• 4 On the philosophy of prophecy, see Hogrebe 1992 and Struck 2016.
• 5 The Erster Entwurf says much the same (III, 21): «we have determined the unconditioned as that whic (...)

2There is therefore a structure to these appearances. Physiogony, noogony, theogony: another series, the third of which discovers the anceps of the nature operative in a consciousness when the «whole world of the gods» arises. The hypothesis underlying each identifies, on the one hand, Schelling’s speculative philosophy with mantics or prophecy,4 and on the other renders first creation its own hypothesis of whatever future it eventually becomes the past of. This ontogenetic hypothesis therefore looks, with the future’s ancient eyes, back to the undiscovered past of a future yet to emerge. Yet emergence happens unconditionally such that its conditions are late acquisitions. That is to say, the form of the hypothesis runs not from condition to conditioned (X → Ǝ), but from the unconditioned to that emergence (→ Ǝ) which is only then conditioned when something has emerged the history of whose emergence then involves that emergence.5

• 6 Descending Stufenfolge are only addressed in the Darstellung des Naturprozesses (X, 311, 329-330).
• 7 Not only the Naturphilosophie: there are Stufenfolge of «actions not possible via nature» in the Sy (...)

3Amongst the surprises in Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology is the threefold series by which theogony is monumentalised in consciousness as its own advent (which, by virtue of involving its own transition from not-being to being, it cannot think) as a branch of a branch of the production of nature that remains the free realisation of an ascending-descending6 ontogenetic series, a Stufenfolge, by which Schelling’s Naturphilosophie was always articulated7 and the position of nature within which movement was and remained constantly examined. This being so, is it possible to ask a Schellingian what nature is? Is it, that is, an occupant of, or even identical to, some ontic domain or ontology as such? The later Naturphilosophie, by which I mean that whose form begins most clearly to emerge during the Weltalter inquiries and develops thereafter, is focused around the problem of creation. Since creation is no thing but rather a process, the questions it asks are not reducibly ontic or ontological, since they entail an ontogenetic dimension. This is what the claim to seek «all the principles of being and becoming», from the Philosophy of Mythology involves: the science of being will always be the science of being, but as such must continuously be remade. In other words, inattention to ontogeny reduces ontology’s object domain (is the reason for reduction) just as the Weltalter tells us inattention to prophecy reduces that of epistemology.

• 10 See the Philosophie der Offenbarung XIII, 207-211, for Schelling’s outline of ontogeny (Seyns-Entst (...)
• 11 See Feyerabend 1984; 2009; 1999.

4What is the position of nature in Schelling’s later philosophy? On the basis of our two epigraphs, nature enjoys the same position in the later as in the earlier. The question therefore becomes: how is Naturphilosophie to be conceived when nature is nothing other than a transitional point between what will be and what can no longer not be?10 And what is the relevance of Schelling’s with respect to more recent naturephilosophy? These questions go to the core of what Hilary Putnam (2012) described as the ‘content and appeal of naturalism’, which consist respectively in the assertion that nothing can be that is not nature, rejecting therefore a supernaturalism nobody holds; or something is nature just when it is analysable by at least one scientific method. If there are no supernaturalists, then what is to be said of those phenomena conceived to be manifestly non-natural, such as artworks or technologies? How is ontology to honour both nature and what is not nature without falling into reductionism on the one hand or supernaturalism on the other? The standard contemporary response to this problem is, as Putnam himself advocates, a pluralism that either rejects the real fundamentality of fundamentality candidates such as nature, or rejects, in line with post-Kantian philosophy in general, a realism determined in reference to the given for a nominalism that honours not merely how nature is constructed, but the number of ways in which it can be. Amongst these latter projects, for instance, are Feyerabend’s later work, including his own mythology-embracing Naturphilosophie, his ‘science as art’11 and abundance theses, but especially Goodman’s concept of worldmaking qua anthropic fact. As we will see, the disjunction of aim and function in key theses by Feyerabend and Goodman concerning abundance and worldmaking compare unfavourably with their conjunction in the later Schelling’s account of cosmopoiesis.

