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Schelling’s
O N T O L O G Y
N E W
P E R S P E C T I V E S
Ontology of
Powers
I N
CHARLOTTE ALDERWICK
Schelling’s Ontology
of Powers
New Perspectives in Ontology
Series Editors: Peter Gratton, Southeastern Louisiana University, and
Sean J. McGrath, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada
Publishes the best new work on the question of being and the history of metaphysics
After the linguistic and structuralist turn of the twentieth century, a renaissance
in metaphysics and ontology is occurring. Following in the wake of speculative
realism and new materialism, this series aims to build on this renewed interest
in perennial metaphysical questions, while opening up avenues of investigation
long assumed to be closed. Working within the Continental tradition without
being confned by it, the books in this series will move beyond the linguistic turn
and rethink the oldest questions in a contemporary context. Tey will challenge
old prejudices while drawing upon the speculative turn in post-Heideggerian
ontology, the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of religion.
Books available
Te Political Teology of Schelling, Saitya Brata Das
Continental Realism and Its Discontents, edited by Marie-Eve Morin
Te Contingency of Necessity: Reason and God as Matters of Fact, Tyler Tritten
Te Problem of Nature in Hegel’s Final System, Wes Furlotte
Schelling’s Naturalism: Motion, Space and the Volition of Tought, Ben Woodard
Tinking Nature: An Essay in Negative Ecology, Sean J. McGrath
Heidegger’s Ontology of Events, James Bahoh
Te Political Teology of Kierkegaard, Saitya Brata Das
Te Schelling–Eschenmayer Controversy, 1801: Nature and Identity, Benjamin
Berger and Daniel Whistler
Hölderlin’s Philosophy of Nature, edited by Rochelle Tobias
Afect and Attention After Deleuze and Whitehead: Ecological Attunement, Russell J.
Duvernoy
Te Philosophical Foundations of the Late Schelling: Te Turn to the Positive, Sean J.
McGrath
Schelling’s Ontology of Powers, Charlotte Alderwick
Books forthcoming
Collected Essays in Speculative Philosophy, written by James Bradley and edited by
Sean J. McGrath
www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/epnpio
Schelling’s Ontology
of Powers
CHARLOTTE ALDERWICK
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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
Te right of Charlotte Alderwick to be identifed as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the
Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Abbreviations and Notes on Referencing ix
Introduction 1
1. Powers: Contemporary Accounts 7
2. Freedom: Te Post-Kantian Perspective 37
3. Powers: Schelling’s Naturphilosophie 72
4. Absolute Identity: Between the Naturphilosophie and the
Freedom Essay 112
5. Freedom and Powers: Schelling’s Freedom Essay 137
6. Freedom and Powers: Te Trouble with Powers 166
Conclusions 187
Bibliography 190
Index 198
Acknowledgements
First, a huge amount of thanks is due to Iain Hamilton Grant for intro-
ducing me to Schelling. As an undergraduate he recommended that I read
the Freedom essay, and from then I was hooked – I was so convinced that
there was something brilliant and beautiful going on there that I’ve been
trying to work out how to make sense of what that is ever since. Tanks also
to Iain for his unwavering support and enthusiasm, for many productive
conversations, and for access to his recent translations.
Second, an equally huge amount of thanks is due to Bob Stern, who was
a fantastic and supportive supervisor for my PhD project which eventually
became this book, and which would therefore have been impossible without
him. Tanks also to Eric Olsen, Jessica Leech and Sebastian Gardner for
their comments and contributions to that project.
