43
M a s s  e X t i N C t i o N : 
s C h e l l i N G  a N D 
N a t u r a l  h i s t o r y
J a s o n  W i r t h *
But this circulation goes in all directions at once, in all the directions of all 
the space-times opened by presence to presence: all things, all beings, all enti-
ties, everything past and future, alive, dead, inanimate, stones, plants, nails, 
gods—and “humans,” that is, those who expose sharing and circulation as such 
by saying “we,” by saying we to themselves in all possible senses of that expres-
sion, and by saying we for the totality of all being.
—Jean-luc Nancy1
One great ruin—in schelling’s dialogue Clara (c. 1810), the doctor 
advises Clara that if one wants to witness ruins, one does not need to 
travel to the deserts of Persia or india because “the whole earth is one 
great ruin, where animals live as ghosts and humans as spirits and where 
many hidden powers and treasures are locked away, as if by an invisible 
strength or by a magician’s spell.”2 scientists now identify at least twenty 
mass extinction events, five of which are considered so cataclysmic that 
they are referred to collectively as the “Big Five” and during which time 
the conditions for life were cataclysmically altered. although it is still a 
matter of some debate, the acceleration of global temperatures due to 
the increasingly industrial character of human life, the widespread de-
struction of non-human habitats, the alarming rate of rain forest dev-
astation, and the general degradation of the earth and its resources, is 
precipitating a sixth. indeed, the very character of life, given its ruinous 
history, leaves the earth scarred with fossilized vestiges of former ages of 
the world, a natural history of the wreckage of past life.
* seattle university
1 Nancy, J.-l. (2000), Being Singular Plural. (translated by robert D. richardson and anne 
e. o’Byrne). California: stanford university Press, p. 3. henceforth BsP.
2 schelling, F.W.J. (2002), Clara. (translated by Fiona steinkamp). New york: state university 
of New york Press, p. 33.
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P o l i G r a F i
although schelling could not have been aware of this current read-
ing of the exuberantly profligate fossil record, nature’s luxurious infi-
delity to its guests was not lost on him. as he mused in The Ages of the 
World: “if we take into consideration the many terrible things in nature 
and the spiritual world and the great many other things that a benevo-
lent hand seems to cover up from us, then we could not doubt that the 
Godhead sits enthroned over a world of terrors. and God, in accordance 
with what is concealed in and by God, could be called the awful and 
the terrible, not in a derivative fashion, but in their original sense” (i/8, 
268).3 There is something awful and terrible concealed within nature, 
and it haunts us through its remnants. or to articulate it more precisely: 
what is haunting about the immense ruin of nature is not only that its 
remnants indicate what once was but is no longer, nor is it enough to 
say, as does the skeleton at the base of Masaccio’s trinitarian crucifixion 
(c. 1427) in santa Maria Novella in Florence: “i once was what you are 
now and what i am you shall be.”4 it is certainly true that the presence 
of the shell of past life speaks both to the past and to the past’s capac-
ity to speak to the future. Both of these moments, however, more fun-
damentally indicate something awful coming to presence concealed in 
each and every coming to presence, something awful in which all nature 
partakes as the paradoxical solitude of its coming to presence.
What all of nature shares, this awful and terrible concealment, is 
not a common and discernible essence or metaphysical property. rath-
er, it shares the paradox of coming to presence: each and every com-
ing to presence, what each being shares in its own way, is therefore a 
solitary coming to presence. each being is exposed as singular, or, as 
3 except where noted, all translations of schelling are my own responsibility. Citations follow 
the standard pagination, which follows the original edition established after schelling’s death by 
his son, Karl. it lists the division, followed by the volume, followed by the page number. hence, 
(i/1, 1) would read, division one, volume one, page one. it is preserved in Manfred schröter’s 
critical reorganization of this material. schelling, F.W.J. (1856–1861) Schellings Sämtliche Werke. 
stuttgart-augsburg: J. G. Cotta; schelling, F.W.J. (1927), Schellings Werke: Nach der Origina-
lausgabe in neuer Anordnung (ed. Manfred schröter). Munich: C. h. Beck. My translations of 
Die Weltalter originally appeared in: schelling, F.W.J. (2000) The Ages of the World. (translated 
by Jason Wirth) New york: state university of New york Press. For citations of this work i also 
use the standard pagination and not the translation pagination, although the prior is embedded 
in the latter.
