Summary
Naturphilosophie was a German philosophical program of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, principally associated with Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), that sought to reconstruct all of nature as the visible expression of one underlying principle or “idea.” It held that organic and inorganic nature were ultimately identical, that the same polarities structuring physics (magnetism, electricity, chemical affinity) also structured physiology and psychology, and that the scientist participates in nature’s processes rather than standing apart as a detached observer. In medicine it amplified the Brunonian theory of excitability, gave rise to distinctive schools of German biology, and shaped the intellectual vocabulary of scientific reformers who later broke explicitly with it. Its influence on nineteenth-century German science is contested: Temkin showed it was a fellow expression of broader German tendencies toward systematic thought, not simply an obstacle overcome, and Richards has argued it gave Romantic biology a real “purchase on reality” that reached into Darwinian science.
Origins and Core Commitments
Naturphilosophie emerged within the cultural ferment of post-Kantian German idealism in the 1790s. Its principal architect was Friedrich Schelling, who worked from Kant’s analysis of the purposiveness of organisms in the Critique of Judgment toward a far more ambitious claim: that nature itself is “spirit made visible,” an ongoing productive activity (Natura naturans) that crystallizes into particular forms (Natura naturata). Schelling held that in knowing nature the scientist does not represent an external object but in some sense produces nature — a view Bortoft notes “looks like an extreme form of subjective idealism to the onlooker consciousness,” but which amounts to a participatory ontology of knowledge.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Hegel’s system, which treated organisms as the idea “in its otherness” (natural objects as “solidified manifestations of the idea”), was the companion philosophical development, though Driesch observed that Hegel’s formulation is “exposition and not explanation: it gives us no doctrine of the laws of becoming.”(Driesch, 1914)
The program’s organizing conviction was the unity of all nature. Polarity was its preferred explanatory form. Just as a magnet has two poles that cannot exist without each other, the Naturphilosophen posited polar relations everywhere: light and dark, acid and base, stimulus and response, sensibility and irritability. The point was not reductionism in the modern sense but holism: the organism was not explained by chemistry but chemistry and life were shown to be expressions of the same deeper polarity. The consequences for biology were significant. G. R. Treviranus (1776–1837), one of the first Naturphilosophie-affiliated writers to use the word “biology” to designate the science of life as a whole, defined life’s characteristic feature as “the uniformity of phenomena in relation to external influences” (meaning the organism’s capacity to maintain regularity against irregular stimuli), while grounding this in a vital force distinct from primary physical forces.(Driesch, 1914)
The Naturphilosophen adopted monism as their metaphysical foundation: matter and Geist (understood as mind or spirit) were regarded as two features of the same underlying Urstoff, so that the causal activities of either had ultimately to express a unified force.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Within this monist framework, Richards proposes a genus-species taxonomy: Romantic biology should be taken as a species of the wider genus of Naturphilosophie, so that all Romantic biologists were Naturphilosophen but not all Naturphilosophen were Romantics. The Romantic variant added aesthetic and moral dimensions to the conceptual content that traveled under the Naturphilosophie label.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
Origins: Kant, Fichte, Spinoza
Richards reconstructs the philosophical situation that produced Naturphilosophie out of three sources. The Romantic “movement” or “school,” he writes, was constituted not by a group with unanimity of ideas but by sympathetically minded individuals whose mutually supportive considerations of philosophy, literature, and science became enmeshed in their personal and professional relationships.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Within this circle, Fichte’s transcendental idealism, with its self-positing absolute ego and its account of the Anstoss by which the self generates the world it confronts, provided the philosophical foundation for Romantic theories of creativity and freedom; it also set the terms within which Schelling reinstated nature as the ego’s coequal.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) The Romantics rejected the simpler rationalisms of Wolff, Leibniz, and the Kant of the first Critique, which they accused of treating nature “atomistically like a dead corpse” — the very opposite of the living organic nature they championed.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Fichte himself observed, in a sentence the Romantics took to heart, that one’s choice of philosophical system is not arbitrary: “What kind of philosophy one chooses thus depends on what kind of man one is,” suggesting that receptivity to Naturphilosophie was a matter of personal disposition, not logical compulsion.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
The third source was Kant’s third Critique. Kant had argued in the Critique of Judgment that biology cannot be a genuine science because teleological principles are only regulative, not constitutive: organisms must be analyzed als ob (as if) they were designed, while science properly seeks mechanical causes. Schelling and Goethe countered, against Kant, that archetypes are constitutive of nature itself.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Where Kant maintained that organisms must be approached als ob they had teleological structure, Schelling insisted that nature is intrinsically teleological and organic, making mechanism derivative rather than foundational.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Kielmeyer’s response to Kant ran in parallel: he attempted to demonstrate from inductive evidence that teleological laws operate in nature with the same epistemic status as mechanistic laws, arguing that inductions of organic laws should convince us no less than inductions of mechanistic astronomical laws.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
The deeper Enlightenment background was the long exile of teleological causes. From antiquity through the eighteenth century, Richards observes, teleological causes were progressively excluded from science: Descartes reduced life to physics, Newton’s mechanics made mind an engine, and Bacon condemned final causes as “barren virgins.” The Enlightenment, in his summary, “enshrined mechanism as the model to explain matter, life, and mind.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Naturphilosophie was the German answer to this displacement, an attempt to give organisms back their constitutive teleology without falling into pre-critical metaphysics.
