consequent with
respect to which that science or pre–science is antecedent. Second, because
science or knowledge follows from its object according to the first proposition,
what it is that precedes science can never be known because its science will
be, if at all, only in its future. A close relative of this claim can be heard in

    . SW, I/, p. . In his excellent forthcoming translation of Die Weltalter I into English (SUNY),
Joseph Lawrence draws attention to Schelling’s use of the verb werden rather than sein here, as I do below. I
am grateful to him for sharing his beautiful, vivid and subtle work on this extraordinary piece with me.
    . The physicist J.W. Ritter presented the talk, ‘Die Physik als Kunst’ at the Inaugural Celebration
of the Königlich–bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften on March , , the same venue as
Schelling, on October  , would present his ‘Über das Verhältniß der bildenden Künste zu der Natur’.
See Ritter : –, here .
    . As stated in the Freiheitsschrift: “. . . no kind of combination can transform that which is by
nature derived into that which is by nature original”, SW, I/, p. .
      Iain Hamilton Grant


Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer’s parsing of the relation of thought to nature:
    Thoughts are awakened by the actus, the emergence of a thing or the
causes of this change (Kielmeyer : –).
    The Naturphilosophen of the turn of the nineteenth century once again
offer a notable instance of emergentism all the way down. This has the
effect, like the génesis eis oùsían Schelling cites from Plato’s Philebus in his
Timaeusschrift, (Schelling : , citing Philebus d) of making ontogeny
prior to ontology, insofar as thought remains consequent upon the actuality,
which consists in emergence, according to Kielmeyer. This thesis is in
marked contrast to the Middle Platonist account of the kósmos noetós
with which Robert F. Brown () and Michael Franz (), amongst
others, characterize Schelling’s theory of intelligible creation, as the “ideas
in God’s mind”. Nor yet is it the Neoplatonist account of the intelligible
creation as flowing from the One; nor, as for example Birgit Sandkaulen–
Bock  argues, is it synonymous with the Kantian understanding as
the lawgiver to the world qua totality of appearances. According to Die
Weltalter, creation is intelligible owing to the “Mit–wissenschaft” of the
human soul with creation (SW, I/, ). Again, owing to the operation or
actuality of science, creation — or rather the created — is not only known
in science but equally instantiated in it, even though the creation that this
science is is not amongst the contents of that science, just as never not
having a past ensures that science qua created cannot sum the creation of
which it is an issuant. This account of what is involved in “co–science” is
further reinforced if we add Schelling’s claim that “quch in Plato means
nothing other than the original principle of motion, arché kínéseos” (Schelling
: ). Here the echo of archeo–ontology in the soul as (and not as
containing) “original principle” recapitulates the beginning of beginning
that is cosmogony’s past, since the principle of motion is not itself motion
but soul. Soul thus remains akin to creation because the pasts to which the
sciences of each seek access are forever cut from them by the fact of having
begun. Moreover, soul is akin to creation in that each obtains as antecedent
only consequently upon an antecedent having obtained, i.e., once creation
has occurred, or once something that was not has become.
    Accordingly, science doubles or recapitulates creation both insofar as
() the former is an instance of the latter, in which () it is grounded and
thus upon which it is consequent. Knowing’s past is the nature in it, where

     . For further support for this reading of Die Weltalter, see Judith Norman and Alasdair Welch-
man, ‘Creating the Past: Schelling’s Ages of the World’, Journal of the Philosophy of History  ():
–.
    . See below for my argument as to why the Middle Platonist understanding of kósmos noetós
is the wrong one, and the evidence to support this claim.
    . K, KpV A.
                             Ontogeny and Ontology in Schelling’s Naturphilosophie   


“nature”, it is now clear, does not mean a being or a domain thereof, but
rather becomes the past of whatever is emergent, even including creation
itself.
    Were all this to result only in the claim: ‘nature qua physis is and means
growth, life, etc.’, nothing philosophically would have been accomplished
but the reassertion of vitalism, a crime of which I have, on the basis of
my Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (e, ), been frequently yet erro-
neously accused. I do not think it is credible to read the book in this way,
however, owing to several key theses there developed:

    ) Because there is no thing that is nature, no special domain of nature
       enjoys ontological privilege over any other. To assert that the domain
       of being to which nature properly applies is the living, is always the
       pleading of special interests.
    ) Nor, by extension, are the natural sciences (are there unnatural sci-
       ences, or sciences of “un–nature”?) the exclusive arbiters of nature’s
       beginnings, ends and means. A successfully operative Naturphiloso-
       phie has therefore mythology as much as it does metallurgy amongst
       its object–domain.
    ) Similarly, the unconditioning of nature is here argued to obtain not
       when nature is made absolute or the One from which thought about
       it, for example, emanates. Rather, nature is unconditioned or un-
       thinged once the search for what it fundamentally is — its “primal
       germ”, “protoplasm”, “intermaxillary bone” or Urpflanze — is shown,
       as here, to be question–begging: no x is the original of all, since at
       least the x that so serves does not receive its origin from it. There is,
       so to speak, no “unit of selection” problem for recapitulation because
       recapitulation recapitulates (or potentiates) recapitulation.

     This leads to a related thesis that, although mentioned in my (),
was not developed therein. The “inborn and indwelling logic of nature” of
which Schelling latterly speaks is not, if we note how it is here qualified,
a logic merely applied to nature; nor, insofar as nature is here posited as
the field within which it is located, does logic exceed it in scope. Rather, it
“fills the world”, as Wittgenstein (: .) claimed. It follows, therefore,
that no science of logic can invert this relation and make nature its subset
unless the resultant nature is not equal to the nature in which the logic
that so contains it is embedded. It further follows that, since this logic is
“indwelling”, that logics are falsely considered to be abstract as opposed to

  . For a sophisticated development of this theme, see P H .
  . In the Grounding of Positive Philosophy, SW II/, .
      Iain Hamilton Grant


concrete when they are considered as not indwelling and thus derived. From
this it follows that, since logic consists in formally repeatable patternings,
nature exemplifies more than one such patterning at different levels, and that
no individual pattern therefore suffices as “the logic of nature” or the logic
of the all. In other words, a nature–philosophy of logic denies the latter’s
self–sufficiency not on the grounds of its reducibility to initial, non–logical
instantiations, but rather because there is no limit in principle to the number
or kind of pattern–instantiations of which nature is capable.
     Why then a nature philosophy? To supplant the Aristotelian Orthodoxy
according to which Ideas — and therefore not nature — are the subject of
the Platonic philosophical ascent “èpékeina tês oùsías”; to reject therefore
the Nietzscheanity Orthodoxy, according to which it is Platonism that must be
overturned (on the contrary, Eduardo Paolozzi’s stated aim “to erect hollow
gods” provides a better idea for their treatment than can be achieved with
a hammer alone); to counter the Scientistic Orthodoxy, which states that
nature has become philosophically intractable (acceptance of which leads
equally, as we have seen, to the Ethicist and Naturalist Orthodoxies); to
demonstrate the Scalar Orthodoxy unfounded, although it founds in turn
the functionalist hegemony of “specialisation” — is ontology conceivable as
a specialisation? — and the banality of the small point. Contrary to special-
isation, which makes the community of scholars larger than the object it
studies, philosophy’s universes simultaneously exceed it and impel it. Natur-
philosophie takes the insuperable localism of the consequent philosophy
that its name hypothesizes not as an occasion for again demonstrating the
elimination of the position that once it, but now none, may occupy. Rather,
it takes its own embeddedness as modelling nature’s ontogenesis of thought,
and the resultant morphology as the ground of a philosophical futurism as
its unprethinkable offspring.


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