Schelling scholarship is a fast-growing and exciting area to be working
in: I have been lucky enough to be involved in a number of fantastic events
and to have met a community of brilliant researchers. Te supportive and
collegiate attitude of the Schelling research community in the UK and
globally is a special thing, and I have beneftted hugely from conversations
with many of its members over the course of this project. Particular thanks
to Daniel Whistler, Benjamin Berger, G. Anthony Bruno, Lydia Azadpour
and Phoebe Page for their comments on various drafts, talks and papers
which contributed to this book. Two events in particular were incredibly
productive for my thinking on these issues: the Pittsburgh Summer Sym-
posium in Contemporary Philosophy on Schelling and Naturphilosophie
at Duquesne University in 2013, and the Powers, Perception and Agency
summer school and conference (part of the Power Structuralism in Ancient
Ontologies project) at the British School in Rome in 2014. Tanks to Iain
Grant and Jason Wirth, and Anna Marmodoro and Erasmus Mayr, for all of
viii | s c h e l l i ng ’ s on t ol o g y of p ow e r s
their work on those events. Tanks are also due to the research communities
working on the metaphysics of free will and the metaphysics of powers,
who were hugely welcoming to me turning up at their conferences and
very tolerant of my attempts to persuade them that Schelling is the key to
practically everything – thanks in particular to Stephen Mumford for some
very productive discussions; others have been credited in what follows for
their contributions to my thinking.
Others deserving of thanks for general support, reading of drafts and
productive philosophical conversations are Joe Saunders, Neil Williams,
Niels Van Miltenberg, Dawa Omerta, Oriane Petteni, and my infnitely
supportive and completely fantastic colleagues at UWE Philosophy. Another
set of completely fantastic human beings and sources of infnite support are
my family and friends, of whom there are too many to list but it would be
a travesty not to mention.
I gratefully thank Taylor & Francis Ltd for permission to reproduce
parts of ‘Atemporal Essence and Existential Freedom in Schelling’, from
the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, vol. 23, no. 1 (2015), pp.
115–37 in Chapter 5; and parts of ‘Nature’s Capacities: Schelling and
Contemporary Power-based Ontologies’, from Angelaki, vol. 21, no. 4
(2016), pp. 59–76 in Chapters 1, 3 and 6.
Finally, thanks to the AHRC for funding the PhD which eventually led
to this book. It was an absolute dream and a privilege to have the time and
the resources to dedicate to thinking about Schelling and these issues. I
hope that what I’ve produced will be helpful to people lucky enough to do
the same in the future.
Abbreviations and Notes on
Referencing
Ethics – Spinoza, B. (1994) (Curley, E. trans. and ed.) Ethics. London: Penguin.
References to Spinoza’s Ethics follow the conventional format: Roman
numerals refer to the parts of the Ethics, and Arabic numbers are used for
the defnitions, propositions, etc.
Te following abbreviations are used:
App – appendix
D – defnition
D (following P and an Arabic numeral) – demonstration
C – corollary
S – scholium
Tis project has a number of overlapping aims. Perhaps the central aim is
to provide a reading and interpretation of Schelling’s philosophy (or rather,
of his philosophy from the Naturphilosophie to the Freedom essay), and in
particular of the conception of human freedom made possible by Schelling’s
metaphysical system. I will argue that we should understand Schelling’s
ontology as a power-based system: one which claims that the most basic
building blocks of reality are powers or dispositions. Accordingly I present
a reading of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie as an articulation of this ontology
of powers. Following this I give an account of Schelling’s evolving philo-
sophical project in the years between the Naturphilosophie and the Freedom
essay; I then ofer a novel interpretation of Schelling’s account of freedom
there. I want to show that this account gives us a way to make sense of the
freedom of human agents within their day-to-day lives, and in a way that is
continuous with the kinds of activity which exist elsewhere in the natural
world. I also want to show that this conception of freedom is made possible
by the ontology of powers which constitutes Schelling’s metaphysics.
Tis indicates another central aim of this book: I want to draw paral
lels between Schelling’s power-based ontology and recent work in the
metaphysics of powers. One of the claims I will defend is that Schelling’s
work highlights an important set of problems for this kind of ontology;
and in particular for attempts to argue for a libertarian conception of
human freedom on the basis of a system of this sort. I argue that Schelling’s
particular treatment of these problems, and his approach to metaphysics
more broadly, enables him to both recognise and solve these problems in a
way which is not currently done in the contemporary literature.
