Cake or Doughnut Zizek and German Ideali

1
Adrian Johnston, “Cake or Doughnut?: Žižek and German Idealist Emergentisms,” Žižek and
His Critics [ed. Dominik Finkelde and Todd McGowan], 2022 (forthcoming)
§1 The Philosophy Behind the Science: Revisiting an Old Debate
In the sixth and seventh chapters of my 2014 book Adventures in Transcendental
Materialism, I initiated a debate with Slavoj Žižek focused on his dialectical materialist turns to
quantum mechanics.1 Following my initial criticisms of Žižek’s speculative appeals to the
physics of the extremely small, he put forward a number of responses to me.2 In turn, I then
defended and further justified my reservations and objections on several occasions (some of
which became parts of my 2018 book A New German Idealism).3
This relatively recent debate between Žižek and me revolved around the issue of whether
quantum physics or neurobiology is the best scientific partner for the philosophical project of
forging an uncompromisingly materialist yet thoroughly anti-reductive theory of subjectivity.
Previously, I have argued against Žižek’s favoring of physics in the manner of a sympathetic
immanent critique. More precisely, I have maintained that Žižek’s privileging of quantum
mechanics is in danger of being at odds with both the anti-reductive and the materialist
commitments he and I share in common. Rooting the subject in the smallest building blocks of
the physical universe threatens to validate long-established reductive explanatory strategies vis-
1 (Adrian Johnston, Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2014, pg. 139-183)
2 (Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism, London: Verso, 2014, pg.
221-226)
(Slavoj Žižek, Disparities, London: Bloomsbury, 2016, pg. 38-53)
3 (Adrian Johnston, “Interview About Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary
Thinkers with Graham Harman for Edinburgh University Press,” Edinburgh University Press, April 2014, http://
www.euppublishing.com)
(Adrian Johnston, “Confession of a Weak Reductionist: Responses to Some Recent Criticisms of My Materialism,”
Neuroscience and Critique: Exploring the Limits of the Neurological Turn [ed. Jan De Vos and Ed Pluth], New
York: Routledge, 2015, pg. 141-170)
(Adrian Johnston, A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek, and Dialectical Materialism, New York: Columbia
University Press, 2018, pg. 129-186)

à-vis human mindedness. Treating the zero-level of the physical universe as proto-subjective
threatens to run contrary to materialism (dialectical or otherwise) by lending credence to
spiritualist panpsychism. The risk is that Žižek might end up unintentionally with a both-are-
worse combination of reductionism and spiritualism—and this despite his sincere anti-reductive
and materialist inclinations.
In the past couple of years, further reflection on these matters has led me to the
conviction that there is another dimension to this disagreement between Žižek and me yet to be
addressed with adequate thoroughness. Behind the confrontation between Žižek’s dialectical
materialist rendition of quantum physics and my transcendental materialist rendition of human
biology, a confrontation in which recent and contemporary science takes center stage, there lurks
an older philosophical tension. Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering that Žižek and I both are
especially passionate about the German idealists, this tension is most manifest between the
metaphysical systems of F.W.J. Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel, particularly the philosophies of
nature put forward by these two complexly entwined contemporaries.
My present intervention aims to revisit the back-and-forth between Žižek and me apropos
interfacing empirical science with materialist philosophy in light of the divergences separating
Schelling and Hegel. In both their overarching philosophical frameworks and their more specific
Naturphilosophien, these two German idealists, so I will contend, can and should be interpreted
as emergentists avant la lettre. That is to say, they both see reality as stratified into multiple
interlinked layers, with each layer having arisen from other layers preexisting it.
However, despite both arguably being emergentists, Schelling’s and Hegel’s
emergentisms differ in certain crucial respects. First and foremost, in terms of the basic

arrangement of emergent layers, Hegel presents a layer cake model, while Schelling offers a
layer doughnut one. What do I mean by this? Hegel’s Realphilosophie gets underway with the
“mechanics” of Naturphilosophie (beginning with objectively real space and time), proceeding
within the realm of nature through “physics” (including chemistry) and then onto “organics”
(consisting of geology, botany, and zoology). Hegelian Philosophy of Nature culminates with
the sentient animal organism as itself the transitional link to the next set of emergent layers,
namely, the strata of Geistesphilosophie (grouped into the three broad headings of subjective,
objective, and absolute mind/spirit [Geist]).
In short, Hegel puts forward a layer cake model in which the bottom layer is spatio-
temporal mechanics and the top layer is artistic-religious-philosophical Geist (with many layers
in-between these two extremes). Although the highest layer allows for all the layers below it to
be comprehended in their inherent intelligibility, there is no direct meeting up and merging
together of top and bottom layers—and this despite Hegel’s fondness for circle imagery. That is
to say, various sublations (Aufhebungen) do not annul significant differences-in-kind between the
mechanical and the spiritual.
Schelling’s configuration of emergent layers, by contrast with Hegel’s, is circular such
that the lowest and the highest layers are made to converge—nay, are essentially the same single
layer. One of the biggest bones of contention between Schelling and Hegel, starting with the
latter’s barbed remark about “the night in which all cows are black” in the preface to 1807’s
Phenomenology of Spirit,4 is the former’s enthusiastic embrace of Baruch Spinoza. The young
Schelling, during the mid-1790s-to-early-1800s period in which he is developing his
4 (G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit [trans. A.V. Miller], Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, pg. 9)

interconnected Naturphilosophie and Identiätsphilosophie, indeed relies heavily upon Spinozism,
particularly its distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata5 (a reliance persisting
well beyond the first stretch of his lengthy intellectual itinerary).6 The later Schelling, looking
back on his early Naturphilosophie in 1830, both admits this philosophy’s Spinozism as well as
5 (Baruch Spinoza, Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being, Spinoza: Complete Works [ed. Michael L.
Morgan; trans. Samuel Shirley], Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002, Chapter VIII [pg. 58], Chapter IX [pg. 58-59])
(Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Spinoza: Complete Works, Part I, Proposition 29, Scholium [pg. 234], Part I, Proposition
31 [pg. 234], Part I, Proposition 31, Proof [pg. 235])
(Baruch Spinoza, “The Letters: Letter 9: To the learned young man Simon de Vries, from B.d.S., February 1663
(?),” Spinoza: Complete Works, pg. 782)
6 (F.W.J. Schelling, “Of the I as the Principle of Philosophy, or On the Unconditional in Human Knowledge,” The
Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays (1794-1796) [trans. Fritz Marti], Lewisburg: Bucknell
University Press, 1980, pg. 69)
(F.W.J. Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature [trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath], Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988, pg. 15)
(F.W.J. Schelling, Presentation of My System of Philosophy, in J.G. Fichte and F.W.J. Schelling, The Philosophical
Rupture between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and Correspondence [trans. and ed. Michael G. Vater and
David W. Wood], Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012, pg. 145)
(F.W.J. Schelling, Anhang zu dem Aufsatz des Herrn Eschenmayer betreffend den wahren Begriff der
Naturphilosophie, und die richtige Art ihre Probleme aufzulösen, Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik: Zweyten
Bandes, erstes Heft, Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik [ed. F.W.J. Schelling], Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1969, pg.
127)
(F.W.J. Schelling, Fernere Darstellungen aus dem System der Philosophie, Neue Zeitschrift für speculative Physik:
Ersten Bandes, erstes Stück, Neue Zeitschrift für speculative Physik [ed. F.W.J. Schelling], Hildesheim: Georg
Olms, 1969, pg. 49)
(F.W.J. Schelling, Bruno, or, On the Natural and the Divine Principle of Things [trans. Michael G. Vater], Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1984, pg. 125)
(F.W.J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art [trans. Douglas W. Stott], Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1989, pg. 26)
(F.W.J. Schelling, “On Construction in Philosophy” [trans. Andrew A. Davis and Alexi I. Kukeljevic], Epoché, no.
12, 2008, pg. 272-273)
(F.W.J. Schelling, System der gesammten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere, Ausgewählte
Schriften: Band 3, 1804-1806 [ed. Manfred Frank], Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985, pg. 261)
(F.W.J. Schelling, “System of Philosophy in General and of the Philosophy of Nature in Particular,” Idealism and the
Endgame of Theory: Three Essays by F.W.J. Schelling [trans. Thomas Pfau], Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1994, pg. 153-154, 157-159, 168, 183-184, 186)
(F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophy and Religion [trans. Klaus Ottmann], Putnam: Springer, 2010, pg. 4, 8, 14)
(F.W.J. Schelling, Aphorismen über die Naturphilosophie, Ausgewählte Schriften: Band 3, 1804-1806, pg. 693-694,
705)
(F.W.J. Schelling, Statement on the True Relationship of the Philosophy of Nature to the Revised Fichtean Doctrine:
An Elucidation of the Former [trans. Dale E. Snow], Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018, pg. 29-32)
(F.W.J. Schelling, The Ages of the World, Book One: The Past (Original Version, 1811) [trans. Joseph P. Lawrence],
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019, pg. 105)
(F.W.J. Schelling, “Notes and Fragments to the First Book of The Ages of the World: The Past,” in Schelling, The
Ages of the World, Book One: The Past (Original Version, 1811), pg. 205, 224, 234, 238-239)
(F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophy of Revelation: The 1841-42 Berlin Lectures, Philosophy of Revelation (1841-42) and
Related Texts [trans. Klaus Ottmann], Thompson: Springer, 2020, pg. 108)
(F.W.J. Schelling, The Grounding of the Positive Philosophy [trans. Bruce Matthews], Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2007, pg. 206)
asserts that Spinozism must provide the foundation for any viable philosophical system7—with
Schelling also portraying his own treatment of human freedom as raising Spinozism to a superior
metaphysical form.8 Interestingly, Žižek, in 2020’s Hegel in a Wired Brain, elevates Spinoza to
enjoying an importance to Žižek’s own thinking comparable to that enjoyed by Immanuel Kant
and Hegel.9
That said, Schelling’s emergentism begins with the fluid “ground” (Grund) of a
primordial creative power (i.e., verb-like natura naturans) that then produces the fixed
“existence” (Existenz) of stable entities (i.e., noun-like natura naturata). According to Schelling,
human subjectivity, as the highest spiritual power, is nothing other than an irruption within the
field of existence of the ground-zero substratum underlying and generating this field. In
psychoanalytic terms, the subject is the return of repressed (Spinozistic) substance, the
resurfacing of natura naturans within the domain of natura naturata. As such, reaching the
highest Schellingian emergent layer amounts to reconnecting with the lowest one—hence a layer
doughnut model.
Tellingly, in nearly all of Žižek’s discussions of quantum mechanics, he explicitly appeals
to Schelling in particular (rather than Hegel, usually his preferred German idealist interlocutor).
The middle-period Schelling of 1809’s Freiheitschrift is Žižek’s favored reference in this vein.
What Žižek values most is this 1809 essay’s Grund-Existenz distinction. As I just implied, this
distinction amounts to a renaming of the Spinozistic contrast between natura naturans and
7 (F.W.J. Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie [ed. Walter E. Ehrhardt], Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-
Holzboog, 1989, pg. 71-72)
8 (Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie, pg. 73)
9 (Slavoj Žižek, Hegel in a Wired Brain, London: Bloomsbury, 2020, pg. 2)

natura naturata. Moreover, the Freiheitschrift clearly continues to uphold what I have
characterized as the layer doughnut model.10
Žižek’s most recent major philosophical work, 2020’s Sex and the Failed Absolute,
involves him putting forward his Schellingian speculative interpretation of quantum physics
(initially developed in 1996’s The Indivisible Remainder) as the very foundation of his dialectical
materialist theoretical framework. Given both this interpretation’s reaffirmed importance for
Žižek’s philosophical apparatus as well as the previous disagreements between him and me
regarding it, I feel it to be worthwhile on this occasion to reengage critically with Žižekian
quantum metaphysics, especially as elaborated in Sex and the Failed Absolute. Such
reengagement will afford me the opportunity both to deepen philosophically the debate between
Žižek and me involving natural science as well as to bring to light the contemporary relevance of
the Schelling-Hegel pair, particularly in terms of significant contrasts between their metaphysical
edifices.
To be more precise, after delineating Schelling’s and Hegel’s early anticipations of more
recent emergentisms, I herein will argue for the Hegelian layer cake and against the Schellingian
layer doughnut emergentist models. In so doing, I will assert that Schelling’s Spinoza-inspired
approach to nature-as-ground both fails actually to explain the genesis of subjectivity as well as
amounts to an implausible and not-at-all-materialist anthropomorphic panpsychism.
Correspondingly, I will indicate that Žižek would do better to stick to his habitual Hegelian guns
in philosophically appropriating natural scientific content. Doing so would enable him to
articulate a dialectical Naturphilosophie consistent with his core materialist commitments.
10(F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom [trans. Jeff Love and
Johannes Schmidt], Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006, pg. 21-22, 29-33)

Žižek’s long-standing choice of the “quantum physics with Schelling” combination is, I will
contend, inconsistent with the dialectical materialism Žižek continues valiantly to advocate.
Despite appearances to the contrary, Schelling is a faux ami of both materialism and naturalism.
As I will show, when he speaks of “matter” (Materie) and “nature” (Natur), he actually is
invoking God and Spirit, the intangible mind of a divine creator.
§2 Giving Layers Their Just Deserts: Schellingian and Hegelian Freiheitskämpfe
My first task here, proving that Schelling and Hegel are emergentists avant la lettre, is
not too difficult. Nonetheless, the accomplishment of this task is called for up front due to the
likelihood of facing two types of resistance to aligning Schelling and/or Hegel with some sort of
emergentism. The first type is a general history-of-ideas worry about anachronism, since the
explicit forwarding of the notion of emergence as per emergentism(s) postdates the era of
German idealism. I believe that the textual evidence I soon will put forward more than
adequately allays any concerns to the effect that attributing emergentist sensibilities to Schelling
and Hegel is at all anachronistic. In fact, this evidence makes a compelling case for identifying
Schelling and Hegel as two key forefathers of emergentist thinking.
The second type of resistance to interpreting Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophies as
involving emergentism(s) is tied to construals of them as metaphysicians of a static, eternal
Absolute. If the ontological foundations of their systems is indeed some kind of timeless,
unchanging One-All, then any and all emergences could feature in their systems only as
epiphenomena qua mere misleading appearances. Although such commonplace impressions of
Schellingian and/or Hegelian metaphysics cannot be thoroughly scrutinized here—doing so

would derail my focus on the Schelling-Hegel divergence apropos emergentism as it relates to
the Žižek of interest to me in this context—suffice it for now to say that I am convinced these
impressions amount to thoroughly inaccurate misimpressions. Both Schelling and Hegel labor
mightily to integrate temporal, genetic, and historical dimensions, ones in which emergences can
and do feature, into the very foundations of their metaphysical edifices (although I believe that
Schelling ultimately fails to achieve such integrations and, along with them, a true emergentism).
Žižek, particularly when reflecting upon quantum physics, heavily favors the middle-
period Schelling of 1809 to 1815. He especially prefers the Freiheitschrift (1809) and the drafts
of the unfinished Weltalter project (1811-1815). This is slightly strange, given that Schelling’s
Naturphilosophie, the component of his corpus evidently most relevant to a philosophical
dialogue with the natural sciences, is developed with the greatest explicitness and detail in his
earlier period. In fact, it is during a stretch from roughly 1797 through 1808 that Schelling
recurrently devotes intense efforts to elaborating a Philosophy of Nature. I will deal with the
emergentism of the middle-period Schelling when I eventually address Žižek’s Schellingian
rendition of recent physics. And, as my illumination of the nature-philosophical emergentism of
the young Schelling immediately to follow will substantiate, the modeling of emergence in such
later texts as the Freiheitschrift and Weltalter drafts is based on Schelling’s pre-1809 work (and
this contrary to the tendency to see Schelling as a thoroughly protean thinker continually
abandoning his prior positions).
The origins of Schelling’s emergentism are to be found in his earliest texts of the
mid-1790s, even before the beginnings of his Naturphilosophie with the 1797 first edition of his
Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature. These initial glimmerings of emergentist sensibilities in the

young Schelling’s pre-1797 writings surface in connection with Spinozism. Of course, Spinoza
arguably is the figure who soon becomes the avowed pivotal forerunner of the Schellingian
philosophies of Nature and Identity—with the entwined elaborations of these philosophies
occupying Schelling throughout the late-1790s and early-1800s.
Schelling, in the sixth of his 1795 Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism,
describes Spinoza as being “troubled by… the riddle of the world, the question of how the
absolute could come out of itself and oppose to itself a world?”11 A footnote to this remark
asserts that this riddle remained “unintelligible” to and unanswerable by Spinoza himself.12
Schelling’s concerns here dovetail with his close friend Friedrich Hölderlin’s contemporaneous
musings as expressed in the latter’s 1795 fragment “Über Urtheil und Seyn”13 (with this
fragment, in its playing off of Spinozistic sympathies against the subjectivist transcendental
idealism of J.G. Fichte, foreshadowing Schelling’s eventual rupture with Fichte in 1801).
One fairly could interpret the entirety of Schelling’s oeuvre, the full sweep of his
meandering output up until his death in 1854, as gravitating around this fundamental
philosophical problem Schelling inherits from Spinoza in particular: how and why the
singularity of the Absolute (whether as God, Nature, Infinity, Identity, Indifference, or whatever
other names one gives it) gives rise out of itself to the plurality of non-Absolute entities and
11 (F.W.J. Schelling, “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism,” The Unconditional in Human Knowledge,
pg. 173-175)
12 (Schelling, “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism,” pg. 174)
13 (Friedrich Hölderlin, “Über Urtheil und Seyn” [trans. H.S. Harris], in H.S. Harris, Hegel’s Development I:
Toward the Sunlight, 1770-1801, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972, pg. 515-516)
(F.W.J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism [trans. Peter Heath], Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1978, pg. 135-136)