Schelling’s Reformulation
Schelling’s role in this program is foundational. Richards calls him the philosopher-king of the Romantic circle, the one who championed and reformulated Fichtean idealism by infusing it with the realism of Spinoza, reinstating nature as the ego’s coequal. He understood nature as fundamentally organic, virtually a living and generative being, and biology became for him the paradigmatic science: the discipline that most conspicuously displayed the creativity and beauty of the one infinite reality.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) The often-quoted core formula identified natural with aesthetic creative forces: “the objective world is only the original, though unconscious, poetry of the mind [Geist].” On this view the biologist’s great aid in comprehending nature was poetic, that is, aesthetic, judgment.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Schelling’s mature synthesis was that nature and mind are two aspects of a single absolute reality, with organism as the foundational concept for science, against Kant’s dualism of noumena and phenomena.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
Schelling was explicit that Naturphilosophie was not meant to replace empirical science. In his Einleitung zu dem Entwurf, he emphasized that the heart of natural science (Naturwissenschaft) was the experiment, in which “nature is forced to respond under determinate conditions, which usually do not exist in her or which must be arranged by others in order to exist.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002) From his inductive surveys of current scientific work, Schelling concluded that the ubiquity of organic structures in nature could only be explained if the mind from which the world derived revealed itself to be organic: “all of nature had to be construed ultimately in telic, organic terms.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002) This monist move had a corollary for the philosophy of time: within Naturphilosophie, nature ceased to be a mere product of the Creator’s designs and became instead a producer of itself. Self-production and development revealed that nature moved from a simpler, less organized, earlier state to a more progressively developed later state; “nature became temporalized.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
Richards rebuts the standard charge that Schelling’s program denied the value of experiment. Schelling’s early work, he writes, exemplifies a persistent effort to think rationally through basic epistemological problems, grounded both in the certainty of self-reflection and in an experimental understanding of nature.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) On the more general point, Schelling identifies the organism as the fundamental concept of nature, not (as Kant held) merely a regulative idea, and argues that the basic principles given objectively in nature are isomorphic with the acts that the self can find subjectively in itself.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Richards positions him as the philosophical architect of Romantic science, whose ideas about archetypes and organicism profoundly shaped nineteenth-century biology, morphology, and medicine.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
Polarity, Process, and the Living Nature
The polarity principle and the process-driven temporal unfolding of nature are the two organizing commitments most strongly associated with Naturphilosophie in Richards’s account. Schelling proposed what he himself called dynamische Evolution, an evolutionism in which species arise through gradual development driven by polar forces but not through genealogical descent from a common ancestor; this is one of the points on which his program differs from Darwin’s.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Schelling’s organic conception, formed in dialectical exchange with Kant, Reil, Kielmeyer, Goethe, and Humboldt, served as the magnet that initially drew these researchers to labor over his abstruse philosophy.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) The forces creating nature, on Schelling’s view, are identical to those creating aesthetic objects, and a naturalist of Schellingian disposition would discover in nature “the self’s other kingdom, where the forces were familiar and the mind would meet its double.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
Polarity was not metaphor. Reil’s Schellingian model of obstetrics treated the pregnant uterus as a polar magnetic line: after conception, the force of expansion increased relative to that of contraction, producing opposite poles at the body and neck of the uterus. The body of the uterus expanded to accommodate the fetus while the neck contracted to retain it, “so that the axis of the uterus is like a magnetic line with different poles.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002) In Reil’s mature metaphysics, every form “lay sequestered in absolute substance,” which “must carry under cover the idea of the sensible universe, like the seed carries the future plant,” and the Bildungstrieb expresses “a striving of the ideal, which expresses itself in the forms it creates, to become objective.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Reil also described nature in terms that could have come from Schelling’s hand: “nature, like a Proteus, brings everything from herself; she herself is the material, tool, craftsman, and archetype.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
Reil’s departing 1810 speech from Halle gives one of the cleanest contemporary descriptions of what the Schellingian turn felt like from within German medicine: “The effort at explanation has made place for living intuition [lebendige Anschauung]; the idea has entered the arena of the mechanical principle; and observation has achieved a standpoint from which to view things in their natural relations.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
Naturphilosophie and Medicine: Brownian Alliance
The connection between Naturphilosophie and medical theory was forged chiefly through John Brown’s system of incitability. Schelling and the clinician Andreas Roschlaub undertook to import Brown’s Scottish doctrine into German medicine by identifying organic excitability with cosmic magnetism, showing how Brown’s claim that “life is a forced state” dependent on external stimuli was compatible with a picture in which organic and inorganic nature obey the same underlying laws. Roschlaub’s Erregungstheorie introduced into medicine the theory that organic and inorganic nature are identical and that excitability is the organic analog of cosmic magnetism.[cang-ir88-ch02-002] Canguilhem notes the cultural timing of this reception: the German literary world of the 1790s, from Goethe’s Werther to Novalis’s Hymns to the Night, was saturated with metaphors for sensibility, making Brown’s physiology of excitability resonate at a moment when the culture was already attuned to its themes.