4 io fui già quel che voi siete e quel ch’io sono voi anco sarete.
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M a s s  e X t i N C t i o N :  s C h e l l i N G  a N D  N a t u r a l  h i s t o r y
schelling adapts lebniz’s Monadology, as a monad, as a “unity” or an 
“idea.” “What we have here designated as unities is the same as what 
others have understood by idea or monad, although the true meanings 
of these concepts have long since been lost” (i/2, 64). The monad is the 
very figure of shared solitude, sharing the awful secret of the absolute 
as natura naturans, yet each in its unique fashion, each singularly. The 
monad is a particular that is not the instantiation of a higher general-
ity, but rather each monad “is a particular that is as such absolute” (i/2, 
64). The community that is nature, a terrible belonging together, is the 
strange one expressing itself as the irreducibly singular proliferation of 
the many, much in the way that Jean-luc Nancy claims that the “world 
has no other origin than this singular multiplicity of origins” (BsP, 9).
This is not merely to mark the awful and terrible secret as a limit, 
as a threshold beyond which thinking dare not pass. as Nancy further 
reflects, “its negativity is neither that of an abyss, nor of the forbidden, 
nor of the veiled or the concealed, nor of the secret, nor that of the un-
presentable” (BsP, 12). Merely to designate it as such is to designate it 
exclusively as the “capitalized other” which marks it as “the exalted and 
overexalted mode of the propriety of what is proper,” relegated to the 
“punctum aeternum outside the world” (BsP, 13). This is precisely what 
is denied in marking the terrible secret as the terrible secret of nature. it 
is everywhere and therefore everywhere different, the immense dynamic 
differentiation of the community of solitude that is nature. The “world 
of terrors” does not therefore merely mark abstractly a limit to think-
ing. it is the awful secret that expresses itself ceaselessly in and as the 
play of nature.
The plurality of the origin is not only the shared solitude of birth, but 
also the shared solitude of ruin. My essay takes as its prompt the phe-
nomenon of mass extinction events, especially the seeming likelihood 
of the “sixth,” but it does so in order to engage in a sustained reflection 
on schelling’s conception of natural history. as such, i will argue that 
for schelling all history is ultimately natural history, all nature is radi-
cally historical, hence subverting the common bifurcation of history 
into human (or cultural) history and natural (or non-human) history. 
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P o l i G r a F i
The ascendancy of the anthropocene age5 is inadequately indicated as 
the triumph of culture over nature. in order to subvert this duality, i 
will consider carefully the difficult and prescient character of my two 
key terms: “nature” and “history.” For schelling, the two terms are ul-
timately inseparable (that is, they belong together as a unity of antipo-
des). already established in the early works of his Naturphilosophie, and 
dramatically developed in the 1809 Freedom essay and various drafts of 
Die Weltalter, nature is not a grand object, subsisting through time, and 
leaving behind it the residue of its past. such a conception belongs to 
modern philosophy’s nature-cide by denigrating nature, reducing it to 
an object that can to some extent be pried open by scientific inquiry. 
hence, nature stands before us as a vast conglomeration of objects and 
the laws that govern the manners of relation to each other. in contrast, 
as Merleau-Ponty later observed, schelling “places us not in front of, 
but rather in the middle of the absolute.”6 schelling’s retrieval of the 
question of nature is simultaneously the retrieval of the temporality of 
nature, including its cataclysmic dimensions, but also its transformative 
dimension for human thinking.