10
events.14 Or, one could ask, what account is there of the emergence of the Many out of the One?
Posing Schelling’s line of interrogation of Spinozism in Spinoza’s own terms, how and why does
the unity of substance refract itself into the plurality of attributes and modes? Schelling’s
extensive philosophical body of work, including and especially its anticipations of emergentism,
ought to be understood as motivated by this red thread of metaphysical inquiry. As Schelling
puts it in a polemic against Fichte in 1806, this Spinoza-bequeathed problematic is “the great
question” (die große Frage).15 In another polemic from 1811, one directed against F.H. Jacobi,
Schelling calls this same problematic “the cross of philosophy” (das Kreuz der Philosophie).16
What is more, 1797’s Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, the first elaboration of Schellingian
Naturphilosophie, already pointedly raises this Spinozistic “great question.”17
Informed by Schelling’s immersion in study of the natural sciences circa 1796, Ideas for
a Philosophy of Nature reflects an appreciation by Schelling of eighteenth-century
historicizations of nature. Well before Charles Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species,
14 (Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, pg. 36)

(Schelling, “On Construction in Philosophy,” pg. 285)
(F.W.J. Schelling, Propädeutik der Philosophie, Ausgewählte Schriften: Band 3, 1804-1806, pg. 105-106)
(Schelling, The Ages of the World, Book One: The Past (Original Version, 1811), pg. 74)
(Schelling, “Notes and Fragments to the First Book of The Ages of the World: The Past,” pg. 211, 228)
(F.W.J. Schelling, Der Monotheismus, Sämmtliche Werke [ed. K.F.A. Schelling], zweiter Band, Stuttgart and
Augsburg: Cotta, 1857, pg. 39)
(F.W.J. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy [trans. Andrew Bowie], Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994, pg. 71-72)
(Xavier Tilliette, Schelling, une philosophie en devenir, 1: Le système vivant, Paris: Vrin, 1992 [second edition], pg.
136, 458)
(Bernd-Olaf Küppers, Natur als Organismus: Schellings frühe Naturphilosophie und ihre Bedeutung für die
moderne Biologie, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992, pg. 52)
(Jean-Marie Vaysse, Totalité et subjectivité: Spinoza dans l’idéalisme allemand, Paris: Vrin, 1994, pg. 152)
(S.J. McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious, New York: Routledge, 2012, pg. 86)
15 (F.W.J. Schelling, Darlegung Des Wahren Verhältnisses Der Naturphilosophie Zu Der Verbesserten Fichte'schen
Lehre: Eine Erläuterungschrift der ersten, Tübingen: Cotta, 1806, pg. 87)
(Schelling, Statement on the True Relationship of the Philosophy of Nature to the Revised Fichtean Doctrine, pg. 68)
16 (F.W.J. Schelling, Denkmal der Schrift von den göttlichen Dingen ec. des Herrn Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi und
der ihm in derselben gemachten Beschuldigung eines absichtlich tauschenden, Lüge redenden Atheismus, Friedrich
Wilhelm Joseph von Schellings sämmtliche Werke, Band 8 [ed. K.F.A. Schelling], Stuttgart-Augsburg: Cotta, 1861,
pg. 77)
17 (Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, pg. 27-28, 46-47)

11
geological and biological natural histories known to Schelling and his contemporaries (including
Hegel) already eroded long-established traditional pictures of nature as an ahistorical realm of
eternally recurring cycles. Indeed, in 1802’s On University Studies, Schelling associates geology
with “the history of nature” (Historie der Natur selbst),18 an association resurfacing in his later
work too.19 This same 1802 Schelling also declares more sweepingly that, “A truly historical
construction of organic nature would give us the real, objective aspect of the universal science of
nature” (Die historische Konstruktion der organischen Natur würde, in sich vollendet, die reale
und objektive Seite der allgemeinen Wissenschaft derselben).20 The 1811 first draft of the
Weltalter project also emphasizes the significance and profundity of recognizing the depths of
nature’s history21 (with geology’s “ages of the world” inspiring the Weltalter endeavor22).
Relatedly, the notes and fragments for this 1811 first draft go so far as to identify history as the
“highest science”23 (an identification repeated in the 1813 second draft of the Weltalter
project24). Even later, in 1830’s Einleitung in die Philosophie, the history of nature is identified
as also being the history of humanity, with the latter as an outgrowth of the former.25 And, the
registration of the becoming-historical of nature itself already shows up in multiple ways within
the pages of Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature.
18 (F.W.J. Schelling, Vorlesungen über die Methode (Lehrart) des academischen Studiums, Hamburg: Felix Meiner,
1990, pg. 123)
(F.W.J. Schelling, On University Studies [trans. E.S. Morgan], Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966, pg. 128)
19 (F.W.J. Schelling, “Inaugural Lecture (Munich, 26 November 1827),” Philosophy of Revelation (1841-42) and
Related Texts, pg. 24-25)
20 (Schelling, Vorlesungen über die Methode (Lehrart) des academischen Studiums, pg. 137)
(Schelling, On University Studies, pg. 142)
21 (Schelling, The Ages of the World, Book One: The Past (Original Version, 1811), pg. 60, 63, 67)
22 (Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie, pg. 132-133)
(Hans Jörg Sandkühler, “Natur und geschichtlicher Prozeß: Von Schellings Philosophie der Natur und der Zweiten
Natur zur Wissenschaft der Geschichte,” Natur und geschichtlicher Prozeß: Studien zur Naturphilosophie F.W.J.
Schellings [ed. Hans Jörg Sandkühler], Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984, pg. 21)
23 (Schelling, “Notes and Fragments to the First Book of The Ages of the World: The Past,” pg. 186)
24 (F.W.J. Schelling, Ages of the World (second draft, 1813) [trans. Judith Norman], in Slavoj Žižek and F.W.J.
Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997, pg. 113-114)
12
The Schelling of this 1797 text speaks both of “a natural history of our mind” (eine
Naturlehre unseres Geistes)26 (suggesting that the transcendental subject itself is a product of
historical nature) as well as of “a hierarchy of life in Nature” (eine Stufenfolge des Lebens in der
Natur)27 (with the mind produced by natural history at the pinnacle of this hylozoistic order). In
this same work, he likewise talks about the immanent genesis of individuated minded
subjectivity out of anonymous worldly objectivity.28 Furthermore, Schelling posits a material
basis as the original foundation of all these generative processes—“Matter is the general seed-
corn of the universe, in which is hidden everything that unfolds in the later developments” (Die
Materie ist das allgemeine Samenkorn des Universums, worin alles verhüllt ist, was in den
spätern Entwicklungen sich entfaltet).29 As will be seen later, recourse to Spinoza’s natura
naturans lurks behind the word “matter” (die Materie) here. This word thereby is somewhat
misleading—and this due to the fact that “matter” just as easily, and more often, connotes the
opposite, namely, Spinoza’s natura naturata.
Despite whatever twists, turns, and discrepancies in Schelling’s claims after 1797, these
just-cited assertions from Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, itself inaugurating Schellingian
Naturphilosophie proper, are echoed repeatedly in subsequent texts. To begin with, the emphasis
26 (F.W.J. Schelling, Einleiting zu: Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur als Einleitung in das Studium dieser
Wissenschaft, Ausgewählte Schriften: Band 1, 1794-1800 [ed. Manfred Frank], Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1985, pg. 277)
(Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, pg. 30)
27 (Schelling, Einleiting zu: Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur als Einleitung in das Studium dieser Wissenschaft,
pg. 284)
29 (F.W.J. Schelling, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur als Einleitung in das Studium dieser Wissenschaft, Berlin:
Holzinger, 2016, pg. 319)

13
on the genetic, on movements of (self-)stratifying becoming, remains constant.30 These geneses
give rise to what arguably are emergent properties and phenomena,31 with Schelling referring to
such unfurling levels and layers as “stages” (Stufen) and/or “potencies” (Potenzen).32 In this
vein, 1799’s First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature identifies as “the fundamental
task of all nature philosophy: TO DERIVE THE DYNAMIC GRADUATED SEQUENCE OF
STAGES IN NATURE” (die Grundausgabe der ganzen Naturphilosophie: die dynamische
Stufenfolge in der Natur abzuleiten).33 This same Schelling refers to “a dynamically graduated
scale in Nature” (eine dynamische Stufenfolge in der Natur)34 and announces that one of the
primary tasks of Naturphilosophie is to illuminate “the intermediate links in the chain of Nature”
30 (F.W.J. Schelling, Allgemeine Deduction des dynamischen Processes oder der Categorieen der Physik, Zeitschrift
für spekulative Physik: Ersten Bandes, erstes Heft, Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik, pg. 103-104)
(F.W.J. Schelling, Allgemeine Deduction des dynamischen Processes (Beschluss der im ersten Heft abgebrochenen
Abhandlung), Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik: Ersten Bandes, zweites Heft, Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik, pg.
83-84)
(Schelling, The Ages of the World, Book One: The Past (Original Version, 1811), pg. 60, 67-68)
(Schelling, “Notes and Fragments to the First Book of The Ages of the World: The Past,” pg. 218)
(Steffen Dietzsch, “Geschichtsphilosophische Dimensionen der Naturphilosophie Schellings,” Natur und
geschichtlicher Prozeß, pg. 246)
(Patrick Cerutti, La philosophie de Schelling: Repères, Paris: Vrin, 2019, pg. 111)
31 (Schelling, Anhang zu dem Aufsatz des Herrn Eschenmayer betreffend den wahren Begriff der Naturphilosophie,
und die richtige Art ihre Probleme aufzulösen, pg. 120)
(Manfred Buhr, “Geschichtliche Vernunft und Naturgeschichte: »Neue« Anmerkungen zur Differenz des
Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie,” Natur und geschichtlicher Prozeß, pg. 227)
(John H. Zammito, The Gestation of German Biology: Philosophy and Physiology from Stahl to Schelling, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2018, pg. 326)
32 (Schelling, Presentation of My System of Philosophy, pg. 194)
(Schelling, “Notes and Fragments to the First Book of The Ages of the World: The Past,” pg. 206, 217, 232-233,
235)
(Schelling, Ages of the World (second draft, 1813), pg. 156-157, 177-178)
(Schelling, Philosophy of Revelation, pg. 51)
33 (F.W.J. Schelling, Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, Ausgewählte Schriften: Band 1,
1794-1800, pg. 322)
(F.W.J. Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature [trans. Keith R. Peterson], Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2004, pg. 6)
34 (F.W.J. Schelling, Einleitung zu dem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, oder, über den Begriff der
speculativen Physik und die innere Organisation eines Systems dieser Wissenschaft, Ausgewählte Schriften: Band 1,
1794-1800, pg. 370)
(F.W.J. Schelling, “Introduction to the Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, or, On the Concept of
Speculative Physics and the Internal Organization of a System of This Science,” First Outline of a System of the
Philosophy of Nature, pg. 215)
14
(aller Zwischenglieder im Zusammenhang der Natur)35 conjoining the Alpha and Omega of
nature’s dynamical “Stufenfolge.” Similarly, in a 1801 Jena lecture, Schelling portrays nature as
evolutionary—“everything is just evolution in living nature!” (in der lebenden Natur ist alles nur
Evolution!).36 He continues to think of nature as evolutionary throughout his career.37
Furthermore, Schelling, throughout the late 1790s and early 1800s, remains adamant that
real material nature is the ontological ground-zero for genetic processes or emergences.38 As he
puts it in his 1801 Presentation of My System of Philosophy, “Matter is the prime existent” (Die
Materie ist das primum Existens).39 Likewise, in Schelling’s 1804 Würzburg lectures on the
Philosophy of Nature, he stresses the metaphysical primacy of “the Earth principle” (das
Erdprincip).40 Already in 1799, Schelling vehemently insists that, “the ideal must arise out of
the real and admit of explanation from it” (das Ideelle… aus dem Reellen entspringen und aus
ihm erklärt werden muß).41 The real in question here is initially material nature and the ideal is
35 (Schelling, Einleitung zu dem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, oder, über den Begriff der
speculativen Physik und die innere Organisation eines Systems dieser Wissenschaft, pg. 347)
(Schelling, “Introduction to the Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, or, On the Concept of Speculative
Physics and the Internal Organization of a System of This Science,” pg. 199)
36 (F.W.J. Schelling, Hauptmomente aus Schellings Vortrage nach der Stunde aufgezeichnet [ed. Ignaz Paul Vital
Troxler], in F.W.J. Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel, Schellings und Hegels erste absolute Metaphysik (1801-1802) [ed.
Klaus Düsing], Köln: Jürgen Dinter, 1988, pg. 33-34)
(Marie-Luise Heuser-Keßler, Die Produktivität der Natur: Schellings Naturphilosophie und das neue Paradigma
der Selbstorganisation in den Naturwissenschaften, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1986, pg. 103)
37 (Schelling, Philosophy of Revelation, pg. 211)
(Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002, pg. 11, 211, 225, 298-299, 306)
38 (Schelling, Presentation of My System of Philosophy, pg. 167, 169)
(Schelling, Allgemeine Deduction des dynamischen Processes oder der Categorieen der Physik, pg. 109)
(Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, pg. 118)
(Judith E. Schlanger, Schelling et la réalité finie: Essai sur la philosophie de la Nature et de l’Identité, Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1966, pg. 63)
39 (F.W.J. Schelling, Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie, Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik: Zweyten
Bandes, zweytes Heft, Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik, pg. 37)
(Schelling, Presentation of My System of Philosophy, pg. 163)
40 (Schelling, System der gesammten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere, pg. 379)
41 (Schelling, Einleitung zu dem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, oder, über den Begriff der
speculativen Physik und die innere Organisation eines Systems dieser Wissenschaft, pg. 340)