Although I argue that Schelling’s ontology of powers bears striking
similarities to contemporary accounts, I also want to draw attention to the
2 | s c h e l l i ng ’ s on t ol o g y of p ow e r s
concepts which I discuss in this book is rather broad. Tere are a number of
strands of Schelling’s thought which I have had to present briefy and have
not been able to do justice to because they have not been integral to the
claims I want to make, and because there is simply too much in Schelling’s
work to be able to do justice to all of it in a project of this scale. I have tried
to include references to other work on Schelling where I have not been able
to fully explore areas of his thought, and hope that even where I have not
been able to spend the time I would have liked to on areas of his philosophy,
I have not ended up misrepresenting him.
My approach to philosophy is what one might call ‘big picture’ – in
this book I take a broad view of Schelling’s philosophy and approach it as a
whole. Tere is a lot of excellent and detailed scholarly analysis of Schelling
being done by various individuals; this book is not an example of that.
Rather what I am proposing is a particular way of reading Schelling which
I argue fts with his overarching philosophical concerns and the spirit of
his philosophy, as well as giving us a way to make sense of the particular
texts I focus on here. I also want to show that the reading of Schelling that
I argue for here is fruitful as it gives us a way to understand his diferent
philosophical concerns as ftting together as a coherent whole, and allows
us to approach his works as an ongoing philosophical project rather than as
protean and piecemeal. I therefore think that this reading has implications
for interpreting Schelling’s works which I have not considered in this
book; though I have not had the space to pursue them here I have tried
to gesture towards them where I can. I also think that this holistic ‘big
picture’ approach is appropriate for reading Schelling, because arguably
this is the way that Schelling approaches philosophy: even in his analysis of
particular specifc phenomena, Schelling always keeps the whole in mind,
always considering the ways that the elements of his system are connected,
and the ways that diferent elements can help to shed light on or come into
confict with others. One reason I hope that this work will be of interest to
philosophers working outside of classical German philosophy is that there
is much to recommend this way of approaching philosophical problems,
as I hope to demonstrate. I want to show that Schelling’s way of doing
philosophy, and his ongoing philosophical project itself, have much to ofer
contemporary debates.
I therefore begin by engaging with contemporary metaphysics, and
in Chapter 1 I outline the central features of contemporary power-based
ontologies. Tere are a number of reasons for this. First, I want to draw
attention to the marked similarities between these accounts and Schelling’s
ontology in order to support my claim that the latter’s system should be
read as an ontology of powers. Second, I want to highlight these simil
arities as I will claim later in the project that the problems that emerge for
16 | s c h e l l i ng ’ s on t ol o g y of p ow e r s
world where the laws of nature difer the dispositions which properties have
will also difer.
Bird (2007b: 68–70) identifes two conceptions of natural laws which are
compatible with categoricalism: a regularity theory (such as Lewis’s) and a
nomic necessitation theory (found in Armstrong, Tooley and Dretske), and
argues that neither of these accounts is successful. Further, he demonstrates
that the problems with quidditism remain on either account of natural laws.
Briefy, the regularity theory argues that laws simply supervene on states of
afairs in the world:
Laws of nature are a subset of the contingent regularities (true generalisations) of
the actual world. Te subset is characterised by some further condition, such as the
requirement that to be a law a generalization must be derivable from each optimal
axiomatized system. (Ibid. 69)
Author: A. H. Bergholm
Abraham Poppius
Language: Finnish
Elämäkerta ja runot
Kirj. ja toim.
A.H. BERGHOLM
A.H.B.
SISÄLLYS:
I. ELÄMÄKERTA.
II. RUNOT.
Jos lie tämä vaikuttanut, tai Poppius muutenkin päätti tällä kertaa
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[»Suurin pyrintöni olisi nyt, että sen ohella kuin olisin suorittanut
Kandidaattitutkinnon, samalla viimeinkin olisin päässyt varmalle
pohjalle filosofiassa, joka voi eksyttää ihmisen kaikellaisilla teillä
aivan kuolluksiin,» — —.]
Grubben luennoista uskonnon filosofiassa toivoi hän paljon ja
Geijeriin oli hän aivan ihastunut: »Man kommer alldeles ånyo född
från hans timmar». [»Tulee ihan uudestasyntyneenä hänen
tunneiltaan».]
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