5 This is the now famous termed coined by Paul Josef Crutzen and eugene stoermer in 2000 
to describe the ascendant role of human manufacture in the prevalent geological character of the 
earth. The climate scientist William F. ruddiman’s (2007) very provocative recent work, Plows, 
Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate (New Jersey: Princeton university 
Press), makes a case that the athropocene is not coterminous, as Cruzen and others have argued, 
with the industrial revolution but rather the interaction between human population numbers 
(their rise and fall, including the effect of pandemics on overall population numbers), cultural 
practices (starting with things like deforestation for agriculture, which increases when popula-
tion numbers increase), and the climate. The implication of his argument is startling: there is 
not an independent, pure, healthy, ideal climate that would exist independent of industrializa-
tion (for the latter merely shifts the direction of the effect of the anthropocene age, namely, 
towards the widespread heating of the planet), but rather that whether the earth is heating (post 
18th Century) or cooling (the enigmatic little ice age that began in the mid-14th Century), the 
climate of the antropocene is inseparable from the widespread presence of human culture. That 
is nothing less than to say: already at a meteorological level it no longer makes sense to divorce 
“natural climate” from “human cultural activity.” The two are rather parts of a more complex 
whole emerging out of the interplay of these two sets of trajectories. We are not in the climate 
as if it were our mere surroundings (environment). in some very real sense it makes more sense 
to say that we are (of and towards) the climate. it is a feedback loop in which the anthropos is 
the leading indicator species.
6 Merleau-Ponty, M. (2003), Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France. (ed. Dominique 
séglard, translated by robert Vallier). evanston, illinois: Northwestern university Press, p. 47.
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M a s s  e X t i N C t i o N :  s C h e l l i N G  a N D  N a t u r a l  h i s t o r y
after a preliminary and orienting reflection on the destructive ele-
ment of time, i will turn to schelling not by broadly canvassing the vast 
territory of his thinking, but rather by concentrating on a small number 
of texts. although i will maintain an eye toward the explosive works of 
schelling’s transitional period, including the celebrated 1809 Freedom 
essay and the third draft of The Ages of the World (1815), i will also look 
into two early writings: “is a Philosophy of history Possible?” (1798) 
as well as the beginning of the introduction to Ideas for a Philosophy of 
Nature (1797, revised edition, 1803).
it is in the latter that schelling makes the remarkable claim that “Phi-
losophy is nothing but a natural accounting of our spirit [eine Naturlehre 
unseres Geistes]” and that, as such, philosophy now “becomes genetic, 
that is, it allows the whole necessary succession of representations to, 
so to speak, emerge and pass before our eyes” (i/2, 39). in moving from 
the being of our representations to their becoming, to the dynamism 
of their coming to presence, we become present to the coming to pres-
ence of nature itself. That is to say, the organic, non-mechanistic tem-
porality of nature’s coming to presence, that is, nature naturing (natura 
naturans), comes to the fore. This in part yields a mode of access to the 
vast, paradoxically discontinuous yet progressive history of nature. as 
schelling articulates it in The Ages of the World: “Therefore that force of 
the beginning posited in the expressible and exterior is the primordial 
seed of visible nature, out of which nature was unfolded in the succes-
sion of ages. Nature is an abyss of the past. This is what is oldest in na-
ture, the deepest of what remains if everything accidental and everything 
that has become is removed” (i/8, 244).
amid the current, heartbreaking and agonizing explosion of ruin, 
an event that, while staggering, is hardly unprecedented, accreting the 
already enormous record of wreckage, i turn to what is “oldest in na-
ture.” at the conclusion of the Freedom essay, schelling designates nature 
as an “older revelation than any scriptural one,” claiming that now is 
not the time “to reawaken old conflicts” but rather to “seek that which 
lies beyond and above all conflicts” (i/7, 416). Now is not the time to 
reawaken the “sectarian spirit” (i/7, 335), to pose one position against 
another, but rather to allow to come to presence, to let reveal itself, that 
which haunts every possible position. it is time for the most ancient 
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P o l i G r a F i
revelation, what is oldest in nature, to come forth. That the sixth biotic 
crisis is not unprecedented does not make it any less of a crisis. What 
does what is oldest in nature enable us to see regarding what is currently 
the anguish of our earth?