15
ultimately transcendental subjectivity.42 The Philosophy of Nature is charged with furnishing the
clarification (die Erklärung) of this rise of ideality out of reality, the springing (entspringen) of
the former out of the latter.43
Schelling views nature’s sequence of stages (Stufenfolge) as exhibiting a clear
hierarchical order. As just observed, pre/non-human materiality or earthiness is at the bottom of
this hierarchy as the initial moment, form, or incarnation of nature. At the other extreme, the
uppermost strata in the succession of natural levels and layers are those of life, sentience, and, at
the very topmost tier, sapience.
In an ordering later also reflected in Hegel’s Naturphilosophie (as per the second volume
of his three-volume Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences), Schelling sketches a
hierarchical Stufenfolge running from lowest to highest as follows: the physical, the chemical,
the organic, the sentient, and, finally, the sapient.44 In the next section of this intervention, I will
scrutinize the first moment of this series, the physical as Schelling understands it, in a critical
manner. For now, I will highlight two phase transitions, so to speak, in the Schellingian natural
hierarchy: first, the move from the inorganic (encompassing both physics and inorganic
chemistry) to the organic; and, second, the move from animal sentience to human sapience.
Schelling repeatedly identifies the organic as a “higher potency” (höhern Potenz) in
relation to the inorganic.45 However, he carefully stipulates, as he puts it in the First Outline of a
System of the Philosophy of Nature, that, “life is a product of a potency higher than the merely
42 (Schelling, Allgemeine Deduction des dynamischen Processes (Beschluss der im ersten Heft abgebrochenen
Abhandlung), pg. 84)
43 (Schelling, Ages of the World (second draft, 1813), pg. 180)
44 (Schelling, Hauptmomente aus Schellings Vortrage nach der Stunde aufgezeichnet, pg. 57)
(Schelling, “Notes and Fragments to the First Book of The Ages of the World: The Past,” pg. 249-250)
45 (Schelling, Allgemeine Deduction des dynamischen Processes oder der Categorieen der Physik, pg. 102)

16
chemical, but without being supernatural.”46 This 1799 stipulation signals that Schelling not
only is an emergentist avant la lettre—the very notion of “potencies” or “powers” already signals
this—but aspires to be a strong-qua-anti-reductive (rather than weak-qua-reductive) emergentist.
Indeed, Schelling proposes that each and every emergent proper power/potency of nature enjoys
a degree of relative absoluteness in the sense of self-sufficiency as both ontological and
epistemological irreducibility to any other power/potency.47
For Schelling, the organic risks appearing “supernatural” in relation to the natural if and
when the latter is taken in the sense of the inorganic, of the lower levels of physics and
chemistry. This appearance is due to life coming to exhibit structures and dynamics (such as its
own mereological [self-]organizations and teleological final causalities) not exhibited by merely
physical or chemical entities and events. Also in First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of
Nature, Schelling indeed maintains that sentient organisms in particular (i.e., non-human
animals) achieve a degree of autonomy, of self-determination, over-and-above their physical and
chemical determinants (with these determinants serving as underlying natural conditions for
organisms coming into being).48 In 1800’s System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling even
goes so far as to portray “organic nature” as “at war against an inorganic nature” (im Kampf
gegen eine anorganische Natur).49 Yet, despite sentient organisms’ relative (but not absolute)
freedom from the immediate efficient-causal influences of physical and chemical nature, the
organic both arises out of the inorganic and continues to be affected by the latter. The war of
46 (Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, pg. 68)

47 (Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, pg. 14-15)
49 (F.W.J. Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus, Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2000, pg. 163)
(Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, pg. 125)

17
organic against inorganic nature is a matter of nature being at war with itself,50 with the First
Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature and its separate introductory presentation
characterizing life as a matter of nature contra nature.51 Emergentism, not matter how strong, is
still not dualism.
Furthermore, Schelling proceeds to identify the species homo sapiens as marking another
major emergent rupture, involving spirit’s “struggle for freedom” (Befreiungskampf) from
nature,52 within nature’s “sequence of stages”—with the genetic jump from the inorganic to the
organic being a preceding major emergent rupture (although, as I soon will demonstrate, the leap
from the inorganic to the organic is not the first Schellingian leap, despite appearing to be so).
Schelling identifies humanity as demarcating the end of animality and the beginning of a natural
stage (Stufe) moving beyond nature’s organic strata—“the human structure (der menschlichen
Bildung)… because it marks the terminal point (die vollendetste) in the series, stands at the limit
of the organic world (der Grenze der Organisation).”53
Likewise, Schelling holds up the human central nervous system as the most glorious
product of organic nature’s productivity. In 1801’s Presentation of My System of Philosophy, he
asserts that, “the brain (das Gehirn)… is the highest product (das höchste Product),”54 promptly
adding poetically that, “Just as the plant bursts forth in the bloom, so the entire earth blossoms in

52 (F.W.J. Schelling, “Treatise Explicatory of the Idealism in the Science of Knowledge,” Idealism and the Endgame
of Theory, pg. 93-94)
(Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life, pg. 136)
53 (Schelling, Vorlesungen über die Methode (Lehrart) des academischen Studiums, pg. 136)
54 (Schelling, Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie, pg. 123)

18
the human brain, which is the most sublime flower of the entire process of organic
metamorphosis” (Wie die Pflanze in der Blüthe sich schließt, so die ganze Erde im Gehirn des
Menschen, welches die höchste Blüthe der ganzen organischen Metamorphose ist).55 In tandem
with this, Schelling, in 1807’s Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Künste zu der Natur, depicts
human consciousness as a sort of phase transition through which animal sentience reaches its
fullest flowering and, in so doing, tips over into more-than-animal sapience.56 In 1830, Schelling
depicts the fullest-fledged subjectivity of homo sapiens as nature achieving its own liberation
and self-spiritualization.57
In Schelling’s account, human beings represent the moment of the ideal bursting forth out
of the real.58 By his reckoning, humans are the highest ideal potency at the very apex of the
natural Stufenfolge.59 Especially during the period from 1797 to 1801 when Schelling is
struggling to renegotiate his relationship with Fichte-the-transcendental-idealist in light of
Schelling’s invention of Naturphilosophie—Fichte’s refusal to admit the validity of the
Philosophy of Nature eventually prompts Schelling to break with his former mentor—this
transition from real to ideal is meant to be reflected in the division of philosophy into
Naturphilosophie (foregrounding the real) and transcendental idealism (foregrounding the
ideal).60 Several times, Schelling emphasizes that minded and like-minded conscious and self-
55 (Schelling, Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie, pg. 124)

56 (F.W.J. Schelling, Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Künste zu der Natur, Ausgewählte Schriften: Band 2,
1801-1803 [ed. Manfred Frank], Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985, pg. 589-590)
59 (Schelling, System der gesammten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere, pg. 451-453, 500-501)
(Schelling, Ages of the World (second draft, 1813), pg. 144)
(Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie, pg. 50)
(Schelling, Philosophy of Revelation, pg. 51-52, 77-78, 174-175)
(Schlanger, Schelling et la réalité finie, pg. 66-67)
Abhandlung), pg. 84)

19
conscious sapient subjectivity, as per Kantian and Fichtean transcendental idealism, is the highest
emergent power/potency arising out of a dynamic, historicized nature, as per his Philosophy of
Nature.61 As Dieter Sturma suggests, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is fundamentally motivated
by a desire to account for the transcendental subjectivity of his immediate predecessors.62
Sturma soon goes on to add, “since nature is temporally prior, then subjectivity itself… acquires
the form of an intrinsically altered nature.”63
1800’s System of Transcendental Idealism is a transitional work in which Schelling
attempts to compromise with Fichte so as to smooth over what the latter perceives as a
fundamental, insurmountable incompatibility between transcendental idealism and
Naturphilosophie. Therein, Schelling portrays transcendental and natural philosophies as
equiprimordial, parallel, and supportive of each other.64 In this portrayal, transcendental idealism
61 (Schelling, Anhang zu dem Aufsatz des Herrn Eschenmayer betreffend den wahren Begriff der Naturphilosophie,
und die richtige Art ihre Probleme aufzulösen, pg. 121, 128-129)
(F.W.J. Schelling, Der Ferneren Darstellungen aus dem System der Philosophie, Andrer Theil, Neue Zeitschrift für
speculative Physik: Ersten Bandes, zweites Stück, Neue Zeitschrift für speculative Physik, pg. 51)
(Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, “Zur Dialektik des Verhältnisses von Mensch und Natur: Eine
philosophiegeschichtliche Problemskizze zu Kant und Schelling,” Natur und geschichtlicher Prozeß, pg. 162)
(Dietzsch, “Geschichtsphilosophische Dimensionen der Naturphilosophie Schellings,” pg. 241-242)
(Wolfram Hogrebe, Prädikation und Genesis: Metaphysik als Fundamentalheuristik im Ausgang von Schellings
»Die Weltalter«, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989, pg. 23-24, 118)
(Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction, New York: Routledge, 1993, pg.
34)
(Rudolf Brandner, Natur und Subjektivität: Zum Verständnis des Menschseins im Anschluß an Schellings
Grundlegung der Naturphilosophie, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002, pg. 52)
(Markus Gabriel, Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism, London: Continuum, 2011, pg. xix-xx, 3,
60)
(Freud Rush, “Schelling’s critique of Hegel,” Interpreting Schelling: Critical Essays [ed. Lara Ostaric], Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2014, pg. 222-223)
(Zammito, The Gestation of German Biology, pg. 319)
62 (Dieter Sturma, “The Nature of Subjectivity: The Critical and Systematic Function of Schelling’s Philosophy of
Nature,” The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel [ed. Sally Sedgwick],
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pg. 219-220)
63 (Sturma, “The Nature of Subjectivity,” pg. 223)
64 (Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, pg. 2-3, 7)
(Schelling, Anhang zu dem Aufsatz des Herrn Eschenmayer betreffend den wahren Begriff der Naturphilosophie,

20
prioritizes the subjective ideal as epistemologically generative of the objective real, whereas the
Philosophy of Nature prioritizes the objective real as ontologically generative of the subjective
ideal.65 However, both before and after the System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling denies
this balanced fifty-fifty weighting of importance between the transcendental and the natural,
clearly emphasizing the ontological and epistemological primacy of Naturphilosophie over
transcendental idealism.66 It should not have come as a shock to him that Fichte was unmoved
by the suspicious olive branch extended in Schelling’s 1800 text.
This noted, a certain continuity between the System of Transcendental Idealism and the
Philosophy of Nature of the late 1790s and early 1800s warrants attention. By 1800, as seen,
Schelling already has situated the subjectivity of transcendental idealism at the highest levels of
nature’s hierarchical succession of stages. In this picture, the transcendental subject is the
ultimate emergent product of a dynamic nature producing a whole series of emergent strata
leading up to the genesis of this subject. Much later, in 1834, Schelling characterizes this as a
matter of grounding “psychology” in ontology.67
The System of Transcendental Idealism then further enriches this picture by introducing a
series of genetic levels and layers within the structure of transcendental subjectivity, namely, by
narrating processes in and through which this subject unfolds itself and achieves self-
65 (Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, pg. 7, 14)

Physics and the Internal Organization of a System of This Science,” pg. 193, 196-197)
66 (Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, pg. 41-42. 53-55)
und die richtige Art ihre Probleme aufzulösen, pg. 128-129)
(Schelling, Der Ferneren Darstellungen aus dem System der Philosophie, Andrer Theil, pg. 51)
(Schelling, On University Studies, pg. 122-123)
(Schelling, System der gesammten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere, pg. 504)
(Schelling, Philosophy and Religion, pg. 8)
67 (F.W.J. Schelling, Vorrede zu einer philosophischen Schrift des Herrn Victor Cousin, Ausgewählte Schriften:
Band 4, 1807-1834 [ed. Manfred Frank], Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985, pg. 626)

21
consciousness68 (Schelling’s 1800 treatise indeed anticipates certain core aspects of Hegel’s 1807
Phenomenology of Spirit). Ideal subjectivity, as well as the real nature from which it allegedly
emerges, contains emergent dimensions within itself. The System of Transcendental Idealism
appeals to Kant’s own hints about the genetic dimensions of the “I”69 and characterizes
transcendental philosophy properly construed as “a history of self-consciousness, having various
epochs” (eine Geschichte des Selbstbewußtseins, die verschiedene Epochen hat).70 These
“epochs” can be understood as the equivalent within transcendental subjectivity of emergent
powers/potencies within nature.
Despite portraying the ideality of transcendental subjectivity as arising from the reality/
materiality of nature, the anti-reductive aspirations of Schelling’s variety of (proto-)emergentism
is on display in his System of Transcendental Idealism. Therein, he asserts that, “the spirit is
everlastingly an island, never to be reached from matter without a leap” (der Geist eine ewige
Insel ist, zu der man durch noch so viele Umwege von der Materie aus nie ohne Sprung gelangen
kann).71 The notion of “leap” (Sprung) suggests that “spirit” (Geist as ideal subjectivity) marks a
break with material nature produced within and out of nothing other than material nature itself.
Schelling’s naturalist account of anthropogenesis hence seemingly would rely upon a strong
68 (Schelling, “Treatise Explicatory of the Idealism in the Science of Knowledge,” pg. 104)
69 (Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, pg. 31)
(Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View [trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell], Carbondale and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978, pg. 9-10, 85, 176)
(Adrian Johnston, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive, Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 2005, pg. 79-93)
(Adrian Johnston, “Meta-Transcendentalism and Error-First Ontology: The Cases of Gilbert Simondon and
Catherine Malabou,” New Realism and Contemporary Philosophy [ed. Gregor Kroupa and Jure Simoniti], London:
Bloomsbury, 2020, pg. 145-178)
70 (Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus, pg. 67)
71 (Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus, pg. 98)

22
variant of emergentism (with Hegel’s emergentism also definitely being an extremely anti-
reductive sort).
In terms of significant overlaps between Schelling’s and Hegel’s narratives apropos
relations between Natur und Geist, Schelling repeatedly describes a grand-scale arc in which the
entirety of nature eventually generates out of itself sentient animals and sapient humans through
which it comes to experience and even know itself.72 Nature, via its unfurling emergences,
transition from being in-itself (an sich) to for-itself (für sich) once it produces from within itself
sentience and sapience.73 This Schellingian story anticipates and likely inspires Hegel’s
substance-also-as-subject motif recurring throughout his mature works.74
Having established Schelling’s proto-emergentist credentials, I turn now to doing the
same for Hegel. However, my task in Hegel’s case is much easier—and this for several reasons.
To begin with, I already argue in detail for an emergentism-avant-la-lettre in the Hegelian edifice
on prior occasions.75
72 (Schelling, Philosophy of Revelation, pg. 158-160, 162, 222)

