Writing Nature Otherwise: Natural History and the Paradox of the Product

If one begins reading Friedrich Schelling’s First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature from the opening lines of the appended “Outline of the Whole,” from the outset the First Outline already encounters its first insurmountable obstacle, the point, or the moment, from which nature begins. “Because to philosophize about nature,” writes Schelling, “means as much as to create it, we must first of all find the point from which nature can be posited into becoming.” 1 This problem results from nature’s determinate identity. Nature, as Schelling defines it, is “being itself;” 2 it is at once both the infinite production and absolute inhibition of itself. Yet how did nature as unconditioned and pure productivity ever encounter such a radical and absolute inhibition that could have resulted in the first point of becoming? It turns out, as David Farrell Krell notes, that “Schelling is never able to answer these questions, each of which circles about the very problem he calls “insoluble.” What he learns repeatedly is that heterogeneity can never be merely “introduced” into homogeneity.” 3 It is precisely because of this circular rotation around this insoluble problem that Schelling’s First Outline immediately overturns homogeneity in favor of heterogeneity, although the text still calls for the process of heterogeneity to end. For once the text has begun, its beginning is always eternally beginning, so that the text calls out for that homogeneous point to put an end to nature’s endless productivity. Whereas some may point to nature as being this unified point, since Schelling represents nature as the point of identity between both productivity and product, the First Outline is unable to convincingly demonstrate that point at which heterogeneity transitions into absolute homogeneity. This duality inherent to nature gives way to a writing of nature in the First Outline that unworks the progressive history and organization that is ascribed to nature, evolution, and

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