• 12 As I argue in my 2008.
• 13 Chief amongst these predations is the consensus that presentational uptake eliminates givenness (Se (...)

5The same assumptions as underlie naturalism also motivate denials of Schelling’s as «Naturphilosophie throughout12», since it is only on considering nature as finite in respect of being that any non-natural state, whether vicious or virtuous, might obtain. Contrastively, the present essay argues that Schelling’s post-naturalist naturalism neither conceives nature as ontically particular for reductionist or abundantist reasons, nor symmetrically conceives construction as an Anthropos-only attribute in order to save its riches from naturalist or pre-modern philosophical predations13. I will thus present a theory of Schellingian as against Goodman worldmakers as abundant precisely because it is naturephilosophically conceived.

• 14 According to Diogenes Laertius, Lives I.17
• 15 VII, 356: «the whole of modern European philosophy since its inception in Descartes has this common (...)
• 16 XI, 216: «nature is equally necessarily a transitive point in the mythological as in the universal (...)

6According to the citation above, from his 1845 foreword to Steffens’ posthumous works, Schelling argues that Naturphilosophie indeed persists throughout his later work, though as a part, rather than the whole, of philosophy as such. The echo of the «ancient Greek division» (IV, 92) or trisection of philosophy into physics, ethics and dialectic14 (i.e. into nature, the practises of life and the discipline of ascent) in Schelling’s endeavours demonstrates the equally long-standing insistence that nature be reclaimed for philosophy, following their parting of the ways «since Descartes»15 When we ask Schelling as to the character of the part he conceives nature to be or possess, we find that nature is thought as a «necessary transitive point» in the movement evident, for example, in both «the mythological and in the universal process».16 The question is whether this «transitive point» is partial in relation to some whole that remains incomplete without something additional to nature, or whether the partial character of nature must be reconceived in accordance with some other contrastive case, as for example the State is said to be only in relation to «higher development», such that this relation, or the development, is prior to the part.

• 17 Hogrebe’s rich contrast (1992: 122-123) of the «discrete and indiscrete» dimensions has the latter (...)

7Taking the first, mereological understanding, that nature is a finite part of some to-be-completed whole, it is a consequence of the resultant reciprocal limitation of nature by some thing or set of things that, according to Schelling, lies «above and beyond nature», that the following dilemma imposes itself: either what is not nature must be supernatural and the partial character of the Naturphilosophie therefore begging the question as to its successors’ natures; or the nature superseding nature is itself nature in turn. As long as the question is posed in this form, or has these ontic entailments, however, the movement whose transitions they are is lost. Consequently, as Die Weltalter puts the point, «where there is no consequent, there is no science» (VIII, 209). In other words, there can be no discrete ontology17 or science of what is without one of what comes to be, no ontology without ontogeny. In consequence, as the Weltalter recalls, the logic or structure of emergence must also be mobile: in place of the mechanical echo of being in ‘A=x’, Schellingian ontogenesis is that what is being is an hypothesis of further development, because hypothesis instantiates the operations to which its being issued contributes. The hypothesis that being makes is therefore that being is an hypothesis.

• 18 Keith R. Peterson’s English language translation (2003) gives «original actants», thus mistaking Sc (...)

8What then is the nature of this contribution? Conceiving nature as an always transitive point in a movement also has consequences regarding how part or point are conceived. This was also the problem addressed in the Erster Entwurf’s theory of «original actions [Aktionen]18». Identifying the error of atomism as lying in the assumption that the mechanical divisibility of matter must eventually isolate its «absolutely smallest» part, Schelling reconceives it around a «constantly active filling of space». In consequence…,

• 19 Contrastively, amongst the possible solutions identified in the Introduction to the Ideen (II, 21-2 (...)
• 20 III, 22: «The original actions… are not themselves in space; they cannot be viewed as parts of matt (...)
• 21 III, 23n: «It is not our view that there are such simple actions in nature… [These are] only the id (...)