Abhandlung), pg. 86-87)
(Schelling, Hauptmomente aus Schellings Vortrage nach der Stunde aufgezeichnet, pg. 36)
(Schelling, System der gesammten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere, pg. 442, 444, 466-467)
(Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie, pg. 42-43)
74 (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, pg. 9-10)
(G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind: Part Three of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences [trans. A.V.
Miller], Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, §573 [pg. 309-310])
(G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on Logic: Berlin, 1831 [trans. Clark Butler], Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008,
§212-213 [pg. 212], §235 [pg. 227])
(Johnston, Adventures in Transcendental Materialism, pg. 23-49)
(Johnston, A New German Idealism, pg. 11-37)
(Adrian Johnston, Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume Two: A Weak Nature Alone, Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2019, pg. 15-69)
(Adrian Johnston, “The Difference Between Fichte’s and Hegel’s Systems of Philosophy: A Response to Robert
Pippin,” Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, special issue: “Hegel and the Sciences: Philosophy of Nature in
the Twenty-First Century” [ed. Filip Niklas], no. 31, 2019, pg. 1-68)
75 (Johnston, Adventures in Transcendental Materialism, pg. 23-49)
(Johnston, Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume Two, pg. 15-69)
(Johnston, “The Difference Between Fichte’s and Hegel’s Systems of Philosophy,” pg. 1-68)

23
Furthermore, as I have hinted intermittently throughout the preceding, I see Hegel as
embracing and carrying forward multiple features of the early Schelling’s Naturphilosophie in
particular (and this despite him also being quite critical of it76). These features include: the
sequencing of the dynamic stages of nature (physical, chemical, organic, sentient, and sapient)77;
treating transcendental subjectivity itself as a product of pre/non-subjective being, with
transcendental idealism in need of an underlying nature-philosophical ontology; and,
comprehending the subject as substance sensing and grasping itself. That is to say, Hegel shares
with Schelling—he continues to do so even after these former friends and allies become
estranged from each other following the publication of the Phenomenology of Spirit—
commitment to a proto-emergentism as central to a partly naturalistic ontology beyond Kantian
and Fichtean transcendental idealisms (with their anti-naturalisms). As for the nonetheless
significant differences between Schelling and Hegel, I will address those later in connection with
my considerations apropos Žižek.
My account of Hegelian emergentism, in a context in which Schellingian emergentism
also is under examination, will focus on the second volume of Hegel’s Encyclopedia, namely, the
Philosophy of Nature. However, the earlier Science of Logic already contains an important
remark relevant to my concerns here. Near the end of “The Doctrine of Being,” during the
discussion of the dialectics of quality, quantity, and measure, Hegel turns his attention to the old
76 (G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature: Part Two of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences [trans. A.V.
Miller], Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, pg. 1, §246 [pg. 10], §359 [pg. 385-388])
(G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume Three [trans. E.S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson],
New York: Humanities Press, 1955, pg. 529, 541-545)
77 (G.W.F. Hegel, The Jena System, 1804-5: Logic and Metaphysics [ed. John W. Burbidge and George di
Giovanni], Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986, pg. 185)

24
bit of supposed wisdom according to which “nature does not make leaps” (natura non facit
saltum).
Hegel proceeds to observe that, “Every birth and death (Alle Geburt und Tod), far from
being a progressive gradualness (eine fortgesetzte Allmählichkeit), is an interruption (ein
Abbrechen) of it and is the leap (der Sprung) from a quantitative into a qualitative alteration.”78
He continues:
It is said, natura non facit saltum; and ordinary thinking when it has to grasp a
coming-to-be or a ceasing-to-be (ein Entstehen oder Vergehen), fancies that it has
done so by representing it as a gradual emergence or disappearance (ein allmähliches
Hervorgehen oder Verschwinden). But… the alterations of being in general are not
only the transition of one magnitude into another, but a transition from quality into
quantity and vice versa, a becoming-other which is an interruption of gradualness
(ein Abbrechen des Allmählichen) and the production of something qualitatively
different from the reality which preceded it.79
Hegel immediately goes on to mention the familiar example of H2O as qualitatively solid, liquid,
or gas at different points along the quantitative temperature scale.80 But, whether the example
be, on the one hand, ice changing to water changing to steam or, on the other hand, birth
following gestation or death following illness, Hegel’s point is the same: Natural processes
indeed are punctuated and marked (or “interrupted” as “ein Abbrechen des Allmählichen”) by
abrupt “leaps” (Sprünge), namely, what nowadays would be called “tipping points” or “phase
transitions.” Later in the Science of Logic, in “The Doctrine of the Concept,” Hegel also refers to
natural “stages” (Stufen) accumulating through emergences.81 Of course, apart from purely
78 (G.W.F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik I, Werke 5, Werke in zwanzig Bänden [ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl
Markus Michel], Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969, pg. 440)
(G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic [trans. A.V. Miller], London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969, pg. 369-370)
79 (Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik I, pg. 440)
(Hegel, Science of Logic, pg. 370)
80 (Hegel, Science of Logic, pg. 370)
81 (G.W.F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik II, Werke 6, Werke in zwanzig Bänden [ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl

25
natural examples, the Russian Marxist tradition, in terms of a historical materialist construal of
socio-political history, subsequently hails Hegel’s dialectics of quality and quantity as “the
algebra of revolution.” Furthermore, these same Hegelian comments on “natura non facit
saltum” subsequently reappear in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature.82
So then, what about Hegel’s emergentism as per his Philosophy of Nature? The second
volume of the Encyclopedia contains ample evidence to the effect that the mature Hegel, still like
Schelling despite the Phenomenology-precipitated split between them, subscribes to what
defensibly can be characterized as an emergentist model of a material nature eventually
generating out of itself spiritual subjectivity. In the introduction to the Philosophy of Nature,
Hegel offers a description of Spirit’s Befrieungskampf from Nature in which he references
Schelling’s Naturphilosophie:
A rational consideration of Nature (Die denkende Naturbetrachtung) must

consider how Nature is in its own self this process of becoming Spirit, of
sublating its otherness (die Natur an ihr selbst dieser Prozeß ist, zum Geiste
zu werden, ihr Anderssein aufzuheben)—and how the Idea is present in each
grade or level of Nature itself (jeder Stufe der Natur selbst); estranged from
the Idea, Nature is only the corpse of the Understanding (der Leichnam des
Verstandes). Nature is, however, only implicitly (nur an sich) the Idea, and
Schelling therefore called her a petrified intelligence (versteinerte… Intelligenz),
others even a frozen intelligence; but God does not remain petrified and dead;
the very stones cry out and raise themselves to Spirit (heben sich zum Geiste
auf).83
82(Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §249 [pg. 22])

83(G.W.F. Hegel, Die Naturphilosophie: Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften II, Werke 9, Werke in
zwanzig Bänden [ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel], Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978, §247 [pg.
25])
(Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §247 [pg. 14-15])

26
The young Schelling’s image of nature as congealed or petrified intelligence84 is not the only
Schellingian note sounded in this passage. Both in this quotation and throughout the second
volume of the Encyclopedia, Hegel echoes a number of features of the early Schelling’s
Naturphilosophie.
First of all, there is the idea of nature as a dynamic “process of becoming” unfolding in a
series of “grades or levels” (Stufen). Indeed, Hegel declares that, “Nature is to be regarded as a
system of stages (ein System von Stufen).”85 And, as I already pointed out, these identified
Stufen and their orderly sequencing are more or less the same between Schelling’s and Hegel’s
Naturphilosophien. It also should be appreciated that Hegel associates each emergent stage as a
sublation (Aufhebung) of its genetic predecessors, with Spirit itself as Nature’s immanent self-
sublation (“Nature is in its own self this process of becoming Spirit, of sublating its otherness,”
“the very stones cry out and raise themselves to Spirit [heben sich zum Geiste auf]”).86
Moreover, Hegel shares with Schelling the claim that conscious and self-conscious
spiritual subjectivity is the very pinnacle of a natural hierarchy of emergent strata, being the
highest product of life, with the realm of the organic as the uppermost general tier of nature.87
However, Hegel stipulates that, “mind has for its presupposition Nature” (Der Geist hat für uns
84 (Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, pg. 181)

(Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, pg. 6, 30)
(G.W.F. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy [trans. H.S. Harris and Walter
Cerf], Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977, pg. 165-167))
85 (Hegel, Die Naturphilosophie, §249 [pg. 31])
(Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §249 [pg. 20])
86 (G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind: Part Three of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences [trans. A.V.
Miller], Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, §381 [pg. 13-14], §388-389 [pg. 29-31])
87 (Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §248 [pg. 17-18], §251 [pg. 25], §252 [pg. 27])

27
die Natur zu seiner Voraussetzung).88 Beginning with the sentient animal organism and reaching
its fullest realization in and through the sapient human subject, natural substance transitions from
unconscious in-itself-ness to self-aware and self-knowing for-itself-ness.89 Speaking of this
movement through which (natural) substance (i.e., “this totality” as the planetary whole of the
earth) becomes also (spiritual) subject, Hegel states:
This totality (Diese Totalität) is the ground (der Grund) and the universal substance
(die allgemeine Substanz) on which is borne what follows. Everything is this totality
of motion but as brought back under a higher being-within-self (höherem Insichsein)
or, what is the same thing, as realized into a higher being-within-self. This being-
within-self contains this totality, but the latter remains indifferently and separately
in the background as a particular existence (ein besonderes Dasein), as a history
(eine Geschichte), or as the origin (der Ursprung) against which the being-for-self
is turned (gegen den das Fürsichsein gekehrt ist), just so that it can be for itself (für
sich zu sein). It lives therefore in this element but also liberates itself (befreit sich)
therefrom, since only weak traces of this element are present in it. Terrestrial being
(Das Irdische), and still more organic and self-conscious being (das Organische und
sich selbst Bewußte), has escaped from the motion of absolute matter (ist der
Bewegung der absoluten Materie entgangen), but still remains in sympathy with
it and lives on it as in its inner element.90
The “being-within-self” (Insichsein) and “being-for-self” (Fürsichsein) would be sentience and
sapience respectively as both moments of the becoming-subject of “universal substance” (die
allgemeine Substanz). The latter is the “totality” (Totalität) of “the motion of absolute matter”
(der Bewegung der absoluten Materie) serving as the “ground” (der Grund) for experiencing and
(self-)knowing beings.
88 (G.W.F. Hegel, Der Philosophie des Geistes: Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften III, Werke 10,
Werke in zwanzig Bänden [ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel], Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970,
§381 [pg. 17])
(Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §381 [pg. 8])
89 (G.W.F. Hegel, Jenaer Systementwürfe III: Naturphilosophie und Philosophie des Geistes [ed. Rolf-Peter
Horstmann], Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1987, pg. 262)
90 (Hegel, Die Naturphilosophie, §270 [pg. 104])

28
Furthermore, there is a cross-resonance between moments in the above quotation from
Hegel’s Naturphilosophie and the earlier-cited Schelling of both the First Outline of a System of
the Philosophy of Nature and System of Transcendental Idealism. Specifically, in these 1799 and
1800 texts, Schelling characterizes life, especially human life, as involving portions of nature
coming to individuate themselves by rebelling against the larger natural whole from which they
emerge. Schellingian life is a matter of nature being at war with itself, immanently generating
discord from within and out of itself.
Likewise, in the just-quoted passage, Hegel portrays being-within-and-for-self (i.e.,
spiritual subjectivity) as reacting back against the larger natural background from which it
originates (“the origin (der Ursprung) against which the being-for-self is turned (gegen den das
Fürsichsein gekehrt ist)”). Through this rebellious turning against its substantial base, the
subject “liberates itself” (befreit sich) from efficient-causal determination by mere physics and
chemistry alone. It thereby “escaped from the motion of absolute matter” (ist der Bewegung der
absoluten Materie entgangen). A short while later in his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel similarly
claims that, “the healthy, and more especially minded, creature withdraws itself from this
universal life and opposes itself to it” (das Gesunde und dann vornehmlich das Geistige entreißt
sich diesem allgemeinen Leben und stellt sich ihm entgegen).91 For Schelling and Hegel alike,
both animal organisms and human subjects come to be and sustain themselves partly through
Freiheitskämpfe in which they violently separate themselves from and strike back against the
natural dimensions from which they originally arise.
91(Hegel, Die Naturphilosophie, §279 [pg. 130])


29
On the basis of the immediately preceding, I will highlight one final point of agreement
between the Schelling and the Hegel under consideration here before proceeding to an
engagement with Žižek. In terms of the rapport between nature (as per Schellingian and
Hegelian Naturphilosophien) and subject (as per Schellingian transcendental idealism and
Hegelian Geistesphilosophie), the subject’s transcendence of nature nonetheless remains
immanent to this same nature. With Hegel, evidence of this insistence is visible in the prior
block quotation from the Philosophy of Nature (“weak traces of this element are present in it,”
“still remains in sympathy with it and lives on it as in its inner element”). What is more, the
Philosophy of Mind, the third and final volume of the Encyclopedia, likewise insists on this
simultaneity of immanence and transcendence in Spirit’s relation with Nature (albeit with an
emphasis here on transcendence)—“Mind, as embodied, is indeed in a definite place and in a
definite time; but for all that it is exalted over them” (Der Geist, als verkörpert, ist zwar an
einem bestimmten Ort und in einer bestimmten Zeit, dennoch aber über Raum und Zeit
erhaben).92
As will become evident in what follows, Hegel comes to worry that Schelling,
particularly in the latter’s more Spinozistic moods, cannot adequately preserve the transcendent
side of the simultaneously nature-immanent and nature-transcendent subject. Indeed, Hegel’s
critique of Spinozism, including Schelling’s Spinozism—I have detailed this critique at length
elsewhere93—dovetails with how Hegel’s version of strong emergentism differs from the
emergentism of Schelling. This difference between Hegelian and Schellingian emergentisms
92 (Hegel, Der Philosophie des Geistes, §392 [pg. 54])

(Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §392 [pg. 38])
93 (Johnston, Adventures in Transcendental Materialism, pg. 13-64)

30
will prove to be central to my assessment of Žižek’s philosophical appropriations of quantum
mechanics. I now turn to this assessment.
§3 The Rabbit and the Hat: Anthropogenesis With and Without Anthropomorphism
For many years now, Žižek has been pursuing a dialectical materialist ontology centrally
including within itself a theory of subjectivity. The subject of this theory originates out of, yet
thereafter becomes irreducible to, pre/non-human nature. The question is not whether Žižek
relies upon some sort of emergentism. Rather, the question is exactly what type of emergentism
he embraces.94 And, given Žižek’s avowed indebtedness to both Schelling and Hegel, revisiting
Žižekian dialectical materialism in light of Schelling’s and Hegel’s (proto-)emergentisms
promises to clarify further Žižek’s core philosophical project.
I will be focusing primarily on Žižek’s 2020 book Sex and the Failed Absolute. I have
chosen this focus for three reasons. First, Sex and the Failed Absolute is Žižek’s most recent
substantial theoretical work. Second, I already have dealt with the bulk of his preceding
philosophical texts in my own prior publications. And, third, Sex and the Failed Absolute
involves Žižek doubling-down specifically on his recourse to quantum physics as integral to his
unique version of dialectical materialism.
Žižek’s initial turn to quantum mechanics occurs in his 1996 book The Indivisible
Remainder, in a chapter entitled “Quantum Physics with Lacan.”95 Perhaps this chapter should
have been entitled “Quantum Physics with Lacan and Schelling,” since the Schellingian
94 (Johnston, Adventures in Transcendental Materialism, pg. 17-18, 125)

(Johnston, A New German Idealism, pg. 141-142, 173-174, 181, 185-186)
95 (Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters, London: Verso, 1996, pg.
189-236)