This alliance amplified Brunonianism theoretically but did not improve it clinically. Brown’s theory simplified medicine to formulas (stimulate or debilitate) and made physicians trainable in four weeks.[cang-ir88-ch02-002] The philosophical amplification gave the system a dignity it might not otherwise have commanded in the German universities without adding any new empirical content. This is a recurring pattern with Naturphilosophie in medicine: philosophical elevation of existing doctrines rather than generation of new clinical knowledge.
The Naturphilosophen as Biologists
Within natural history and physiology, Naturphilosophie generated more substantive work. Several figures associated with its framework produced contributions that remained significant after the movement’s decline. Richards’s case-by-case account adds a number of figures and details to the picture.
In the Weltseele (1798), Schelling undertook extensive surveys of contemporary scientific work to show that teleological structures characterized all living creatures. He contended that Humboldt, Blumenbach, Kielmeyer, and Reil all “either explicitly or implicitly relied on the concept of teleological structure when describing living nature,” positioning their empirical research as grounding his philosophical synthesis.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
Karl Friedrich Kielmeyer’s 1793 lecture “Über die Verhältnisse der organischen Kräfte” was recognized by Schelling as “a talk that future ages, without doubt, will regard as an epoch of the new natural history,” and Humboldt judged that the essay vaulted Kielmeyer to the rank of “the first physiologist of Germany.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Kielmeyer himself observed that he and Schelling had arrived at convergent views of nature without coordination: “What my countryman and friend Schelling has up to now produced from the depths of the human mind [Geist] concerning external nature could and should agree with what I have perceived in external nature, the world of appearance; however, since no written communication occurred [between us], this agreement arose quite independently for each.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Schelling’s organic conception, formed in dialogue with Kielmeyer, Reil, Goethe, and Humboldt, was both shaped by and decisive for them: Reil incorporated Schelling’s conception of an active ego into his theory of personality development, and after 1800 Reil adopted Schelling’s Romantic Naturphilosophie wholesale, reconceiving mental illness as a fragmentation of self-consciousness and advocating psychological therapies; his Rhapsodieen (1803) is generally taken as the founding text of psychiatry as a discipline.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
Goethe, Schelling’s senior collaborator, encoded a Schellingian view of nature in the Faust Part II homunculus narrative, which Richards reads as a naturphilosophisch metamorphosis of creatures rising from “living dust” through gradual evolution into higher animals and human beings.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Behind Goethe stood Herder, whose developmental cosmology had already defined nature as subservient to “the principle of life, which contains the possibility that the simplest beginnings progressively diversify into infinity,” in a 1805 gloss that directly preceded Schelling’s organic conception of nature.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Schelling’s broader influence on biology ran through Carl Gustav Carus, Lorenz Oken, Ignaz Döllinger, Karl Friedrich Burdach, and Karl Ernst von Baer, all of whom worked within or in dialogue with his Naturphilosophie framework.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
Lorenz Oken (1779–1851) proposed galvanism as the principle of life, a theory Driesch dismissed as nearly absurd in its formulation but acknowledged was grounded in what he took to be the fundamental vitalist truth: the irreducibility of organic form.(Driesch, 1914) J. Ch. Reil (1759–1813), a more rigorous thinker, proposed a vitalism of “living matter” in which the cause of organic formation lies in the nature of animal matter itself, specifically in what he called “a special sort of crystallisation.” Driesch praised Reil’s definition of irritability as “a model of logical clearness” among the Naturphilosophie school: “the quality of animal organs which causes them to change their present state through themselves when stimulated by an external agency.”(Driesch, 1914) Reil was also a pioneer psychiatrist whose concept of “Psychische Curmethode” (psychological treatment) anticipated later asylum reform.