9Neither the emergence of space nor its relation to the forces filling it are explained here. The composition of matter, which the Ideen argued could not occur but by the balancing of forces, remains equally unexplained19. Schelling does however tie the fate of matter to that of space while isolating «the principle of dynamic atomism», as «ideal only», from space20 or nature21. The result is that the partibility problem not only remains unresolved, but not yet adequately formulated. While mechanically understood, the parts of matter are isolable smallest simples, the same discreteness criteria seem not to apply to the parts of movement. In a nutshell, dynamic atomism’s reciprocal isolation of ideal parts of motion from space and nature is on the right tracks with the concept of original or ‘originating’ actions but does not properly conceive these.

• 22 Though Aristotle (Physics 262a24f) describes how division arises through the intercession of some t (...)

10Thus, contrasting the divisibility of matter into its smallest simple parts with that of movement, Feyerabend claims on behalf of Aristotle22 that «parts emerge only if the line is cut»:

• 24 III, 261-2: «For intuition, [an] infinite tendency towards evolution at infinite velocity. Thus not (...)
• 25 II, 397: «Real antithesis is possible only between things of one kind and common origin».

12The Law of Motion, though lately so designated, has a history in Schelling’s thought, a history that makes sense of the Protean character it must exhibit if it is both to satisfy philosophically natural pluralism, as it must just if nature is articulated as a universally «transitive point», i.e. as operative in the mythological and the theogonic processes as in the universal (XI, 216). As well as the Erster Entwurf’s dynamics, it further addresses the problem of movement along with Die Weltalter and the Philosophische Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie. In the first case, Schelling considers a movement at infinite speed,24 which would not be – or better, would never issue in – a movement because it would be over before it began. To become movement at all, a movement of such velocity must therefore be restricted, which, according to the Weltseele, can only happen through another of the same kind.25 Thus where movement acts, it acts on movement. Indeed this is already recognised in the Ideen (II, 185), where Schelling writes of…

• 26 I have here modified Jason Wirth’s (2000: 11) translation of VIII, 218: «keines kann sich von Natur (...)

13The hypothesis preceding that of dynamic atomism was precisely a theory of motions that are original just when they precede others: in other words, the hypothesis is that there is a necessary complexity of movement rather than an absolute simplicity of matter. In the second: when the «primal urge to Being», the «Urdrang zum Seyn» (VIII, 220) is achieved, it must be «finished in the beginning [such that… e]verything has happened and there is no further progression.» (VIII, 229) Similarly, the «first nature [is] from the very beginning… decomposed into three powers [… but] not one of them can bring itself by nature to sheer Being nor submit to not being what is being».26 It is only however with The Philosophical Introduction that a Law of Movement is formulated as such.

• 28 XI, 422: «all the things of nature are set as it were outside themselves, thus in motion towards th (...)

16If the Law is one of movement, however, then the movement does not cease with the coincidence of fact and principle, since what is being is only principle in relation to the powers that conjointly compose its hypothesis; rather than containing potencies, it therefore becomes the hypothesis of another that will act as principle in relation to which what is being is power. Hence the claim that «movement is implicit in what is being» (XI, 375). The Stufenfolge that the Naturphilosophie explicated from nature is, it turns out, a structure or shape of reason and being as by nature «in motion towards the highest28».

• 29 I take this term from Paul Feyerabend’s attempt to defend what he calls «the richness of Being» aga (...)
• 30 Feyerabend 1999: 13.
• 31 VI, 388: «Alles ist Urkeim oder nichts». See my 2015.
• 32 Feyerabend 1999: 33, emphasis mine.
• 33 Feyerabend 2009 ch.1.
• 34 Goodman 1978: 17.