31
philosophy being explored throughout this 1996 book is as important to its chapter on quantum
matters as is Lacanian psychoanalysis. To be precise, the middle-period Schelling, from 1809’s
Freiheitschrift to 1815’s third and final draft of the unfinished Weltalter project, is Žižek’s
privileged partner (along with Jacques Lacan) in the context of his theoretical borrowings from
quantum physics.
Before carefully considering Žižek’s Schelling-inspired quantum ontology, I need to say a
few things about the Žižek-preferred middle-period Schelling with respect to the early (pre-1809)
Schelling I discussed in some detail above. Many scholars consider the 1809 Freiheitschrift as
marking a break within Schelling’s corpus, a rupture in his intellectual itinerary demarcating a
divide between “early” and “middle” periods. I will not be debating here whether or not a
radical discontinuity occurring in 1809 punctuates the unfolding of Schelling’s thinking. For my
limited present purposes, even if it does so, I would maintain that there nonetheless remain
certain major lines of continuity between the pre-1809 and the 1809-and-after Schelling.
The first of these continuities is Schelling’s commitment to select features of Spinozism
as he construes it. His clarifications and qualifications apropos Spinozism in the Freiheitschrift
testify to how sharply he had been stung by Hegel’s then-fresh 1807 dismissal of the Spinozistic
“night in which all cows are black.”96 Hegel belatedly, in his Berlin Lectures on the History of
Philosophy, registers an appreciation of these clarifications and qualifications insofar as he then
recognizes the Freiheitschrift as “deeply speculative in character.”97
Yet, I would maintain that, whatever caveats Schelling tacks onto his relationship with
Spinoza in 1809, he nevertheless retains certain essential features of Spinozism. More generally,
96 (Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 12-13, 16-17)
97 (Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume Three, pg. 514)

32
Schelling’s occasional distance-takings from Spinoza, his scattered criticisms of Spinoza’s
philosophy he voices periodically both before and after 1809, are far outweighed by his frequent
embracing across the span of his philosophical journey of foundational tenets associated with
this key predecessor and source of inspiration. Indeed, I would maintain that Schelling’s 1795
declaration in a famous letter to Hegel that “I have… become a Spinozist!”98 continues to hold
true long after 1795. Xavier Tilliette is right to maintain that, “Spinoza haunts Schelling from
the beginning.”99
In terms of the Schelling of the Freiheitschrift, he holds onto, most importantly, the
Spinozistic “natura naturans” versus “natura naturata” distinction. This distinction is
terminologically recast in the Freiheitschrift as the contrast between “ground” (Grund) and
“existence” (Existenz), with ground as producing, creating natura naturans and existence as
produced, created natura naturata100 (this recasting likewise is visible in Schelling’s subsequent
Ages of the World101). Hence, Žižek’s enthusiastic explicit embrace of Schelling’s ground-
existence distinction102 risks being tantamount to an implicit endorsement of Spinoza’s pair of
natura naturans and natura naturata.
98 (F.W.J. Schelling, “Letter to Hegel: February 4, 1795,” in G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel: The Letters [trans. Clark Butler
and Christiane Seiler], Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, pg. 32)
99 (Tilliette, Schelling, une philosophie en devenir, 1, pg. 308)
100 (F.W.J. Schelling, Über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, Stuttgart: Reclam, 1964, pg. 72-73, 126-129)
(Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 29, 68-69)
101 (Schelling, “Notes and Fragments to the First Book of The Ages of the World: The Past,” pg. 205, 224, 234,
238-239)
(F.W.J. Schelling, The Ages of the World: (Fragment) from the handwritten remains, Third Version (c. 1815) [trans.
Jason M. Wirth], Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000, pg. 20-21, 56-60, 62, 88)
102 (Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder, pg. 20, 40)
(Slavoj Žižek, “The Abyss of Freedom,” in Žižek and Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World, pg. 5-8)
(Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, London: Verso, 1997, pg. 208)
(Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London: Verso, 1999, pg. 55, 87-88)
(Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, New York: Routledge, 2004, pg. 75)
(Slavoj Žižek, “Hegel, Lacan, Deleuze: Three Strange Bedfellows,” Interrogating the Real [ed. Rex Butler and
Scott Stephens], London: Continuum, 2005, pg. 190-191)
(Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute, London: Bloomsbury, 2020, pg. 284)

33
Prior to me foregrounding philosophical problems generated by the Spinozistic
distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata (as problems for both Schelling and,
perhaps, the Žižek who appeals to him), I also should point out that Schelling’s pre-1809
emergentism is another line of continuity persisting within his 1809-and-after work. During the
1809-1815 period appealed to by Žižek, Schelling repeatedly tells the same emergentist stories
he told prior to 1809, details and all, at the interlinked levels of his general metaphysics, theory
of subjectivity, and speculative account of anthropogenesis.103
Much earlier here, I alluded to an ambiguity haunting Schelling’s use of the word
“matter” (die Materie) to designate the ontological and genetic ground-zero of the “sequence of
stages” (Stufenfolge) constituting nature as a self-unfolding dynamic. As I noted, this word
typically connotes for non-Schellingians the sort of things subsumed under the Spinozistic
heading of natura naturata. These things would be individuated, noun-like objects of
determinate kinds, such as the particles, atoms, molecules, cells, etc. studied by different
branches of the empirical, experimental sciences of nature—with Schelling clearly distinguishing
between Naturphilosophie as “speculative physics” from natural science as “empirical
physics.”104 Although multiple commentators try to argue that Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature
103 (Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 29, 31-32, 66, 73)
(F.W.J. Schelling, “Stuttgart Seminars,” Idealism and the Endgame of Theory, pg. 202, 206-208, 220, 230)
(F.W.J. Schelling, Clara, or, On Nature’s Connection to the Spirit World [trans. Fiona Steinkamp], Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2002, pg. 15, 23)
(Schelling, The Ages of the World: Third Version (c. 1815), pg. 31-32, 34-35, 43, 56-60, 84)
(F.W.J. Schelling, The Deities of Samothrace [trans. Robert F. Brown], in Robert F. Brown, Schelling’s Treatise on
‘The Deities of Samothrace’, Missoula: Scholars Press, 1974, pg. 23)
104 (Schelling, “Introduction to the Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, or, On the Concept of
Speculative Physics and the Internal Organization of a System of This Science,” pg. 196, 201-203, 217, 229)
(Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, pg. 6, 30)

34
remains deeply respectful of and influenced by modernity’s experimental sciences of nature,105
his speculative physics functions as independent of and authoritative over empirical physics. For
instance, in the 1804 Würzburg lectures on Naturphilosophie, Schelling denigrates empirical
physics as bringing about a mechanical de-vitalization of nature, a reduction of living, kinetic
natura naturans to dead, static natura naturata.106 Indeed, as Tilliette observes, “Of
Naturphilosophie after 1800, the envelope only is scientific; the core is speculative and
religious.”107 Regardless of when one dates this purported shift in the Schellingian Philosophy
of Nature (whether before, during, or after 1800), I would argue that the reduction of the
scientific to serving as the non-mystical shell of a mystical (i.e., speculative and religious) kernel
is licensed from the very inception of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie in the late 1790s thanks to
the Spinozistic elements at its foundations. Similarly, Daniel Breazeale faults the hybrid
Platonic-Spinozistic inclinations of the early Schelling for his epistemological recklessness
specifically in the guise of a cavalier disregard for “empirical evidence.”108
For Schelling before, during, and after 1809, “matter” qua the ultimate unhintergehbar
basis of all existence both natural and subjective actually is nothing other than the living creative
105 (Wolfgang Wieland, “Die Anfänge der Philosophie Schellings und die Frage nach der Natur,” Materialien zu
Schellings philosophischen Anfängen [ed. Manfred Frank and Gerhard Kurz], Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975,
pg. 273)
(Brandner, Natur und Subjektivität, pg. 43)
(Zammito, The Gestation of German Biology, pg. 302)
106 (Schelling, System der gesammten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere, pg. 275)
107 (Tilliette, Schelling, une philosophie en devenir, 1, pg. 308)
108 (Daniel Breazeale, “‘Exhibiting the particular in the universal’: Philosophical construction and intuition in
Schelling’s Philosophy of Identity (1801-1804),” Interpreting Schelling, pg. 113)

35
power of Spinoza’s natura naturans.109 Schelling rightly dismisses (eighteenth-century French)
interpretations of Spinoza as a materialist.110 He likewise, in 1830’s Einleitung in die
Philosophie, rejects materialism as incompatible with his preferred dual-aspect monism
hypothesizing a fundamental Identity underlying and cutting across the difference between the
material and the spiritual.111 In this same 1830 lecture series, he stipulates that the “original
matter” (ursprüngliche Materie) lying at the basis of all things is not anything material in the
ordinary, everyday sense, but, instead, “the matter of our matter” (die Materie unserer Materie),
a “matter” more sublime and subtle than the banal tangible stuff of quotidian experience.112
Relatedly, in the 1828 course Monotheism, Schelling denies that his nature-philosophical
“matter” is corporeal,113 once again appeals to nature’s energies and forces as indicating its
fundamental immateriality-as-spirituality,114 and counter-intuitively associates the concrete with
the immaterial rather than the material.115
109 (Schelling, Allgemeine Deduction des dynamischen Processes oder der Categorieen der Physik, pg. 104-105,
109)
(Schelling, Hauptmomente aus Schellings Vortrage nach der Stunde aufgezeichnet, pg. 36)
(Schelling, Bruno, pg. 202-203, 206-207)
(Schelling, System der gesammten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere, pg. 288, 292, 443-444,
502-503)
(Schelling, “Stuttgart Seminars,” pg. 208, 213)
(Schelling, Clara, pg. 23)
(Schelling, The Ages of the World, Book One: The Past (Original Version, 1811), pg. 91, 103)
(Schelling, The Ages of the World: Third Version (c. 1815), pg. 20-21, 56-61, 67, 88, 104)
(Schelling, The Grounding of the Positive Philosophy, pg. 113)
110 (F.W.J. Schelling, Ueber das Wesen deutscher Wissenschaft, Ausgewählte Schriften: Band 4, 1807-1834, pg.
17-18)
111 (Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie, pg. 2, 57)
113 (Schelling, Der Monotheismus, pg. 27)
36
Whereas empirical physics (i.e., the natural sciences) deals with natura naturata,
Schellingian speculative physics (i.e., Naturphilosophie as the “Spinozism of physics”116) deals
with natura naturans. And, as Schelling emphasizes, natura naturans as pure productivity, as
the flowing activity of the God-like creative power of φύσις, is different-in-kind from natura
naturata as the secondary (by-)products of this productivity, the fixed results of the underlying
restless pulse of vital generative élan.117 Schelling insists on this pure productivity being
independent of all its products.118 Natura naturata are mere coagulations or retardations of the
ever-surging dynamism of natura naturata.119 While empirical physics is limited to pondering
these coagulations/retardations, only speculative physics can contemplate natura naturans in its
purity.120 Hence, from a Schellingian perspective, the very first emergence, the origin
(Ursprung) as original leap (Ur-Sprung), is not the rise of the chemical out of the physical or the
organic out of the inorganic, but the birth of material entities qua natura naturata out of spiritual
substance qua natura naturans (or, in terms of the doctrine of temporality developed in the
Speculative Physics and the Internal Organization of a System of This Science,” pg. 194-195)
117 (Walter Schulz, Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus in der spätphilosophie Schellings, Stuttgart and Köln:
Kohlhammer, 1955, pg. 62-63, 90)
(Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life, pg. 111, 142, 490)
(Hans Heinz Holz, “Der Begriff der Natur in Schellings spekulativem System: Zum Einfluß von Leibniz auf
Schelling,” Natur und geschichtlicher Prozeß, pg. 206)
(McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit, pg. 85)
119 (Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, pg. 181)
(F.W.J. Schelling, “On the World-Soul” [trans. Iain Hamilton Grant], Collapse: Philosophical Research and
Development, vol. 6, January 2010, pg. 70-71, 92)
(Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, pg. 17-18)
Physics and the Internal Organization of a System of This Science,” pg. 212-213)
(Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, pg. 32-33, 51, 92, 109, 111, 124)
Speculative Physics and the Internal Organization of a System of This Science,” pg. 201-202, 217, 229)

37
Weltalter manuscripts, the birth of the reigning age of the present out of that of the repressed
eternal past as a time before linear chronological time).
Similarly, in the 1815 third draft of Ages of the World, Schelling maintains that, “the
inner being of matter is spiritual in a broader sense because forces, insofar as they are something
incorporeal, are undeniably something spiritual”121 (a contention already to be found nearly
verbatim in the 1813 second draft of the Weltalter122 as well as the notes for the 1811 first draft
of it123). This Schellingian spiritualization of matter is an essential part of Schelling’s
Naturphilosophie from its inception in 1797.124 Indeed, 1797’s Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature
describes how “matter, the first foundation of all experience, becomes the most insubstantial
thing we know” (die Materie, die erste Grundlage aller Erfahrung, wird das Wesenloseste, das
wir kennen).125 The young Schelling latches onto those then-current developments in the
sciences of nature (concerning electricity, galvanism, gravitation, magnetism, optics, and the
like) seeming, from his perspective, to suggest that kinetic energies and forces, rather than static
and inert bodies, constitute the zero-level foundation of nature and its Stufenfolge.126 As for
certain witnesses of the quantum revolution in physics approximately a century later, so too for
Schelling starting with his early appreciations of the scientific avant garde of his time: Matter
121 (Schelling, The Ages of the World: Third Version (c. 1815), pg. 61)
122 (Schelling, Ages of the World (second draft, 1813), pg. 148, 150-151, 157)
123 (Schelling, “Notes and Fragments to the First Book of The Ages of the World: The Past,” pg. 230, 237)
124 (Schelling, “Treatise Explicatory of the Idealism in the Science of Knowledge,” pg. 88)
(Reinhard Lauth, Die Entstehung von Schellings Identitätsphilosophie in der Auseinandersetzung mit Fichtes
Wissenschaftslehre, Freiburg-München: Karl Alber, 1975, pg. 194-195)
(Hogrebe, Prädikation und Genesis, pg. 33-34)
(Wolfgang Bonsiepen, Die Begründung einer Naturphilosophie bei Kant, Schelling, Fries und Hegel, Frankfurt am
Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997, pg. 281)
125 (Schelling, Einleiting zu: Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur als Einleitung in das Studium dieser
Wissenschaft, pg. 260)
126 (Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, pg. 6, 30)
(Zammito, The Gestation of German Biology, pg. 305-306)

38
itself, as the rock-bottom base of the physical universe, itself undergoes dematerialization at the
hands of specific scientific advances, with tangible bodies losing their fundamental ontological
status and decomposing into yet-more-fundamental incorporeal forms, powers, and fluctuations.
Schelling, in his Naturphilosophie, portrays this as the material becoming spiritual qua
immaterial. This dematerialization-as-spiritualization of matter is equivalent to Schelling’s
identification of the primordial Ur-dimension of all things as natura naturans. Additionally, he
consistently throughout his early and middle periods emphasizes that natura naturans is subject-
like, a sort of universal subjectivity, an organism or even mind writ astronomically large,
animating the entirety of creation through its activity and generative powers. And, Schelling, in
his late period, reaffirms all of this in an overtly theosophical key, maintaining in line with
various religious narratives that the spiritual underlies and generates the material.127 This later
Schelling even goes so far as to claim that Naturphilosophie proves God’s existence,128 with
foundational natura naturans as the one-and-only Absolute Ego generating out of itself both the
objectivity of natura naturata and the subjectivity of the human conscious “I.”129 Incidentally,
Žižek, pointedly contra the V.I. Lenin of 1908’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,130
celebrates the quantum version of the “disappearance of matter” already trumpeted by Schelling
starting in the late 1790s.131
127 (Schelling, Der Monotheismus, pg. 90-91, 94, 117-118)

129 (Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie, pg. 55-56, 100, 110-111, 114)
130 (V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Peking: Foreign Languages, 1972, pg. 308-318)
131 (Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder, pg. 165, 230-231)
(Žižek, Organs without Bodies, pg. 24-25)
(Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006, pg. 165, 239)
(Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, London: Verso, 2012, pg.
807, 929)
(Žižek, Absolute Recoil, pg. 5, 73)
(Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2008, pg. 200-203)