Johannes Müller (1801–1858) represents the most consequential figure to straddle the boundary between Romantic science and exact physiology. Ackerknecht called him the “last of the universal naturalists and the pivot between Romantic science and exact nineteenth-century medicine,” noting that his Berlin laboratory produced virtually all the heroes of the next generation: Schwann, Henle, Virchow, Helmholtz, Du Bois-Reymond.(Ackerknecht, 1955) Müller’s Manual of Human Physiology “systematically summed up the dogmatic Vitalism for the last time,” and he raised the question of the “source of energy” for the vital force in terms that Driesch thought anticipated the conservation of energy debates.(Driesch, 1914) His students then dismantled the vitalist framework while inheriting the rigorous research program he had built.
Goethe himself occupied an adjacent position. He coined the term morphology and was a pioneer in the study of plant and animal form; for him and his contemporaries in the philosophy of nature there was the idea of evolution, though not in the Darwinian sense: for the Naturphilosophen, evolution was a continuous unfolding of formative possibilities rather than adaptation through chance variation.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) Goethe learned from his contact with Schelling how his own way of science exemplified a participatory approach to knowing nature.(Bortoft, Henri, 1996) The full development of Goethe’s distinctive method belongs under goethean-science and delicate-empiricism.
Medical Reception: Germany Against France and Britain
The Naturphilosophie period in German medicine (approximately 1800–1840) was characterized, in Ackerknecht’s assessment, by speculation that stood in sharp contrast to the clinical progress being made in Paris and Dublin through direct hospital observation. While British and French medicine advanced through, as he put it, “sober observation,” German physicians under Schelling’s leadership “indulged in extensive speculations on the essence of life and disease, on the polarities, and on Paracelsian analogies between macrocosm and microcosm.”(Ackerknecht, 1955) This contrast was real but should not be overstated. The French clinical advance required the infrastructure of post-1789 hospital medicine that Germany had not yet built; the intellectual orientation of the German universities was the main variable Ackerknecht was tracking.
Schelling’s philosophy shaped not only the Romantics but the reformers who succeeded them. Carl August Wunderlich’s 1842 essay on fever, generally taken as one of the founding texts of the German scientific medicine that displaced Romanticism, opened with a quotation from Schelling: “In accordance with a general rule, Science, like every kind of culture, seems after the age of unconsciousness to arrive at conscious clarity and fulfilment only by way of opposition and splitting off.” Wunderlich explicitly said he put “this sentence of the celebrated philosopher of our time at the head and would like to use it as a motto.”(Temkin, 1977) Wunderlich went further, distinguishing between a “scientific treatment of history” (tracing developmental sequences of ideas relevant to present medicine) and mere “antiquarian historiography” (preserving the past for its own sake); his model for this distinction was drawn from Herder, Schelling, and Hegel’s concept of historical development.(Temkin, 1977) This is a striking datum: a founder of scientific medicine in Germany appealing to Schelling as a model for the history of science at the very moment of breaking with Romantic medicine.
Temkin’s analysis of this episode produced an important revisionary argument. The tendency toward systematic, philosophically penetrated science in German medicine, Temkin contended, should not be attributed specifically to Naturphilosophie as cause. Rather, “Naturphilosophie itself was an early manifestation of the same tendency, of which the materialism of the mid-century, and many systematized theories were other manifestations.”(Temkin, 1977) The standard historiographic picture (Naturphilosophie as romantic aberration overcome by positivist science) misses that both Romantic and anti-Romantic German scientific culture expressed the same underlying German disposition toward systematic, philosophically-informed inquiry.
Schelling’s Anxiety and Freedom
Schelling’s mature philosophy extended well beyond the early system-building of the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797) and System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). His later work, particularly On the Essence of Human Freedom (1809), addressed questions of existence, will, and the relation of freedom to necessity that had little to do with the physiology of excitability. Gadamer quotes Schelling in the context of existential anxiety (“The anxiety of life drives the creature outside of its own centre”) and connects the remark to the existential meaning of anxiety that Heidegger would later develop.(Gadamer, 1996) This existential-theological dimension of Schelling’s thought influenced German psychiatry and philosophy of medicine alongside, and distinct from, the natural-philosophical program.