Accordingly, the Law of the World (XI, 592) turns Schelling’s Ontogenetic Hypothesis into a theory of ‘worldmaking’ that honours what, following Feyerabend, we might call a principle of Abundance.29 We may understand ‘principle’ here as Schelling does: namely, as the actuality that, because it possesses no further possibility, itself becomes the hypothesis of another. With this in mind, we may identify two elements of the principle of abundance. The first is that «a large part of the abundance… on Earth arose in the attempt to conquer abundance30». That is, if abundance is true, every putative structure, core or principle augments rather than resolves abundance into simplicity and there are no non-productive principles. The ubiquitous fact of generation both provokes first philosophy’s search for its principles and entails that, as Schelling puts it, «everything is primal germ or nothing is».31 The second, therefore, is that «potentially, every culture is all cultures», or that totality is likewise contributory to rather than the completion of abundance.32 Feyerabend’s goal is, granting the historical forms reason and inquiry have taken, there is no reason to assume final form will ever be attained, though each inquiry or «culture» (each Bildung) self-conceives exactly thus. Historically considered, then, «every culture is all cultures» warns that the epistemic denigration, for example, of myth in respect of science,33 amounts to the denigration of epistemology as such, whether of the earlier by the later or the peripheral by the globally metropolitan. In fact, the ‘inverted fundamentalism’ of «a unique world of worlds» that Goodman warns is just another version of «the unique world»,34 is eliminated as a prospect by virtue of the «potentially» that qualifies the becomings of cultures. As with Schelling’s account of antecedence as the potency of consequents and so renders non-finality a trans-cultural driver such that every culture must forge its concept of the «all cultures» of every culture so again contributing rather than resolving our Feyerabend-Schelling «abundance» principle. In other words, abundance does not entail the ‘inverted fundamentalism’ of «a unique world of worlds».

• 35 «Nichts ist schwieriger, als ursprüngliche Seyns-Entstehung oder -Erzeugung zu begreifen» (XII, 37)
• 36 Plato, Philebus, 26d: «γένεσιν εἰς οὐσίαν», cited in Schelling 1994: 63. In an essay in the same vo (...)
• 37 Not only was this the situation Kant (Ak. 5, 525) confronted when he argued that, because matter co (...)

21«Nothing is more difficult than to conceive the original emergence or generation of Being35» as Schelling puts it in the Philosophy of Mythology. The difficulty at issue is not simply a complexity, but a problem of Being and becoming Schelling first notes, in his Timaeus commentary of 1794, is articulated by Plato in his Philebus as the «becoming of being»,36 and which becomes a central theme of his Naturphilosophie. Thus, when the Erster Entwurf proposes that «the concept of original Being should simply be eliminated from Naturphilosophie as it has been from transcendental philosophy» (III, 11). The emphasis is not on eliminating Being but original Being – the concept, that is, that Being is not only primary, but also originary. Thus, though the question arises of what is primary if this were not to be Being, this turns into the problem of Being’s capacity for origination, or of Being’s powers at all. The concept of something that simply is and ‘has’ powers or forces as its predicates, so that something that is may also move, is considered sufficiently key to figure in the ‘Introduction’ to the Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur. At issue is whether there is any possible consistent explanation for the claim that «matter has original forces» (II, 22-3), i.e. that they form the substrate on which powers act but do so while remaining the properties or predicates of bodies. The problem is, that if bodies arise at all, i.e. are not simply or cosmologically ‘given’, or if they come to have powers, how can this occur other than by the impetus or attraction of forces? If this is the case, however, it yields two distinct ontological classes that would, ex hypothesi, be incapable of interaction and lead to a dualism of the Newtonian sort (II, 23), and so could not provide a coherent philosophy of nature.37 Rather than acquiescing in the dualistic assumption that powers are no more than the predicates or dispositions of underlying bodies, the Ideen argues that the hypothesis of «original forces» rules out the prospect of a matter or body prior to or possessing them as its properties, since if this was not the case, we are left only with arbitrary hypotheses as to how forces come to be added to bodies, and the inexplicable fact of their capacity to interact. Clearly therefore, the only possible solution is that bodies are local structures within fields of force or, all beings are field beings.

• 38 Schelling 1989: 117.