39
For Schelling, micro-scale human subjectivity, in its self-determination and self-
consciousness, is a product (indeed, the highest product) of this productive agency as a macro-
scale cosmic mega-subject (whether the latter be named Nature, God, Absolute Ich, etc.).132 But,
what is more, he directly identifies these two subjectivities with each other. There is an
equivalence in his eyes between these macro- and micro-, infinite-cosmic and finite-human,
subjects. To risk anachronism through recourse to psychoanalytic language, Schelling portrays
the subjectivity of singular persons as the “return of the repressed,” namely, the resurfacing
within the existence (Existenz) of natura naturata of the underlying ground (Grund) of natura
naturans133 (with Sigmund Freud rightly appealing to Schelling in discussing the uncanniness of
instances of the return of the repressed134). Schelling’s Philosophy of Art describes miracles as
the appearance in the finite-empirical-temporal world of the infinite-nonempirical-eternal
Absolute.135 Free human subjects are, for him, miracles in this exact sense (as is also indicated
in 1802’s On University Studies when Schelling says of minded subjects’ mental products,
“every idea is a miracle, since it is produced in time without having any relation to time”136).
Relatedly, the Schellingian subject (or “soul” [Seele]) is not the ego qua atomic individuality or
132 (F.W.J. Schelling, Ist eine Philosophie der Geschichte möglich?, Ausgewählte Schriften: Band 1, 1794-1800, pg.
301)
(Schelling, Presentation of My System of Philosophy, pg. 165, 201-203)
(Schelling, “On Construction in Philosophy,” pg. 284)
(Schelling, Ages of the World (second draft, 1813), pg. 119, 136, 140)
(Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie, pg. 42-43, 51, 53, 124)
(Schelling, Philosophy of Revelation, pg. 81-82)
133 (Schelling, “Notes and Fragments to the First Book of The Ages of the World: The Past,” pg. 172-175, 239)
(F.W.J. Schelling, Ueber die Natur der Philosophie als Wissenschaft, Ausgewählte Schriften: Band 4, 1807-1834,
pg. 389, 396-397, 402)
134 (SE 17: 219-252)
135 (Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, pg. 69)
136 (Schelling, On University Studies, pg. 89)

40
idiosyncratic personhood, since the former is the embodiment amidst finite determinations of the
universality of absolute infinitude.137
The two extreme ends of Schelling’s dynamic natural Stufenfolge, its Alpha as natura
naturans and its Omega as transcendental subjectivity, are made by him to converge with and
merge into one another.138 Through this joining of base and pinnacle, Schellingian emergentism
presents what I have been calling a layer doughnut model. In 1801’s Presentation of My System
of Philosophy, Schelling maintains that, “In no process can anything enter a body that is not
already there potentially.”139 One implication of this is that all (apparent) emergences, each and
every arising power/potency, would be nothing more than instances of making explicit what is
always-already implicit in the primal, foundational origin itself (as the seed containing
everything that subsequently will blossom out of it—an organic metaphor Schelling repeatedly
employs under the enduring influence of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1790 treatise The
Metamorphosis of Plants140). In truth, nothing new or in excess of the origin arises in everything
that proceeds forth from this beginning, with the end itself being a rejoining and resurfacing of
this very beginning. Indeed, 1800’s System of Transcendental Idealism associates philosophical
systematicity with circularity.141
During the early 1800s, Schelling associates the emergent power/potency of the organic
with this micro-scale resurgence, amongst the entities and events of natura naturata, of the
137 (Schelling, Bruno, pg. 181-183)

(Schelling, “System of Philosophy in General and of the Philosophy of Nature in Particular,” pg. 189)
(Schelling, Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Künste zu der Natur, pg. 602)
139 (Schelling, Presentation of My System of Philosophy, pg. 194)
140 (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Metamorphosis of Plants [trans. Douglas Miller], Cambridge: MIT Press,
2009, pg. 5-6, 31, 80, 83, 92, 95, 99-100, 102)
141 (Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, pg. 232)

41
living dynamism of natura naturans.142 The individual organism is a spatio-temporal grain of
sand refracting the universe as a whole, namely, the cosmic organism birthing all of creation.
For Schelling, this infinite organism, organicism writ large, generates not only finite organic
products, but even inorganic ones too.143 And, what holds here for (especially sentient) life in
general holds too for sapient life in particular: Human subjects are Spinoza’s God (i.e., Nature as
natura naturans) becoming conscious of itself, returning and relating to itself with the clarity of
self-consciousness.144 Schelling directly equates the dynamic productivity of speculative physics
142 (Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, pg. 157-158)
(Schelling, Presentation of My System of Philosophy, pg. 200-201)
(Schelling, Bruno, pg. 151)
(Schelling, “Treatise Explicatory of the Idealism in the Science of Knowledge,” pg. 92-93)
(F.W.J. Schelling, Von der Weltseele: Eine Hypothese der höhern Physik zur Erklärung des allgemeinen
Organismus, Berlin: Holzinger, 2016, pg. 130-131)
(Schelling, “On the World-Soul,” pg. 68-71, 92)
Physics and the Internal Organization of a System of This Science,” pg. 217, 228-229)
(F.W.J. Schelling, “Further Presentations from the System of Philosophy (1802) [Extract],” The Philosophical
Rupture between Fichte and Schelling, pg. 217-218)
(Schelling, Bruno, pg. 150-151)
(F.W.J. Schelling, Immanuel Kant, Ausgewählte Schriften: Band 3, 1804-1806, pg. 18)
(Schelling, System der gesammten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere, pg. 389-390)
(Schelling, Aphorismen über die Naturphilosophie, pg. 693-694)
(Schelling, Ueber das Wesen deutscher Wissenschaft, pg. 20)
(Tilliette, Schelling, une philosophie en devenir, 1, pg. 149-150)
(Heuser-Keßler, Die Produktivität der Natur, pg. 104)
(Küppers, Natur als Organismus, pg. 86, 88)
144 (Schelling, Statement on the True Relationship of the Philosophy of Nature to the Revised Fichtean Doctrine, pg.
86)
(Hogrebe, Prädikation und Genesis, pg. 23-24, 51-55, 118)
(Markus Gabriel, “The Mythological Being of Reflection—An Essay on Hegel, Schelling, and the Contingency of
Necessity,” in Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek, Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Subjectivity in German
Idealism, London: Continuum, 2009, pg. 84)
(Gabriel, Transcendental Ontology, pg. 98)
42
(i.e., Natur as per Naturphilosophie) with the subjectivity of philosophy (as transcendental
idealism).145
Schelling’s layer doughnut also is on prominent display in his middle-period texts
favored by Žižek. In the Freiheitschrift, human beings, particularly in their freedom, are
depicted as points of return for the darkness of Grund within the light of Existenz146—recalling
that Schelling recasts natura naturans and natura naturata as Ground and Existence respectively
in this 1809 text. The drafts of the unfinished Weltalter project echo this depiction.147
Žižek’s elaborations of his dialectical materialist version of “quantum physics with
Schelling” clearly involve embracing this Schellingian layer doughnut model. From 1996
onward, Žižek periodically affirms the soundness of this model in which human subjectivity is
the return of the repressed ontological ground-zero. In Žižek’s updating of Schelling, this
ontological ground-zero is identified as the domain of quantum indeterminacy prior to the
collapse of the wave function. In the Schellingian vocabulary redeployed by Žižek, this collapse
amounts to the transition from Grund to Existence, from shadowy proto-reality to the constituted
being(s) of determinate reality.148
More recently, in both 2017’s Incontinence of the Void149 and 2020’s Sex and the Failed
Absolute, Žižek has taken to linking Hegel’s logical “realm of shadows” (Reich der Schatten,
Abhandlung), pg. 83-84, 86-87)
146 (Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 32-33, 73)
147 (Schelling, The Ages of the World, Book One: The Past (Original Version, 1811), pg. 56-57, 73-74, 92, 154)
(Schelling, The Ages of the World: Third Version (c. 1815), pg. 56-57)
148 (Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder, pg. 220-228, 231)
(Žižek, The Parallax View, pg. 165-173)
(Žižek, Less Than Nothing, pg. 918-921)
(Žižek, Absolute Recoil, pg. 203)
(Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, pg. 195-203)
149 (Slavoj Žižek, Incontinence of the Void: Economico-Philosophical Spandrels, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017, pg.
36)

43
Schattenreich)150 with the proto-reality of quantum indeterminacy. Sex and the Failed Absolute
features Žižek’s most sustained discussions of this linkage. Therein, he proposes in this vein:
If Hegel were to rewrite his system today, its three main parts would no longer have
been: logic—nature—spirit, but: quantum real (pre-ontological virtual space of
quantum waves)—reality—spirit. One should note that the passage from each
level to the next one is not simply some kind of ‘progress’ but also involves a
failure (loss, restraint): our ordinary reality emerges through the collapse of the
wave function, i.e., through the erasure of virtual possibilities; reality gradually
develops through life to the explosion of thought/spirit/subject—however, this
explosion of spirit is also to a deadlock of animal life. Man is a failed animal,
human consciousness is primordially the awareness of limitation and finitude.151
Of course, the early-twentieth-century overturning of the worldview of Newtonian physics
radically alters the notions of space and time available to Hegel in his own era. Nonetheless,
from what likely would have been Hegel’s perspective had he lived to see this overturning,
quantum mechanics remains within the domain of nature. This is because it still deals with
spatio-temporal objects and processes despite its drastic departures from familiar mid-level,
human-scale experiences and intuitions. Hence, Hegel would see Žižek’s “quantum real” not as
a replacement for Logik, but as a part of an appropriately-revised Naturphilosophie (with Hegel
himself already signaling the openness of his Philosophy of Nature to revisions in light of
unforeseeable scientific developments,152 such as the toppling of Newtonian physics in the
opening years of the twentieth century).
In fact, Hegel characterizes Logic as a “realm of shadows” not so as to propose a
Spinozistic-Schellingian ontology of a dark Ground-before-Existence, but, on the contrary, so as

(Hegel, Science of Logic, pg. 58-59)
151 (Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute, pg. 155)
152 (G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences with the
Zusätze [trans. T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting, and H.S. Harris], Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991, §9 [pg. 33], §12 [pg. 37])
(Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §246 [pg. 6-8])

44
to warn against interpreting the field of the logical as constituting in and of itself a full-fledged
ontology. As an Aristotelian hylomorphist rather than a Platonic metaphysical realist, Hegel
asserts that the categories of Logik acquire actual ontological weight only if and when they are
instantiated and realized within the myriad moments of Realphilosophie (i.e., Naturphilosophie
and Geistesphilosophie, as per the second and third volumes respectively of the Encyclopedia of
the Philosophical Sciences). On their own, the categories of Hegelian Logic merely determine
what makes the Real intelligible. They delineate the conditions of possibility for the in-principle
knowability of both objectivity and subjectivity as well as both Natur und Geist.
One implication of the preceding is that, for Hegel to accept Žižek’s proposal of replacing
the realm of the logical with that of the quantum in a new permutation of Hegel’s encyclopedic
System, quantum mechanics would have to be able to furnish out of itself the epistemological-
transcendental explanatory framework provided by Hegel’s own Logik in its intimate,
indissoluble relationship with his Realphilosophie. Žižek has not (at least, not yet) explained
how quantum physics might be able to take on playing this epistemological-transcendental role.
Does his recent talk of moving “beyond the transcendental”153 indicate an intention to refuse to
articulate such an explanation? In substituting quantum physics for Logic, is Žižek also
intentionally purging Hegelianism of the transcendentalist features and functions of Logik? If so,
unanswered questions loom about the epistemology accompanying Žižek’s materialism. This
accompaniment is requisite on both Kantian and Hegelian grounds—with Kant and Hegel
153(Žižek, Absolute Recoil, pg. 16-17, 98, 109, 372-374)

(Žižek, Incontinence of the Void, pg. 3)
(Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute, pg. 60)

45
sharing in common a rejection as epistemologically indefensible of Fichte’s and Schelling’s
recourses to intellectual intuition.
It must be acknowledged that Žižek is well aware of the tensions between himself and
traditional Hegelian philosophy along the lines I just sketched. For instance, in Sex and the
Failed Absolute, he states, “This pure pre-ontological real (and not logic, as Hegel thought) is the
‘shadowy world’ that precedes reality.”154 A couple of paragraphs later, Žižek avers that his own
quantum ontology involves preferring Schelling over Hegel—specifically, the author of the 1809
Freiheitschrift, with its distinction between Ground and Existence.155 This Žižekian preference
entails once again embracing Schelling’s layer doughnut model of ontological emergentism (with
Sex and the Failed Absolute continuing to endorse this model156).
Immediately after affirming his favoring of Schelling in connection with quantum
mechanics, Žižek addresses the apparent antagonisms between the Schellingian and Hegelian
philosophies that both serve him as crucial sources of inspiration. He does so by reinterpreting
the very opening of Hegel’s Science of Logic so as to permit a rapprochement between Hegel and
Schelling in relation to a dialectical materialist appropriation of quantum physics. On Žižek’s
interpretation, the first words of the Science of Logic’s main body—therein, “The Doctrine of
Being” begins with the line “Being, pure being, without any further determination” (Sein, reines
Sein,—ohne alle weitere Bestimmung)157—ought to be read as announcing that Hegelian Logic is
based upon a “minimal idealization” of a “pre-ontological X.”158 Implicitly defanging the later

156 (Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute, pg. 283, 348)

46
Schelling’s critique of Hegel’s Logic,159 Žižek recasts the logical starting point of the entire
Hegelian System as a moment identical with the Schellingian transition from the indeterminate
Real of unprethinkable Ground (unvordenklicher Grund) to the determinate Ideal of cognizable
Existence.160
However, what numerous commentators on the Science of Logic have not noticed to date
is that the opening line of “The Doctrine of Being” in the Science of Logic contains a subtle but
direct reference to Schelling. The latter, in Philosophy and Religion, writes of “pure
absoluteness, without any further determination” (reine Absolutheit, ohne alle weitere
Bestimmung).161 The identical wording between Schelling’s 1804 Philosophy and Religion and
Hegel’s 1812-1816 Science of Logic is almost certainly no coincidence.
Associating the “pure absoluteness” of the early Schelling’s Identitätsphilosophie (as well
as the natura naturans of Schellingian Naturphilosophie) with indeterminate “pure being,” the
very opening of Hegelian Logik seeks to show, among other things, that where Schelling intends
to begin systematic philosophizing cannot actually serve as a proper starting point. Any such
mere, sheer indeterminacy (ohne alle weitere Bestimmung) promptly succumbs to a dialectical-
speculative implosion (as demonstrated by the opening triad of the logical moments of Being,
Nothing, and Becoming). Hence, the very initiation of Hegel’s Logic harbors within itself an
installment in the post-1807 critical feud between Hegel and Schelling. This complicates Žižek’s
maneuver, in Sex and the Failed Absolute, of utilizing Hegel’s line about “Being, pure being,
159 (Schelling, Der Monotheismus, pg. 93-94, 115)

(Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, pg. 134-163)
(Schelling, “Vorrede zu einer philosophischen Schrift des Herrn Victor Cousin,” pg. 628-629)
(Schelling, The Grounding of the Positive Philosophy, pg. 128-131, 139, 148-151, 155, 169, 186, 204-205, 211)
160 (Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute, pg. 285-286)
161 (F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophie und Religion, Ausgewählte Schriften: Band 3, 1804-1806, pg. 39)
(Schelling, Philosophy and Religion, pg. 18)

