Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775 to 1854) was a German philosopher who taught, in his philosophy of nature of the late 1790s, that nature is not dead matter pushed about by outside forces but a living, productive activity that shapes and organises itself, rising through stages from matter to living organisms to conscious minds, with nature and mind as two sides of one reality. His picture of a living, self-making world sits close to Therapeutic Shamanism’s; it parts company with him where his stages climb to human self-consciousness as their peak.
Who was Schelling? #
He was born on 27 January 1775 in Leonberg, near Stuttgart. At the Protestant seminary in Tübingen, from 1790 to 1795, he shared his student years and his friendship with the philosopher Hegel and the poet Hölderlin. At Jena, where he held his first professorship from 1798 to 1803, he moved among the early Romantics, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis among them.1
He did his best-known work young. His Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature came out in 1797, On the World Soul in 1798, the First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature in 1799 and the System of Transcendental Idealism in 1800, when he was twenty-five.1 2 He went on to his ‘philosophy of identity’, to an essay on human freedom (1809) and to long later work on mythology and revelation, and died at Bad Ragaz in Switzerland on 20 August 1854.1
What did he mean by nature as a living, self-organising process? #
That nature is first of all an activity, not a collection of things. Behind every product of nature, every stone, plant and animal, lies an original productivity that never shows itself directly, only in what it produces. Its products are like eddies in a stream. Each holds its shape whilst the water flowing through it is always changing.3
Nature, for Schelling, is a self-forming whole, to be explained from within itself, not by a designer or purpose imposed from outside.4 The idea built on Kant, who had described a living organism as a being that organises itself, each part existing for and through the others.5 Schelling widened it to nature as a whole. Its divisions, he held, have no final validity; they all come from one formative energy, the soul or inner side of nature, which he called the world soul. That energy unfolds in a rising series of stages: matter; then light, with magnetism, electricity and chemical action; then the organism, with its powers of reproduction, irritability and sensibility.4
The early stages are unconscious; living things, and then consciousness and self-consciousness, arise out of them.3 So mind is not a stranger dropped into a dead world. In the introduction to the Ideas he put the two together, nature being spirit made visible, and spirit is nature made invisible.6 Later he called the real and the ideal “only different views of one and the same substance.”3
What did scientists and philosophers make of it? #
Opinion has swung both ways. Many working scientists of the nineteenth century turned against his philosophy of nature. The chemist Justus von Liebig likened it to the Black Death, and the physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond dismissed it as bogus.7 Many of its particular claims about physics and chemistry are now indefensible, overtaken by the sciences themselves.8 Among philosophers, his old friend Hegel mocked the philosophy of identity as a night “in which all cows are black”, an absolute in which every difference is lost.8
On the other side, his early writings put forward ways of reading nature that echoed through the sciences, especially biology, for the next century,7 and his idea of a productive nature that organises itself has been linked to modern theories of self-organisation. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy also holds that Hegel’s jibe is not a fair reading, since Schelling’s aim was to show how that night of the absolute could be turned into day for knowledge.8
How does Schelling’s teaching connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most deeply in refusing the dead world. Shamanic peoples experience being part of, not separate from, a world that is profoundly alive and can be communicated with, which is why everything is described as alive and sacred.9 In shamanism everything is made of Spirit, Spirit is conscious, and so everything is conscious, even where most modern people struggle to see it.10 Schelling arrived at a living, self-making nature, with mind as its inner side, by philosophy, starting from the problems Kant had left; it is a kindred picture reached from a very different direction. See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons? and What is autopoiesis, and what does it say about what is alive?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
Over the shape of the stages. Schelling’s nature climbs, from unconscious matter, through life, to the self-conscious human mind, in which, on a common reading, nature at last comes to know itself.11 It is a ladder with humans at the top. Therapeutic Shamanism sees that move as part of the myth of human supremacy, which treats our own kind of consciousness, self-awareness, as the ‘highest’, when it is one end of a continuum whose other end is collective-awareness, the kind of consciousness of plants and, above all, of the Stone People.12 13 Shamanism is entirely free of the judgement that up is good and down is bad, and of any ranking of humans over animals, or animals over plants and stones.14 See What is the myth of human supremacy?
Over method too. Schelling looked to philosophy and, for a time, to art, which he called “the only true and eternal organ and document of philosophy”.11 Therapeutic Shamanism starts from direct experience of the living world, in journeying and in relationship with the other-than-human Peoples. See Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
