Reading nature : empiricism and literary imagination in Friedrich Schelling's naturphilosophie, 1797-1800
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Concepts of reading and literary interpretation pervade Friedrich Schelling's Naturphilosophie (1797-1801). Schelling sees objects and systems in nature, such as eddies in a river, thunderstorms, the geomorphology of mountains and volcanoes, and (especially) the diachronic development of animal physiology, as susceptible to a particularly literary kind of interpretation. All of these systems, Schelling holds, arise from moments of radical novelty and are expressions of nature's own freedom. Natural objects, then, cannot be explained merely by analyzing and recreating a chain of causal events. In order to understand the appearance of radically new levels of complexity, natural evolutions on vast time scales, and their relationship to the symbolic representations that govern human life we need the tools of the reader. A particular sensitivity to metaphor, metonymy, and narrative was, Schelling thought, essential for the Naturphilosoph. By way of close reading, the Naturphilosoph could discover complex interactions of literary, symbolic and aesthetic forms with the material forms of nature. Schelling's account of nature is an explicitly relational account: the diachronic and synchronic forms of the physical world are always in communication with the symbolic representations of human thought. Moments of radical novelty in nature, such as the arising of self-sustaining life forms from general chemical processes, , introduce the need for a type of interpretation that is not exclusively empirical, because empirical descriptions are designed to establish continuous chains of causality. Schelling's claim that nature is a text to be "read" challenges standard views of nature, including the budding empirical life sciences of the late eighteenth century. It also calls into question ideas of reading as a purely internal endeavor that is passive, detached, and without material consequences. He takes up a Romantic discourse around hermeneutics, which holds interpretation to be balanced grasping the whole of a symbolic representation and relating it to detailed analysis of its parts, and extends this style of interpretation to the natural world. In a bold departure from Kantian transcendental philosophy as well as the empirical sciences, Schelling charts a path for "reading nature" that requires us to rethink "reading" as a creative—and potentially destructive—activity, deeply tied to body as well as mind.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Feldmann, Tammo |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Berman, Russell A, 1950- |
| Degree supervisor | Smith, Matthew, 1987- |
| Thesis advisor | Berman, Russell A, 1950- |
| Thesis advisor | Smith, Matthew, 1987- |
| Thesis advisor | Starkey, Kathryn |
| Degree committee member | Starkey, Kathryn |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of German Studies. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Tammo Feldmann. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of German Studies. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Tammo Feldmann
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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