47
without any further determination” as a means of bridging the evident divide between the
Schelling of the Ground-Existence distinction and Hegel.
Furthermore, the end of Hegel’s mature Logic, with its transition from the logical to the
Real (first as Natur),162 reveals that the true beginning of full-fledged ontology is not the false
start of any sort of pure indeterminacy, including in the guise of Schelling’s Absolute Identity or
Indifference qua the infinite, intellectually-intuited Ground of natura naturans (incidentally, the
later Schelling’s attacks concerning the transition from the logical to the natural in Hegel’s
System are based on a misreading according to which the formal categories of Hegelian Logik
are free-standing metaphysical realities preexisting in time what would be a subsequently arising
extra-logical Real demoted to a lesser ontological status by comparison with the categorial forms
of Logic in and of themselves163). Instead, the Hegelian ontology of the Real (as per
Realphilosophie divided into Naturphilosophie and Geistesphilosophie) arises on the basis
provided by objectively given spatio-temporal nature, first at the level of “mechanics” as falling
under the explanatory jurisdiction of empirical physics (rather than the [pseudo-]explanatory
jurisdiction of something like Schelling’s “speculative physics”). That is to say, Hegel’s
ontological emergentism, unlike that of Schelling, begins with the light of the dialectically-
speculatively thinkable existence of natura naturata as natural objectivities knowable thanks to
(onto-)logical categories, rather than beginning with the darkness of the intellectually-intuited
162 (Hegel, Science of Logic, pg. 843-844)

(Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, §244 [pg. 307])
(G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on Logic: Berlin, 1831 [trans. Clark Butler], Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008,
§244 [pg. 232-233])
163 (Schelling, Der Monotheismus, pg. 93-94, 115)
(Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, pg.149, 153-155, 157-159)
(Schelling, Philosophy of Revelation, pg. 78-80, 89, 91, 102)
(Schelling, The Grounding of the Positive Philosophy, pg. 151, 186)

48
unprethinkable Ground of natura naturans as spiritual subjectivity ineffable save for the
confabulations (or Schwärmerei) of mythologies, religions, and theosophies.164 A Hegelian
Philosophy of Nature lets itself look forward to future scientific discoveries for further
illumination of its subject matters. A Schellingian Philosophy of Nature ends up looking
backward to various spiritualistic fictions receding far into humanity’s past.
At this juncture, the differences between Hegel’s and Schelling’s emergentisms, between
the former’s layer cake model and the latter’s layer doughnut one, become clear and crucial. As I
explain elsewhere,165 Hegelian Naturphilosophie is designed so as to thread the needle between
the extremes of either an ontology of nothing but mindless matter (such as a reductionist or
eliminativist worldview based on Newtonian mechanical physics) or one of matterless mind
(such as variants of hylozoism, panpsychism, pantheism, vitalism, and the like). A general
ontology of mindless matter refuses to explain the Befreiungskampf genesis of Geist out of
Natur, explaining away the spiritual (i.e., sentience, sapience, mindedness, and like-mindedness)
as epiphenomenal, fictive, hallucinatory, illusory, etc. For Hegel, this worldview one-sidedly
absolutizes mechanics, physics, and/or inorganic chemistry, with their corresponding regional
ontologies representative of specific levels (but specific levels only) of a many-layered natural
and spiritual Real.
164 (Schelling, “Stuttgart Seminars,” pg. 199, 206-209, 213)

(Schelling, Clara, pg. 12-13, 61)
(F.W.J. Schelling, Andere Deduktion der Principien der positiven Philosophie, Ausgewählte Schriften: Band 5,
1842-1852 [ed. Manfred Frank], Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985, pg. 779-798)
(Schelling, The Grounding of the Positive Philosophy, pg. 183, 185-186, 198, 200-201, 203-204, 208)
(F.W.J. Schelling, Historical-critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology [trans. Mason Richey and Markus
Zisselberger], Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007, pg. 7-8, 10-11,17, 35-36, 38-39, 41, 45, 61, 66,
74-75, 78, 117, 129, 132, 137-138, 170)
(Schulz, Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus in der spätphilosophie Schellings, pg. 289)
165 (Johnston, Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume Two, pg. 39-41)

49
Correlatively but conversely, a general ontology of matterless mind, with equal but
opposed one-sidedness, absolutizes organics and/or the spheres of the humanly spiritual (i.e., the
domains and accompanying regional ontologies covered by Hegel’s Geistesphilosophie). Such a
general ontology also, like its opposed general ontology of mindless matter, refuses to explain
the Befreiungskampf genesis of Geist out of Natur. This is because, for it, no emergence of life
and/or mind actually occurs. Instead, they are purported to be immediately given from the get-
go, supposedly present as underived, factical Ur-elements.
From Hegel’s non-one-sided perspective, Geist is neither nowhere nor everywhere. It is a
set of select strata that arise from pre/non-spiritual (i.e., natural) dimensions of being(s).
Moreover, these mindless pre/non-subjective dimensions are knowable in themselves thanks to
their inherent forms and sometimes come to be really known by the subjectivities that happen to
have been eventually precipitated out of evolving nature. The Hegelian emergentist layer cake,
as per his ontology qua Realphilosophie (an ontology whose epistemological possibility
conditions are laid down by Logik), starts with the pre/non-spiritual objectivity of spatio-
temporal natura naturata as accessible to empirical, experimental investigation by such
disciplines as the natural sciences (i.e., Schelling’s “empirical physics”). It ends with the
spiritual subjectivity of humans and their social histories as comprehensible through
philosophical versions of such disciplines as anthropology, phenomenology, psychology, law,
ethics, politics, history, art, and religion. Geist neither never exists nor always exists. It comes
to be, namely, it genuinely emerges.
Hegel would view Schelling’s layer doughnut emergentism as pseudo-emergentism. This
is due to the fact that the particular Spinozistic intuitions and inspirations relied upon by

50
Schelling throughout the entirety of his long career commit him to a fundamental ontology of
what ultimately would be matterless mind (i.e., spiritualized, de-materialized matter as the
creative, productive agency of natura naturans). Matter qua natura naturata (i.e., determine
physical entities and events situated in objectively real space and time) forms the ground-zero
level in Hegel’s emergentism, with the top layer of this cake (i.e., sapient human mindedness and
like-mindedness) being placed at a distance from and not simply rejoining its base layer. For
Schelling, on the other hand, a living, spiritual, subject-like natura naturans (as Grund) is
simultaneously the Alpha and, through its irruptive return within the constituted fields of natura
naturata (as Existenz), also the Omega of his doughnut, the point where two extremes unite in a
single layer.166 The “emergence” of Spirit out of Nature in Schellingian ontology is a pseudo-
emergence insofar as it is not truly the genesis of the posterior out of the prior, the new out of the
old, the higher out of the lower.
The Hegelian complaint against Schelling’s ontologically hylozoist, panpsychist,
pantheistic, and/or vitalist layer doughnut model would be that, as Lacan might put it, the rabbit
Schelling pulls out of the hat is the one he put there in the first place.167 Lacan usually employs
this line about the rabbit and the hat to disparage modelings of psychoanalytic metapsychology
on natural-scientific energetics (particularly physics with its constants and the conservation of
energy). This disparagement also would be applicable to Schelling, especially considering
166(Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie, pg. 53, 134)

167(Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of
Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Sylvana Tomaselli], New York: W.W. Norton and
Company, 1988, pg. 81, 107, 116, 184)
(Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960 [ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller; trans. Dennis Porter], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1992, pg. 284, 293)
(Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre IX: L’identification, 1961-1962 [unpublished typescript],
session of January 24, 1962)
(Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Écrits: The First Complete
Edition in English [trans. Bruce Fink], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006, pg. 247)

51
Schelling’s blending of energies, forces, and the like from the sciences of nature with Spinoza’s
natura naturans (a blending pioneered by J.G. Herder in his God, Some Conversations,168 with
this text also anticipating some of Schelling’s complaints about the shortcomings of Spinoza’s
metaphysics169). Yet, on one occasion, Lacan depicts the “absolute knowing” (das absolute
Wissen) of the concluding chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as itself a rabbit Hegel
sneaks into his hat earlier in the Phenomenology through sleight of hand so as to pull it out at the
grand finale.170 Setting aside debates about how fair or not Lacan’s jab at the Phenomenology is,
Hegel’s emergentist Realphilosophie, unlike enduring central features of Schelling’s
(pseudo-)emergentist metaphysics, does not smuggle the rabbit of Geist into the hat of Natur so
as subsequently to feign having an explanation for the genesis of the spiritual out of the natural.
Schelling passes off a dubious anthropomorphization of nature as a satisfactory account
of anthropogenesis. By contrast, Hegel’s layer cake emergentist model offers an arguably more
satisfactory account of anthropogenesis while simultaneously refusing to anthropomorphize
nature. When Hegel insists on characterizing Natur as alterity and externality vis-à-vis Geist,171
one implication of this insistence is that pre-subjective nature must be regarded as radically non-
subjective. That is to say, this is tantamount to a Hegelian repudiation of any sort of hylozoist,
panpsychist, pantheistic, and/or vitalist Naturphilosophie (including Schelling’s own
permutations of his Philosophy of Nature—by 1811, in both the first version of the Weltalter as
168 (J.G. Herder, God, Some Conversations [trans. Frederick H. Burkhardt], Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1940, pg.
102-103, 105)
169 (Herder, God, Some Conversations, pg. 193-194, 196-197, 209)
170 (Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XVI: D’un Autre à l’autre, 1968-1969 [ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006, pg. 385)
171 (Hegel, Science of Logic, pg. 71, 118, 843-844)
(Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, §244 [pg. 307])
(Hegel, Lectures on Logic, §244 [pg. 232-233])
(Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §247 [pg. 13-14], §248 [pg. 17])
(Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §389 [pg. 30-33])

52
well as in a contemporaneous text polemically responding to a Jacobian charge of atheism,
Schelling basically admits to being an idealistic pantheist172). Of course, Spinoza himself
forcefully forbids any anthropomorphizing of Deus sive natura as infinite substance.173 But,
Schelling’s linkage of his borrowings from Spinoza with his own layer-doughnut emergentism
leads him to violate flagrantly the Spinozistic ban on anthropomorphizing. This violation is
epitomized by, for instance, Schelling’s animistic, panpsychist talk in the 1813 second draft of
The Ages of the World of the history of the universe as that of “the development of an actual,
living essence” (i.e., Deus sive natura174) in which “the first or oldest of essences” is
“primordially alive.”175 The bond between Schelling’s Spinozism and his anthropomorphizing of
nature via the layer-doughnut model also is on display in S.J. McGrath’s observation with respect
to Schelling that, “Material nature now tells us as much about the structure of the subject as the
structure of the subject tells us about nature.”176
Another anti-Spinozism line from the preface to 1807’s Phenomenology of Spirit, in
addition to the one about “the night in which all cows are black,” lies at the origins of the parting
of ways between the former friends and collaborators Hegel and Schelling. This is the line
according to which one must conceive “the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject”
(das Wahre nicht als Substanz, sondern ebensosehr als Subjekt).177 Schelling took it personally
despite Hegel insisting that this, along with the cows remark, was a swipe aimed exclusively at
172 (Schelling, The Ages of the World, Book One: The Past (Original Version, 1811), pg. 108-109, 151)
(Schelling, Denkmal der Schrift von den göttlichen Dingen ec. des Herrn Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi und der ihm in
derselben gemachten Beschuldigung eines absichtlich tauschenden, Lüge redenden Atheismus, pg. 25-26, 69)
173 (Spinoza, Ethics, Part I, Proposition 15, Scholium [pg. 224-225], Part I, Appendix [pg. 240])
174 (Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life, pg. 176, 515)
175 (Schelling, The Ages of the World, Book One: The Past (Original Version, 1811), pg. 113)
176 (McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit, pg. 87)
177 (G.W.F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Werke 3, Werke in zwanzig Bänden [ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl
(Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, pg. 10)

53
Schelling’s less talented followers rather than at Schelling himself.178 Regardless of Hegel’s own
private intentions, Schelling was right to feel wounded. Hegel’s thesis about substance-also-as-
subject expresses a legitimate objection and alternative to Schelling’s strong Spinozistic leanings.
The two little words “sondern ebensosehr” (but equally) in the Phenomenology’s “nicht
als Substanz, sondern ebensosehr als Subjekt” signal a huge difference between Hegel and
Schelling. Schelling’s Spinozism and the layer doughnut model tied to it amount to asserting
that subject simply is substance, with both Subjekt and Substanz as one-and-the-same natura
naturans. Against this Schellingian equation of the substantial and the subjective, Hegel’s
“sondern ebensosehr” indicates a non-identity between these two concept-terms. In other words,
the “also” in the Hegelian substance-also-as-subject marks an ineliminable difference-in-kind
between these two sides, with the emergent layer of the subject remaining irreducible to the
layers of pre/non-subjective substance from which it arose (hence a layer cake instead of a layer
doughnut). Subjectivity, itself a sublation (als Aufhebung) of substantiality, is a spirituality that
really emerges from naturality, with the latter not already containing within itself the former.
Again and again, Schelling complains, throughout his writings, about modern philosophy
remaining in the grip of stubbornly persistent dichotomizing tendencies.179 He bemoans a
preference, that of the “reflection” (Reflexion) of the understanding (Verstand), for thinking in
178(G.W.F. Hegel, “Hegel to Schelling: Bamberg, May 1, 1807,” Hegel: The Letters, pg. 80)
179(Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, pg. 10-13, 40)
(Schelling, Presentation of My System of Philosophy, pg. 145-146)
(Schelling, “Further Presentations from the System of Philosophy (1802) [Extract],” pg. 207-210)
(Schelling, Bruno, pg. 204, 209)
(Schelling, On University Studies, pg. 67-69, 117)
(F.W.J. Schelling, “On the Relationship of the Philosophy of Nature to Philosophy in General,” Between Kant and
Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism [trans. George Di Giovanni and H.S. Harris],
Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000, pg. 373-374, 377)
(Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 24, 68-69, 74)
(Schelling, The Ages of the World: Third Version (c. 1815), pg. 64)

54
terms of starkly black-and-white dualisms (a form of thinking allegedly transcended by reason
[Vernunft] proper). Yet, ironically, Schelling’s spiritualization of nature, with its “disappearance
of matter” through the dissolution/decomposition of inert material bodies into dynamic energies,
forces, etc., covertly relies upon precisely the sort of either-or dualism he so frequently decries.
For Schelling, insofar as natural science reveals the basest dimensions of nature to be kinetic
energies (for him, particularly those of electricity, galvanism, gravitation, light, and magnetism)
rather than static entities (such as the elementary building blocks of atoms, corpuscles, elements,
and the like), this means that nature is, at root, spiritual and subject-like (as active, fluid natura
naturans) rather than material and object-like (as passive, fixed natura naturata).
But, this Schellingian inference trades upon a false dichotomy appearing in multiple
terminological guises, including: natura naturans versus natura naturata; productivity versus
product; spirit versus matter; mind versus body; and subject versus object. Just because the
zero-level foundations of the physical universe, whether as the energies and forces of the natural
sciences of Schelling’s era or as the quantum phenomena (or even the ephemeral, vibrating
strings of string theory) of current physics, do not resemble the mid-sized dry goods of human
sensory-perceptual experience does not mean that they are therefore to be identified as subjects
(qua the diametrical opposites of objects). Schelling’s retention, inconsistent with his avowed
anti-dualism, of a false dichotomy between the mental/spiritual and the bodily/material misleads
him into a fundamental, general ontology of matterless mind (i.e., scientifically and
philosophically dubious hylozoism, panpsychism, pantheism, and/or vitalism). For instance, this
inconsistency is flagrantly on display in a single three-paragraph stretch of the 1813 version of
The Ages of the World, with a paragraph complaining about dualistic thinking sandwiched in-