Decline, Legacy, and Historiographic Disputes
Naturphilosophie as a medical movement was largely spent by the 1840s. Its decline was accelerated by the successes of cell theory (cell-theory), the rise of experimental physiology under Müller’s students, and the reception of French clinical methods. Driesch, writing in 1914, thought the old vitalism rooted in Naturphilosophie “died not by refutation but by self-extinction — it ceased to justify its fundamental principles, stopped producing new proofs, and lost its capacity to face attack.”(Driesch, 1914)
Richards traces three successive theories of archetype instantiation through the movement’s history. The first was Schelling’s transcendental account, in which archetypes are features of ideal reality, with their appearance in nature explained through dynamische Evolution rather than Darwinian descent from common ancestors. In England, figures such as Joseph Henry Green and Richard Owen who followed Naturphilosophie closely risked charges of irreligion and consequently relocated archetypes in the Divine mind. Darwin and Haeckel, finally, took the structural patterns that Cuvier had described and gave them a genealogical explanation: evolutionary history, not ideal reality or divine design, accounted for why nature exhibited such forms.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) His account of the transition from old vitalism to neovitalism via the development-mechanics movement preserves the continuity between Romantic biology and the experimental biology that superseded it.
The historiographic legacy is complicated. Positivist histories of medicine treated Naturphilosophie as a detour overcome by scientific rationality. Temkin’s revisionary reading showed that the dichotomy between Romantic speculation and scientific observation was an artifact of later professional self-presentation rather than an accurate description of how German medicine actually developed. Wunderlich’s appeal to Schelling as a methodological guide, at the founding moment of the scientific-medicine program, illustrates the problem with the simple narrative.
In the philosophy of science, Naturphilosophie’s participatory ontology of knowledge has attracted renewed attention through Bortoft’s reading of Goethe and the phenomenological tradition more broadly. The claim that the knowing subject participates in nature’s processes rather than representing them from outside remains a live philosophical position, and its genealogy runs through Schelling’s post-Kantian philosophy of nature. The concept is developed further in goethean-science and in the related entries on delicate-empiricism and archetypal-leaf.
Richards’s The Romantic Conception of Life (2002) supplies a third revisionary reading. Where Ackerknecht treats Romantic medicine as clinically deficient and Temkin treats Naturphilosophie as one expression among many of a German taste for systematic thought, Richards defends the Romantic biology directly: it had “a strong purchase on reality” and its theories “grasped part of the truth about natural objects.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002) On Richards’s reading, Schelling and Goethe were both biological evolutionists, and their conceptions “straightened the path for German zoologists to advance more quickly and easily to Lamarckian and Darwinian theories than could their counterparts in England and France.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002) The wider claim, developed across the book and its epilogue on Darwin, is that Darwin’s theory of evolution was deeply influenced by ideas from the Romantic movement, and the Goethe–Schelling–Kielmeyer line is part of the prehistory of evolutionary biology rather than its detour.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
Cross-References
Related concepts in this encyclopaedia: vitalism, vis-medicatrix-naturae, goethean-science, delicate-empiricism, archetypal-leaf, john-brown, brunonianism, cell-theory, homeopathy, samuel-hahnemann, mesmerism
Scholarly Assessment
The evidence base for this page is adequate but uneven. Temkin’s essay on Wunderlich and Schelling (ch17) is the only source providing a sustained historiographic analysis of Naturphilosophie’s medical reception, and it is focused on one episode. Ackerknecht’s characterization of German romantic medicine as clinically deficient (ch13) is the standard positivist assessment and should be read against Temkin’s corrective. Driesch (1914) provides detailed coverage of the Naturphilosophie biologists (Oken, Reil, Treviranus, Müller) from a vitalist perspective that is valuable but avowedly partial. Canguilhem’s brief mention of the Schelling-Roschlaub-Brown alliance (ch02) is precise and well-sourced. Bortoft’s account of Schelling’s influence on Goethe (part2-ch4) is philosophically significant but is not a historical study of Naturphilosophie as such.
With the addition of Richards’s The Romantic Conception of Life (2002) as a lead authority, the page now has a substantial account of the philosophical genealogy (Kant, Fichte, Spinoza), Schelling’s biographical and intellectual situation, the polarity principle in physiological work (Reil’s obstetrics), and the Schellingian background of nineteenth-century German evolutionism. Notable gaps remain: the page still lacks evidence from primary Schelling texts; it lacks any account of Naturphilosophie’s influence on homeopathy and Hahnemann, which were contemporaneous; and it lacks systematic coverage of Alexander von Humboldt, whose relationship to the movement was significant and ambivalent. A more complete account would draw on Lenoir’s The Strategy of Life (1982) and on the German-language Schelling literature.