I explore how the "synthesis of history and nature" that defines the Anthropocene might signal the advent of the “new mythology” Schelling hoped would emerge from his Naturphilosophie. The epistemological dimension of this new mythology is to be understood through Schelling’s idea of Mitwissenschaft, in which humanity is the essential active agent in the reflexive system of the world. Such an inquiry derives not from a sentimental longing for an enchanted world, but from the impending “annihilation of nature” Schelling foresaw (...) in 1804. The resulting organic episteme introduces a new realism in which nature, because absolute, becomes normative. (shrink)

This essay interprets Schelling's positive philosophy as an effort to conceive nature as a gift. Schelling ruminated throughout his career on the paradoxical relation between humanity and nature that is expressed in the contemporary term “Anthropocene,” but this essay argues that Schelling's most productive response to this paradox can be found in his reflections on how to receive the gift of nature. After laying out the project of positive philosophy, the essay first explores Schelling's effort to conceive nature as a (...) gift in On the World-Soul, and then considers how this project founders in the First Projection of a System of Nature Philosophy. After the resources of the natural sciences showed themselves to be inadequate to the task of conceiving nature as a gift, Schelling returned to mythology in his late philosophy, and the concluding section of this essay traces how an often overlooked Epicurean strain in Schelling's late philosophy can help us see what is entailed in conceiving nature as a gift. (shrink)

What Elizabeth Kolbert has called the ‘sixth mass extinction’ due to anthropogenic climate change has obliged us to rethink our traditional assumptions about the rapport between ourselves and nature. While the reconceptualization of nature has largely been led by scientists and environmental theorists and activists, this paper argues that Schelling provides the best and earliest model for rethinking nature in the Anthropocene. To this end, Schelling critiques two approaches to nature. Schelling repudiates Fichte’s idealism for reducing nature to an instrument (...) for the self-assertion of our egos much like modern industrial capitalism views nature as an economic resource to be exploited for human gain. Further, Schelling critiques Spinoza for mechanizing nature as a structurally invariant system in the same way that climate change denialists hold that the earth’s ecosystem is perfectly homeostatic. Having dismissed these two approaches, Schelling develops another environmentally ethical conception of nature to answer the question of how the free human subject emerges out of an allegedly blind and lifeless nature. Schelling’s solution to safeguarding nature is to paradoxically anthropomorphize it further by reconceiving it as always-already structured as per the dynamic free spirit. This paper shall thus conclude by extracting two environmentally ethical principles that Schelling’s anthropomorphization of nature entails. Contra Fichte, the ‘dependency principle’ states that humans are radically dependent upon nature rather than nature being dependent on our positing it as an object of our intuition. Moreover, the ‘contingency principle’ stipulates against Spinoza that nature is itself contingent, dynamic and precarious. In this way, Schelling provides a conceptualization of nature befitting the demands placed upon thought in the age of the sixth extinction. (shrink)