55
between two paragraphs dematerializing matter by relying on a dualism according to which what
is not bodily is spiritual.180 Walter Schulz indeed is justified in maintaining that idealism (as
anti-materialism) is enduringly central to Schelling.181 Likewise, John Zammito writes of
Schelling’s enduring (counter-Enlightenment) ambition to “reanimate the physical world.”182
Alas, Schelling does so at the price of regressing to pre-modern spiritualist animism.
In a bad version of Hegel’s positing a presupposition, a version akin to Lacan’s rabbit and
hat, Schelling pretends to posit the subjective as emerging out of the natural. But, Schelling’s
posit here presupposes the subjective as non-emergently always-already there within the natural
from the outset. Schelling’s pseudo-emergentist conjuring trick relies on deceptive spiritualist
cheating. This should be somewhat troubling for Žižek, given his interlinked commitments to
both Hegelianism and materialism.
With respect to Žižek, the cautionary case of Schelling’s spiritualism ought to encourage
him, especially in his engagements with matters quantum, to opt for a more Hegelian than
Schellingian form of Naturphilosophie. At one point in Sex and the Failed Absolute, he indeed
appears to do so:
…the big problem is not how we can pass from the classic universe to the
universe of quantum waves, but exactly the opposite one—why and how the
quantum universe itself immanently requires the collapse of the wave function,
its ‘de-coherence’ into the classic universe, i.e., why and how the collapse is
inherent to the quantum universe. Instead of just standing in awe before the
wonder of the quantum universe, we should turn around our perspective and
perceive as the true wonder the rise of our ‘ordinary’ spatio-temporal reality.
It is not only that there is no classic reality which is not sustained by blurred
quantum fluctuations; one should add that there is no quantum universe which
is not always-already hooked onto a piece of classic reality. The problem of
180 (Schelling, Ages of the World (second draft, 1813), pg. 150)
181 (Schulz, Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus in der spätphilosophie Schellings, pg. 286)
182 (Zammito, The Gestation of German Biology, pg. 326)

56
the collapse of the wave function through the act of measurement is that it has
to be formulated in classic, not quantum, terms… a measurement formulated
in terms of classic reality is necessary for quantum mechanics itself to be
consistent, it is an addition of the classic reality which ‘sutures’ the quantum
field.183
My assessment of this passage will be limited by my lack of expert knowledge of quantum
physics. What I have to say about it concerns its implications for Žižek’s philosophical position
as it relates to German idealism. In particular, the above quotation calls for being read in relation
to Schelling’s and Hegel’s divergent arrangements of modal categories.
To cut a long story short, Schelling and Hegel each privilege a different category of
modality in terms of the fundaments of their metaphysical systems. Across the shifting
landscape of his corpus, Schelling prioritizes possibility/potentiality as ultimate184 (despite
intermittent, and inconsistent, affirmations of the primacy of contingency and/as factical
givenness during Schelling’s middle and late periods185). This prioritization is reflected by
Žižek’s Schellingian recourses to the collapse of the wave function in quantum mechanics, in
which the Grund of a teeming multitude of possible states contracts and distills itself into the
single settled state of Existenz as actual reality. In this picture, possibility precedes and generates
actuality.

184 (Schelling, Bruno, pg. 179, 184, 187)
(Schelling, The Ages of the World: Third Version (c. 1815), pg. 48, 86-87)
(Schelling, Philosophy of Revelation, pg. 125, 147)
(Schelling, The Grounding of the Positive Philosophy, pg. 132-135, 141-142, 160-161)
185 (Schelling, Clara, pg. 27)
(Schelling, The Grounding of the Positive Philosophy, pg. 128-131, 133-135, 139, 141-142, 160-161)
(F.W.J. Schelling, Abhandlung über die Quelle der ewigen Wahrheiten, Ausgewählte Schriften: Band 5, 1842-1852,
pg. 594)
(Schelling, Andere Deduktion der Principien der positiven Philosophie, pg. 792)

57
Hegel is diametrically opposed to Schelling’s (or anyone else’s) privileging of possibility
as the metaphysically most fundamental of the modal categories, a privileging already
entrenched in German modern philosophy due to the influence of Leibnizian-Wolffian scholastic
metaphysics. First and foremost, Hegel, in the last stretch of “The Doctrine of Essence” in his
mature Logic, makes the actual (as Wirklichkeit), as also contingent, the primordial grounding
modal category of his metaphysics. Both possibility and necessity are, for Hegel, to be treated as
supervening upon the foundations laid by contingent actuality. I advance and justify this
reconstruction of Hegel on modal categories, including Hegel’s problematization of philosophies
that treat pure possibility alone as metaphysically primary, in the third chapter of A New German
Idealism.186
As I also highlight in the same chapter of A New German Idealism, Žižek rightly
recognizes the priority enjoyed by the modality of contingency for Hegel. This enormously
important Žižekian recognition runs contrary to the standard misreading of Hegel as a
metaphysician of necessity, a philosopher for whom Absolute Spirit as a God-like mega-Mind
teleologically orchestrates from above and in advance the fateful trajectory of all reality and
history. Additionally, Žižek’s restoration of Züfalligkeit to its central place in Hegel’s thinking
helps implicitly to challenge the criticisms from the later Schelling of the “positive philosophy”
to the effect that Hegel surreptitiously presupposes without successfully positing the original
contingent facticity of the Real (i.e., the “thatness” of there ever being something rather than
nothing).187 This late-Schellingian objection to Hegel’s philosophy looks to be even more fully
186(Johnston, A New German Idealism, pg. 74-128)

187(Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, pg. 147)
(Schelling, Philosophy of Revelation, pg. 41-42, 45)
(Schelling, The Grounding of the Positive Philosophy, pg. 128-131, 133-135, 137, 139, 141-142, 151, 155, 160-161,
182-183, 186, 197-198, 204-205, 211)

58
refuted once one appreciates that it is contingent actuality, not just contingency, that serves as the
Hegelian Ur-modality. This means that Hegel gives the facticity of Schelling’s positive-
philosophical “thatness” a place within the very heart of Logik, in addition to it playing multiple
roles within the Realphilosophie.
To return to the preceding block quotation from Sex and the Failed Absolute, Žižek now
can be seen there to proffer a more Hegelian than Schellingian interpretation of the collapse of
the wave function in quantum mechanics. At certain moments in this passage, it sounds as
though Žižek is sticking to his Schelling-inspired interpretation in which the Ground of quantum
possibilities comes first, secondarily giving rise to the Existence of classic actuality. However,
by the close of this quotation, it is evident that, at least epistemologically if not also
ontologically, Žižek reverses the Schellingian collapse sequence, with the Grund of pre-collapse
possibilities having to be seen as shadowy outgrowths accompanying the Existenz of post-
collapse Wirklichkeit. This reversal is that of Schelling’s possibility-before-actuality into Hegel’s
actuality-before-possibility.
Hegel, with the greater epistemological conscientiousness he, unlike Schelling, inherits
from Kant, at least would insist specifically on the intelligibility of the quantum Real being
conditioned by classic reality. Žižek is being Hegelian rather than Schellingian when he insists
upon this point (“a measurement formulated in terms of classic reality is necessary for quantum
mechanics itself to be consistent, it is an addition of the classic reality which ‘sutures’ the
quantum field”). Like everyone else, I can only guess at what Hegel might have made of
quantum physics had he lived to witness it develop.

59
As for Žižek, I suspect that Sex and the Failed Absolute contains a sophisticated effort to
approach quantum physics in a manner bringing together aspects of both Schelling’s and Hegel’s
philosophies (a synthesis perhaps resembling Schelling’s integration of the ontology of
Naturphilosophie with the epistemology of transcendental idealism specifically in his 1800
System of Transcendental Idealism). More precisely, I am left with the hunch that Žižek wishes
to couple a more Schellingian rendition of a quantum ontology with a more Hegelian
epistemology (taking into account Hegel’s doctrine of modal categories) qualifying and
supporting this same ontology (with this effort at coupling deliberately bringing about a blurring
of the lines of division between Schelling and Hegel). But, I might be wrong about this.
Much later in Sex and the Failed Absolute, Žižek remarks in an endnote that, “One should
always bear in mind the scientific strength of so-called reductionism: Is science not at its
strongest when it explains how a ‘higher’ quality emerges out of the ‘lowest’ ones?”188 Žižek’s
use of the word “emerges” here calls for some disambiguation, particularly considering his
recourse to the term “reductionism” in the same sentence. Apropos emergentism, it is typical to
distinguish between multiple permutations of it in the form of differences of degree between
“weak” and “strong” emergentisms. And, these differences have everything to do with
reductionism. Weak emergentisms admit the potential for (or even accomplishment of) reductive
explanatory strategies exhaustively accounting for higher-level properties on the basis of lower-
level ones. By contrast, strong emergentisms are vigorously anti-reductive, maintaining that
higher emergent strata are irreducible to, even inexplicable in terms of, lower ones. Such higher

60
emergent strata come to enjoy a certain amount of independence involving self-sufficient
structural dynamics not to be found in the distinct structural dynamics of other strata below.
Žižek’s just-quoted endnote comment makes it look as though the emergentism he is
referring to and approves of is a weak variant compatible with scientific reductionism.
Consistent with this, both Schelling himself, on my preceding reconstructions of his
philosophical positions, and the Žižekian shotgun marriage of Schelling with quantum physics
can be construed as licensing (or, in Žižek’s case, at least risking to license) the reduction of the
Existence of spiritual subject to the Ground of natural substance (whether this Grund be
Spinoza’s natura naturans, the forces of early-nineteenth-century physics and chemistry, or
quantum mechanics). Given Žižek’s growing insistence that his “quantum physics with
Schelling” is central to his dialectical materialism, my critique is tantamount to saying that Žižek
cannot hold onto everything he is trying to bring together, namely, Schelling, Hegel, dialectical
materialism, and quantum physics. One to two of these things needs to be jettisoned for the sake
of consistency. Most pointedly, the combination of Schelling and quantum physics bottoms out
in one or another form of reductionism inconsistent with the rest of Žižek’s philosophical
agenda. With Schelling, one ultimately gets spiritualist reductionism (as anthropomorphism,
hylozoism, panpsychism, pantheism, and/or vitalism). With quantum mechanics alone (i.e.,
minus the Schelling), one is in danger of endorsing physicalist reductionism. Only one of these
options (i.e., physicalist reductionism) is materialist, and neither are dialectical.
Yet, numerous other facets of Žižek’s thinking, facets bound up with his admirable
endeavor to “re-actualize” for today the radically autonomous, Cogito-like subjectivity of
classical German idealism, suggest that what he truly needs and wants is a strong-emergentist

61
Hegelian layer cake model whose anti-reductive strength goes so far as to posit the casually
efficacious reality of so-called “top-down causation.” The weak-emergentist Schellingian layer
doughnut model, with its reductive Spinozistic spirit monism,189 provides none of this. It
delivers neither an authentic (dialectical) materialism nor a theory of denaturalized subjectivity
as self-relating negativity. These are both desiderata of Žižek’s philosophizing, things I too
desire. Hence, I would encourage him to join me in ordering Hegel’s cake instead of Schelling’s
doughnut, whether with or without a side of quantum physics.
189 (Schelling, “Further Presentations from the System of Philosophy (1802) [Extract],” pg. 225)

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1

§1 The Philosophy Behind the Science: Revisiting an Old Debate

In the sixth and seventh chapters of my 2014 book Adventures in Transcendental

quantum mechanics.1 Following my initial criticisms of Žižek’s speculative appeals to the

which became parts of my 2018 book A New German Idealism).3

forging an uncompromisingly materialist yet thoroughly anti-reductive theory of subjectivity.

threatens to run contrary to materialism (dialectical or otherwise) by lending credence to

and materialist inclinations.

materialist rendition of quantum physics and my transcendental materialist rendition of human

nature put forward by these two complexly entwined contemporaries.

However, despite both arguably being emergentists, Schelling’s and Hegel’s

objective, and absolute mind/spirit [Geist]).

be comprehended in their inherent intelligibility, there is no direct meeting up and merging

mechanical and the spiritual.

Schelling’s configuration of emergent layers, by contrast with Hegel’s, is circular such

Schelling, during the mid-1790s-to-early-1800s period in which he is developing his

interconnected Naturphilosophie and Identiätsphilosophie, indeed relies heavily upon Spinozism,

Tellingly, in nearly all of Žižek’s discussions of quantum mechanics, he explicitly appeals

characterized as the layer doughnut model.10

amounts to an implausible and not-at-all-materialist anthropomorphic panpsychism.

in philosophically appropriating natural scientific content. Doing so would enable him to

articulate a dialectical Naturphilosophie consistent with his core materialist commitments.

invoking God and Spirit, the intangible mind of a divine creator.

§2 Giving Layers Their Just Deserts: Schellingian and Hegelian Freiheitskämpfe

Schelling and Hegel as two key forefathers of emergentist thinking.

The second type of resistance to interpreting Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophies as

involving emergentism(s) is tied to construals of them as metaphysicians of a static, eternal

epiphenomena qua mere misleading appearances. Although such commonplace impressions of

Schellingian and/or Hegelian metaphysics cannot be thoroughly scrutinized here—doing so

would derail my focus on the Schelling-Hegel divergence apropos emergentism as it relates to

Naturphilosophie, the component of his corpus evidently most relevant to a philosophical

emergentism of the middle-period Schelling when I eventually address Žižek’s Schellingian

rendition of recent physics. And, as my illumination of the nature-philosophical emergentism of

abandoning his prior positions).

philosophies of Nature and Identity—with the entwined elaborations of these philosophies

occupying Schelling throughout the late-1790s and early-1800s.

ought to be understood as motivated by this red thread of metaphysical inquiry. As Schelling

Naturphilosophie, already pointedly raises this Spinozistic “great question.”17

a Philosophy of Nature reflects an appreciation by Schelling of eighteenth-century

14 (Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, pg. 36)

Hegel) already eroded long-established traditional pictures of nature as an ahistorical realm of

the pages of Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature.

subjectivity out of anonymous worldly objectivity.28 Furthermore, Schelling posits a material

opposite, namely, Spinoza’s natura naturata.

on the genetic, on movements of (self-)stratifying becoming, remains constant.30 These geneses

task of all nature philosophy: TO DERIVE THE DYNAMIC GRADUATED SEQUENCE OF

STAGES IN NATURE” (die Grundausgabe der ganzen Naturphilosophie: die dynamische

Evolution!).36 He continues to think of nature as evolutionary throughout his career.37

the former out of the latter.43

Schelling views nature’s sequence of stages (Stufenfolge) as exhibiting a clear

hierarchical order. As just observed, pre/non-human materiality or earthiness is at the bottom of

the very topmost tier, sapience.

of his three-volume Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences), Schelling sketches a

Schelling repeatedly identifies the organic as a “higher potency” (höhern Potenz) in

this—but aspires to be a strong-qua-anti-reductive (rather than weak-qua-reductive) emergentist.

a degree of relative absoluteness in the sense of self-sufficiency as both ontological and

epistemological irreducibility to any other power/potency.47

animals) achieve a degree of autonomy, of self-determination, over-and-above their physical and

46 (Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, pg. 68)

still not dualism.

of the organic world (der Grenze der Organisation).”53

product of organic nature’s productivity. In 1801’s Presentation of My System of Philosophy, he

50 (Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie, pg. 140)