The Ungrounded Nature of Being: Grounding a Dynamic Ontology from Nature-Philosophy to Positive Philosophy

Abstract

The fact that in around 1844, and at the height of his positive philosophy period, Schelling dedicates himself to drafting a work entirely dedicated to issues in the nature-philosophy, such as the Presentation of the Process of Nature (Darstellung des Naturprozesses), in the explicit attempt to give continuity to the speculative physics theories set out in the 1799 First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie) and in the 1801 General Deduction of Dynamical Process (Allgemeine Deduktion des dynamischen Processes) in particular, raises a number of questions of both a historiographic nature and, above all, of a more strictly theoretical nature, which merit an in-depth analysis. The Presentation of the Process of Nature, together with the other works from Schelling’s later Naturphilosophie, brings into question all of the interpretations that split Schelling’s philosophy into different phases, as well as highlights how his interest in the nature-philosophy did not die out between the late 1790s and 1806. In addition, and far more significantly, the presence of a work such as the Presentation of the Process of Nature in that theoretical context, in which Schelling was working in particular on the grounding of positive philosophy and on its relationship with negative philosophy and on the passage from the latter to the former, leads us to reflect on the radical role and relevance of the nature-philosophy for Schelling’s entire philosophical development, as well as on the particular relationship that his positive philosophy has with Naturphilosophie.