Sifting through ruins—if one were to drive to a museum of natural 
history, one could become aware of two ways in which nature is com-
ing to presence. Parking the car, one could enter the museum and, if 
it is at all comprehensive, one can find preliminary indications of the 
ruinous discontinuity of nature in the remnants of earlier ages of the 
world. Nowhere is it more dramatically evident than when contemplat-
ing the fossilized remains of the great reptiles. Their size and power are 
haunting relics from a scarcely imaginable age, ghosts that speak not 
only of themselves, but of a lost world, a vastly different ecology of life. 
although such things remain issues of scientific debate, the decline of 
the dinosaurs and the rise of the mammals are generally attributed to 
the fifth great biotic crisis, occurring some 65 million years ago, per-
haps as the result of a collision with a meteor or a dramatic increase in 
volcanic activity. in either scenario, the ecology was drastically altered 
and the rate of speciation of macroscopic life was overwhelmed by its 
rate of extinction.
it is the macroscopic grandeur of the Cretaceous-tertiary extinction 
event, with the disturbing and compelling specters of the rapacious ty-
rannosaurus rex, the enormous Brontosaurus, and myriad other sublime 
creatures, that make the paleontology divisions of natural history mu-
seums the most gripping of haunted houses. The imagination reels all 
the more when it considers that the magnitude of this loss was greatly 
exceeded by the third great biotic crisis, which concluded the Permian 
age. This was the so-called “Great Dying,” which preceded the fall of the 
great reptiles by some 180 million years. if one then ponders the spectral 
record of the species that have died since the last great biotic crisis, the 
“fearful symmetry” of creatures like the saber tooth tiger or the woolly 
mammoth, or if one considers the plight of the beleaguered Florida 
panther or the himalayan snow leopard, their endangered grasps on 
life symbolic of the immense pressure on so many different creatures, 
known and unknown, one then grasps the awful truth of what Bataille 
meant when he claimed that death “constantly leaves the necessary room 
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M a s s  e X t i N C t i o N :  s C h e l l i N G  a N D  N a t u r a l  h i s t o r y
for the coming of the newborn, and we are wrong to curse the one with-
out whom we would not exist.”7 Death makes space for the progression 
of life, the awful secret of what is oldest in nature, haunting nature, pro-
gressing anew as natura naturans.
When one then, unsettled, leaves the museum of natural history, that 
repository “where animals live as ghosts and humans as spirits and where 
many hidden powers and treasures are locked away,” and gets back into 
one’s car, and navigates back into a great sea of automobiles, one could 
reflect that the car’s capacity for movement basically depends on fos-
sil fuels. it profits from the very wreckage that had just been haunting 
one. Not only that, it partakes in a vast network of human industrial life 
that is exercising immense, even cataclysmic, pressure on biotic com-
munities. although the debates continue, there is a growing consensus 
among biologists that we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction 
event, with predictions running as high as the net loss of half of all mac-
roscopic species by the end of the century. however, one’s automobile is 
not analogous to a comet or a volcano and catastrophic climate change 
cannot be attributed to an accident. We “are” the automobile and the 
wreckage of the earth is a symptom of our acquisitive wrath. We are the 
natural disaster.
richard leakey and roger lewin have bemoaned that we “suck our 
sustenance from the rest of nature in a way never before seen in the 
world, reducing its bounty as ours grows.”8 Not only is the rise of the 
human the diminishment of the earth, but the more we diminish the 
earth, for example, by clear-cutting rainforests for arable land, the more 
we increase our numbers, which means the more we need to diminish 
the earth, and so it continues in a deadly progression of self-destructive 
self assertion. “Dominant as no other species has been in the history of 
life on earth, homo sapiens is in the throes of causing a major biologi-
cal crisis, a mass extinction, the sixth such event to have occurred in the 
past half billion years.”9
7 Bataille, G. (1991), The Accursed Share, volume 1. (translated by robert hurley). New york: 
Zone Books, p. 34.
8 leakey, r. and lewin, r. (1995), The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Hu-
mankind. New york: Doubleday, 233.
9 ibid., p. 245.
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P o l i G r a F i
is this self, exorbitantly sucking our “sustenance from the rest of na-
ture,” that is, the self as the occasion of explosive ruin, clearly distinct 
from the self which gazes at the extravagant expenditure of life that 
haunts biotic relics? one might be tempted to say that in the first in-
stance one finds oneself against nature and in the second instance awe-
struck, gazing at nature. yet to stare at nature, as if it were simply be-
fore one, is to be no less opposed to nature then to be straightforwardly 
against it. in both instances one finds oneself in nature, that is to say, 
surrounded by nature, amid nature, as if nature were an environment. 