22This established, we are now in a position to return to the Erster Entwurf’s case for the elimination of originary Being. It is important to stress that the function of this elimination is not to invert the objects to be accorded priority in the relation bodies-forces. Rather, because the problem is not the elimination of Being but of originary Being, it first enables an examination of what is involved in origination. Thus, what was true for the Naturphilosophie remained so for the positive philosophy, whose «true aim», Schelling stipulates, is «the concept of creation38». Involved in the concept of creation, minimally, is a change of state we might describe as from not-X to X. But this is an abstraction. Clearly, the ‘not-X’ formally antecedent to an X that was not only becomes specifically that not-X once X is. X that is augments and alters the career of what become its antecedents. The solution therefore proposed in the Erster Entwurf to the construction of creation is twofold: the dichotomy of product and production, or of nature as object and nature as subject; and the hypothesis, in partial solution to the relatedness of matter and forces in the Ideen, of «dynamic atomism», which theorizes units of minimal force as the simples from which bodies are composed. The latter seems merely to reduce to unity the dichotomy the former which, conversely, accords with the bifurcation claim around which Schelling’s first iteration of the «Law of the World» takes form in the Weltseele:

• 41 Note the assumption of discrete universes in Cassirer’s (1953: 44) acknowledgement of Schelling as (...)
• 42 Goodman 1978: 4.
• 43 McCormack (ed.) 2006: 10.
• 44 Goodman (1978: 21) puts the point pithily: «awareness of varied ways of seeing paints no pictures. (...)
• 45 1978: 7.

26In the passage above Goodman indicates what he takes it to be irrealism’s virtue to avoid, namely, conceding that there is just one «way the world is». Inspired by Cassirer, just as the latter was by Schelling’s revelation of «the universe of myth»41 Goodman’s irrealism is the view that, though neither the realist nor the idealist can be right because they each assert single yet antinomic accounts of fundamentality, this does not eliminate rightness and wrongness when measured by the former’s capacity to make a world, one, that is, that fits together.42 Thus, contrastively with both the mystic’s silence over ineffable being and the naturalist’s noisy assertion that fundamentality prescribes the world’s being, the Irrealist’s answer to the question «What is the way the world is?… is not a shush but a chatter»43. So far, so abundantist. Yet another answer, hidden amongst this chatter, was already given above: it does not concern the way the world is, but the idea that the world is as it is given, rather than described. This seems to set the bar ‘unnaturally’ high for an entity’s qualifying as a worldmaker: though «chatter» resonates with both Rorty’s liberal and Feyerabend’s anarchic pluralisms, it also reveals the provenance of making as exclusively a property of symbol users, i.e. those engaged in the «hard work» of worldmaking.44 Accordingly, though gods may qualify,45 stones do not, so that worldmaking is work only for beings for which description is work, i.e., where the difference between reporting and remaking is moot. The passage is worth quoting at length:

• 47 Ritter (2010: 536) distils science or Wissenschaft into «desjenigen, was das Wissen überhaupt schaf (...)
• 48 Goodman 1978: 6. On the previous page, Goodman argues that world building may properly be a study o (...)

27The italicised line above clearly demonstrates that it is in reporting’s becoming remaking that worlds emerge. Yet there is another element in this passage that will serve to introduce Schelling on the issue of worldmaking. The repeated insistence that differences between acknowledged antecedents to making arise only consequently upon that making being engaged certainly echo Johann Wilhelm Ritter’s insight, in Die Physik als Kunst (1806), that knowing is making.47 It is this aspect, the work indissociable from the world words make into knowing, that allows Goodman to restrict worldmakers to wordmakers, since we can have words without a world but no world without words or other symbols.48

• 49 Goodman 1978 ch. IV.
• 50 Goodman 1978: 7. Compare Cassirer 1910.

28But it additionally raises a question Goodman raises in the context of a specific kind of work namely, «when is art?»49 The question concerns, on the one hand, the chapter in the morphogenetic history of a particular movement of forms at which structure appears and so differentiates old from new worlds. The issue is significant because it highlights an additional element of Goodman’s indebtedness to Cassirer, namely, his concern with «substance dissolved into function».50 Taken together with Arthur C. Clarke’s statement, above, that a properly comparative study of any cultural phenomenon entails the broadest possible comparative base of species, this raises a prospect of abundant worldmakers to which, ultimately, Goodman is only opposed on the axiological grounds that value inheres exclusively in the hard-won. This brings us to the second iteration of Schelling’s Law of the World in the Philosophische Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie: