Schelling's Panentheism and Psi

The following is a condensed transcript of my remarks at Edward Kelly’s Theory Meeting as part of the Department of Perceptual Studies at University of Virginia’s work to find an adequate cosmology to account for psi phenomena. The video is above.

It is a pleasure to be invited to an event where for once I am not asked to talk about Whitehead—though I see Whitehead and Schelling as, in spirit, in league with one another. Schelling belongs to a modern process lineage that runs from the 1790s through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, with Whitehead updating—rather than displacing—many of Schelling’s natural-philosophical intuitions. In what follows, however, I unfold Schelling on his own terms before returning to resonances with process thought.

I take Schelling to be among the earliest modern articulators of evolutionary panentheism. One can name pre-modern precursors to panentheism—Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, Jacob Böhme—but the thought that the divine becomes through cosmogenesis, that the life of God is historically entangled with nature’s unfolding, receives one of its first systematic modern statements in Schelling (with Herder and Lessing edging toward similar vistas). Panentheism precedes him; evolutionary panentheism finds one of its earliest, clearest modern exemplars in him.

Kant’s Interval and Its Crack

Against the backdrop of Kant’s Copernican Revolution we can appreciate Schelling’s originality. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant famously claims he must deny knowledge to make room for faith; he cleaves reality into a phenomenal realm lawfully ordered for science and a noumenal realm of freedom, God, and immortality, which we may think but cannot know. The price of securing both science and freedom is a brittle two-worlds compromise—a Kantian interval with no principled bridge.

Kant’s Critique of Judgment exposes a crack in that firewall. There Kant treats the organism as something that must be judged as if purposive and self-organizing; he even quips that we should not expect “a Newton of a blade of grass.” Teleological judgment is, for him, regulative: a necessary heuristic for inquiry, not a constitutive insight into nature’s inner causality. Biology becomes descriptive where mechanics is explanatory; psychology and anything like parapsychology remain cordoned off beyond the limits of possible science. The interval holds, but it wobbles.

From Fichte to Schelling: Inverting the Question

Fichte radicalizes Kant by dissolving the thing-in-itself into the activity of a transcendental I: nature (the “not-I”) is posited as the necessary resistance through which spirit recognizes itself. Whatever the merits of this move, nature’s autonomy is sacrificed.

Schelling inverts the picture. He asks not, “What must mind be for nature to appear as it does?” but “What must nature be for mind to evolve out of it?” In this sense, nature is a priori: not a mute stage set but a dynamic, internally structured productivity from which consciousness gradually crystallizes. Schelling famously describes nature as visible spirit and spirit as invisible nature; the human becomes the locus where the universe turns reflective upon itself.

Naturphilosophie: Polarity, Potency, Evolution

Schelling’s Naturphilosophie (1797–1800) offers a staged, potency-theoretic account of nature’s development. The cosmogony is polar from the outset: a dark, contractive tendency toward unity and concealment (gravity) is countered by an expansive, illuminating tendency toward differentiation and manifestation (light). These poles never exist in isolation; through their strife and mediation arise magnetism, electricity, and chemism—each a new equilibrium of tension—until at last life appears as a center that maintains itself far from equilibrium by circulating causes through itself.

Here Schelling anticipates later talk of autopoiesis and homeostasis without mistaking organismic stability for stasis. Crucially, he insists that death and disease belong intrinsically to life. The very forces that sustain life also undo it; life is a passage whose equilibria can never be final. To do justice to organisms is to integrate finitude into our ontology of the living.

This cosmology is evolutionary panentheism. Schelling articulates a robust Geistleiblichkeit—a spirit-bodiliness—where embodiment is not a fall into illusion but the very medium by which the divine seeks deeper relation with itself. Space-time actualization is serious business; possibility and actuality interpenetrate in one world of becoming. The physical is not a container beside a separate realm of forms; potencies are actively at work within nature’s processes and products.

Schelling’s writings of this period—Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797), On the World-Soul (1798), and First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799)—made waves in the Weimar-Jena milieu. Goethe read him attentively; the Romantic conversation between poets, philosophers, and experimentalists was thick. It is well documented that Oersted absorbed Naturphilosophie’s language of polarity en route to the discovery of electromagnetism; Faraday extended the experimental path he opened. Whatever may be said of Fichte or of a rationalist Hegel, Schelling and Goethe were not “out of touch” with the sciences of their time, as Whitehead, I think wrongly, implies in Science and the Modern World (1925).

Identity, Freedom, and the Turn to Narrative

By the early 1800s, Schelling’s so-called Identity Philosophy seeks an indifference-point beyond subject and object: an Absolute approachable via two coordinated routes, transcendental and natural-philosophical. He privileges the latter, but both are limited by finite reason. Hegel’s famous jibe about an Absolute that is a “night in which all cows are black” targets this phase; their friendship frays.

The Freedom essay (1809) pushes further. Drawing deeply on Böhme, Schelling distinguishes in God between ground and existence: a pre-rational, dark potency and the luminous emergence of order. Freedom is not a consumer’s choice among options; it is a prior stance of character, a way the human participates in reconciling divine polarity. On this view, God is not complete outside history; God has a history.

Soon after, Schelling writes Clara, or On Nature’s Connection to the Spirit World—a luminous dialogue he never published (his son brought it to print decades later). Set on All Souls’ Day, the work stages a conversation among a priest (spirit), a physician (nature), and Clara (soul), with a clergyman voicing the Kantian position that the spiritual is real but epistemically sealed off from nature. Against this, the dialogue explores correspondences—hermetic, alchemical resonances—between the physical and the spiritual: as below, so above. Schelling insists on the persistence of individual personality beyond death. Whatever the biographical pathos of Caroline’s death, the philosophical point is larger: the desire for personal immortality is itself a datum within nature’s psychology, and experience—our own included—belongs to philosophy’s evidential base.

Schelling’s unfinished Ages of the World drafts (1811–1815) attempt a mythic cosmogony rather than a deductive system. He comes to judge narrative, symbol, and myth as often more faithful than logic to the living Absolute. One might call his aim an auto-cosmology: a self-implicated story in which the teller is a product of the very cosmos being told.

Positive Philosophy: Metaphysical Empiricism

In Berlin (1841–1844), Schelling distinguishes negative from positive philosophy. Negative philosophy asks what—it articulates essences and conditions and aspires to a view from nowhere. Positive philosophy begins from that—that there is something rather than nothing; it starts in existence, historically given. Schelling calls this a kind of metaphysical empiricism: philosophy must take seriously the history of myth and revelation, the data of religious and extraordinary experience, not as irrational interruptions but as disclosures of being. The upshot is not a retreat from reason but an enlargement of its evidential field.

The Timaeus Essay: Retrieving Yin

At just 19 years old, Schelling wrote an essay on Plato's Timaeus, reading Plato through a Kantian lens. In the Timaeus, Plato presents an account of cosmology where the Demiurge (a divine craftsman) looks at the realm of Forms and molds the receptacle (chora) to create the actual world. Timothy Jackson and I discussed this early essay a few months ago:

Typically, the receptacle is viewed as a passive feminine principle, while the Demiurge represents the active masculine principle. But Plato gives hints of a more balanced view, describing the receptacle or chora as already having structure and movement, capable of winnowing and filtering the elements through its vibratory activity. Plato calls it “the wet nurse of becoming,” attributing to it a selective agency that goes beyond mere passivity.

Schelling recognizes how one could read the Timaeus in a Kantian way, with the Demiurge representing mind and the receptacle representing nature. But just as Plato attributes surprising activity to the receptacle, Schelling attributes activity and autonomy to nature, suggesting that the receptacle itself, through its vibratory movement and pre-existing tensions, could give rise to mind. This represents an early attempt to retrieve the missing “yin” principle in Western thought (which is emphasized by Ruth Kastner in her Possibilist Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics).

Afterlives and Parallels

Schelling’s Naturphilosophie offers a powerful organic alternative to mechanistic science without lapsing into anti-empirical enthusiasm. Nineteenth-century science, for contingent and industrial reasons, largely pursued a mechanistic road; yet an organicism worth retrieving runs through Schelling, Goethe, and Humboldt. In this key, physics and biology are not alien orders but differently scaled studies of organism. Whitehead would later quip that biology studies the larger organisms while physics studies the smaller; more importantly, he too hears the “data of science crying out” for an organic interpretation. Schelling’s work remains relevant not only for an organicist biology but for a reconception of physics not as opposed to the living world but as a maybe more subdued form of life (“matter is effete mind,” as Charles Sanders Peirce put it).

On such a view, parapsychology does not need to hover at the margins of inquiry. If we reconceive nature as living, purposive, and ensouled, then parapsychology is simply psychology writ large—not because we abandon rigor, but because we widen ontology to fit experience. In this sense, Schelling’s evolutionary panentheism is not a mere doctrine. It is a way of inhabiting a living world: death belonging to life; myth to reason; individuality to eternity; nature and spirit as one evolving life in which the divine comes to itself through us.

Notes

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