Nature appears as one’s environs when one measures one’s relationship 
to nature as an object distinct from oneself as a subject. even when one 
is in nature, one is more fundamentally opposed to it, cut off from it, 
allowing one to gaze at it or act ruinously against it.
it is in this spirit of separation, of the Fall from the Garden of na-
ture, so to speak, that the human gazes even at its own animality as 
something strange, distant, perhaps lost, and therefore looks at its com-
munity with non-human animals as somehow beneath the dignity of 
aristotle’s “animal having logos.” The human knows itself as the arche of 
thinking only as the consequence of having risen out of or above nature. 
such extrication or elevation, however, is not a clean escape, but a fun-
damental denial or obscuration of oneself, a turning away from oneself 
in order to elevate oneself above oneself. The vestigial self, left behind 
in the self ’s movement toward self-presence, toward the pretence of 
autonomy, is not yet separated from nature. The “self ” that one aban-
dons in order to become distinctively and autonomously a self was not 
a self-standing self, extricating itself from nature in the act of cognizing 
itself. it was therefore a “self ” at the depths not only of itself, but also of 
nature, something like what the Zen tradition has called the “original 
face”: “Before your parents were born, what was your original face?” This 
question, still studied in rinzai kōan practice (dokusan, 独参), seeks to 
initiate the deconstruction of a self that has come to know itself as a self 
wholly in possession of itself.
The self-possessed subject, the self imminent to itself, has taken flight 
from the great life of nature. in the Freedom essay, this life on the periph-
ery will be characterized, from the perspective of nature, as a sickness, 
and from the perspective of the human, as radical evil, the original sin 
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M a s s  e X t i N C t i o N :  s C h e l l i N G  a N D  N a t u r a l  h i s t o r y
of human self-consciousness. This is the paradox of Selbstbewußtsein in 
post-Kantian thought: as soon as the self takes possession of itself, that is, 
as soon as it identifies with a phenomenal representation (Vorstellung) of 
itself, it loses itself. in direct contrast to the Cartesian position, the sub-
jective self cannot take possession of itself as an object. self-presentation 
leaves a trail of relics, without ever revealing what is being presented. 
how then does one think this ghostly subject haunting the relics of one-
self? in some strange sense one can designate it as the ground of oneself, 
but then again, that is also to make this ground objective, to hypostasize 
it, even in calling it a thing in itself or some object = x. it is not a thing, 
neither of the noumenal nor the phenomenal sort.
in The System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), schelling argues that 
the pure self, the self haunting the subject position, “is an act that lies 
outside of all time” and hence the question “is the i a thing in itself or 
an appearance [Erscheinung]?” is “intrinsically absurd” because “it is not 
a thing in any way, neither a thing in itself nor an appearance” (i/3, 375). 
it is literally unbedingt, that which has not and cannot become a thing 
within each thing. translating das Unbedingte as “absolute” always risks 
hypostasizing das Unbedingte or rendering it vague, a night when all 
cows are black.10 schelling was clear about this in his earliest writings. 
in On the I as Principle of Philosophy, or Concerning das unbedingte in 
Human Knowing (1795), published when schelling was twenty years 
old, he considered this an “exquisite” German word that “contains the 
entire treasure of philosophical truth.” “Bedingen [to condition] names 
the operation in which something becomes a Ding [thing], bedingt [con-
ditioned], that which is made into a thing, which at the same time illu-
minates that nothing through itself can be posited as a thing. an unbed-
ingtes Ding is a contradiction. Unbedingt is that which in no way can 
be made into a thing, that in no way can become a thing” (i/1, 66). Das 
Unbedingte comes to presence as things, but without revealing itself as 
anything. hence in the 1800 System, we can see that from the perspec-
tive of the objective, seen among things, this is philosophy resuscitated 
10 hence, iain hamilton Grant (2006), in his Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (london 
and New york: Continuum), renders unbedingt literally as “unthinged.” Despite its lexical exu-
berance, this is a watershed study of schelling’s Naturphilosophie in the english-speaking world. 
henceforth PoN.
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P o l i G r a F i
as genetic, as “eternal becoming” and from the perspective of the sub-
jective, it “appears [erscheint],” itself a rather spectral verb, as “infinite 
producing” (i/3, 376), the free play of nature.
The pure self, the original face before your parents were born, is a 
non-subject haunting the subject (because the subject is in itself abso-
lutely nothing). it “is” an Ungrund, to use schelling’s deployment of 
Böhme’s phrase (i/7, 407), spectrally present, that is, present in its ab-
sence, within Grund. how does one face this all-consuming fire within 
oneself, and within all things, when it emerges, as did Krishna to the de-
spondent arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita, as Vishnu, the mystery of mys-
teries, the royal secret, and finally as great time, mahā kāla, the world 
destroyer? in the Freedom essay, schelling will argue that Angst before 
the great matter of life, before what is oldest in nature, drives us from 
the center (i/7, 382). and as schelling argued in The Ages of the World: 
“Most people turn away from what is concealed within themselves just 
as they turn away from the depths of the great life and shy away from 
the glance into the abysses of that past which are still within one just as 
much as the present” (i/8, 207–208).
The face of modern philosophy came to presence in abdicating its 
original face. in a sense one might hazard to say that its very existence 
was its original sin (the self falling from nature in its flight toward it-
self ). schelling was a close yet worried reader of modern philosophy 
and a defender of a radicalized spinoza, one might even say, using the 
designation carefully, a post-modern spinoza in the sense of a spinoza 
that has been extricated from the limitations of what was thinkable 
within modern philosophy’s estimation of its grounding possibilities.11 
schelling’s spinoza, unleashing the spectral force of natura naturans, 
with its implicit post-enlightenment reconfiguration of the philoso-
phy of science, certainly invited ridicule from the prevailing theological 
orthodoxy, but it also put him at odds with the enlightened scientific 
standpoint, with its commitment to an autonomous subject (one is 
11 For a discussion of schelling’s relationship to spinoza, see my (2003) The Conspiracy of Life: 
Meditations on Schelling and His Time. New york: state university of New york Press, chapters 
two and three.
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M a s s  e X t i N C t i o N :  s C h e l l i N G  a N D  N a t u r a l  h i s t o r y
tempted even to say, the liberal capitalist subject) as both researcher of 
nature and moral agent.
in the Freedom essay, schelling provocatively characterized all of 
modern philosophy as the impossibility of the question of nature even 
emerging as a serious question. “The entirety of modern european phi-
losophy has, since its inception (in Descartes) the shared deficiency that 
nature is not present to it and that it lacks nature’s living ground” (i/7, 
356–357). in resuscitating spinoza, schelling breathes life into his think-
ing, endeavoring to divorce the ground of nature in spinoza’s thinking 
from any dogmatism. it is the very freedom at the heart of things that, 
as unbedingt, is what is oldest in nature, always older than its ceaseless 
coming to presence. it is a life beyond the life and death of things. it ex-
presses itself12 pluralistically as the shared or “natural” monadic solitude 
of the life and death of those things. Not only does this deconstruct a 
Newtonian mechanistic universe, that is, a universe of sheer necessity, 
adhering to a priori laws of nature, but it also deconstructs the autono-
mous moral subject, adhering to the laws of freedom or to the divine 
command of a transcendent creator God. “The moralist desires to see 
nature not living, but dead, so that he may be able to tread upon it with 
his feet” (i/7, 17).
Time and nature—long before he became president, Thomas Jeffer-
son knew of the remarkable mastodon fossils from what was called the 
Big Bone lick (formerly in Virginia, now in Kentucky).13 yet when he 
sent lewis and Clark on their famous trip to the Pacific Northwest, he 
wanted them to find living mastodons. “such is the economy of nature 
that no instance can be produced, of her having permitted any one race 
of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her 
great work so weak as to be broken.”14 The laws of nature, whether or 
12 on the problem of expressionism in schelling, see my (2004), “animalization: schelling and 
the Problem of expressivity,” in: Schelling Now: Contemporary Readings of Schelling. (ed. Jason 
M. Wirth). Bloomington, indiana: indiana university Press, p. 84–98.
13 Jefferson bequeathed the fossilized jawbone of a mastodon to the university of Virginia.
14 Both the anecdote about lewis and Clark and the Jefferson quotation are from elizabeth 
Kolbert’s (2009) essay, “The sixth extinction?” The New Yorker, May 25, 2009, p. 53. henceforth 
se. in her eloquent and eye-opening essay, Kolbert also speaks with the harvard paleontolo-
gist andrew Knoll who reflects on the nature of the sixth extinction event: When the asteroid 
collided with the yucatan Peninsula, “it was one terrible afternoon . . . But it was a short-term 
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P o l i G r a F i
not God is the legislator, form a closed and recursive system. all sur-
prises, all happenstance, are manifestations of our ignorance and lack 
of mastery of the fundamental rules governing the movement of nature. 
Catastrophic ruin suggests that God does not know what he is doing, 
or at least that the rules of nature are not ironclad. it has been the West-
ern disposition to err on the side of an omniscient and omnibenevolent 
God or to have an equally optimistic faith in reductionist materialism.
Georges Cuvier, the French naturalist, did not buy any of this and 
in 1812 concluded that the fossil record not only indicated that some 
species were “lost,” but that the rate of loss was not exclusively a mat-
ter of what is now called background extinction (it is the way of species 
to become espèces perdues). he discovered evidence of cataclysmic loss, 
like the floods that drove Noah to his ark.15 even Darwin, who unset-
tled the traditional account, according to which divine final causality 
was incompatible with an account of speciation that included, even to 
a limited extent, the play of chance, opposed the idea that chance was 
capable of such profligacy.16
Nonetheless, the remnants of sublime squandering, as well as the 
role of chance mutation in species survival, cast doubt on the unbroken 
recursivity (“mechanism”) of nature. as Grant observed, “the reassur-
ing certainty of a mechanical eternity is removed by the fossil remains 
event, and then things started getting better. today, it’s not as if you have a stress and the stress 
is relieved and recovery starts. it gets bad and then it keeps being bad, because the stress doesn’t 
go away. Because the stress is us” (63).
15 see se, p. 53–54.
16 se, p. 54. Deleuze and Guattari argue in “10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals” that Cuvier 
and this kind of approach nonetheless is too tied to forms, not the unfolding of the earth: “There 
are irreducible axes, types, branches. There are resemblances between organs and analogies be-
tween forms, nothing more.” Deleuze, J. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus (translated 
by Brian Massumi). Minneapolis: university of Minnesota Press, p. 46. For a more complicated 
account of Cuvier, see Grant, PoN, p. 124–125. it is also, however, clear that Cuvier had a poor 
understanding of schelling and Naturphilsophie, dismissing it as illogical. see: outram, D. 
(1984), Georges Cuvier: Vocation, Science, and Authority in Post-Revolutionary France. Manchester: 
Manchester university Press, p. 135–138. Cuvier concluded that schelling’s tendency to regard 
nature as a “living organism” was experimentally unverifiable and that such metaphysics could 
only discredit the natural sciences (136). in this sense, Cuvier’s allergic reaction to Naturphil-
osophie was nothing unusual, but rather ultimately emblematic of modern science’s inclusion 
within modern philosophy in general and that, as such, “natural” science was oblivious to the 
natural.
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of vanished creatures” (53). is this not freedom in its permutation as 
contingency?
schelling’s efforts to think through the problem of the relationship 
between freedom and nature, of course, had first to move through the 
Kantian critical project. in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, the very ap-
pearance of nature excludes the possibility that freedom operates in any 
way in nature. rather, the laws of nature manifest the forms of intu-
ition that gather the manifold into experience. We are the legislators of 
nature. “The intellect [Verstand] is itself the legislation [Gesetzgebung] 
of nature, that is, without the intellect there simply would not be any 
nature, that is, the synthetic unity of the manifold according to rules.”17
The impossibility of an experience of freedom, of freedom in na-
ture, governs the famous third antinomy, the antinomy of pure reason 
in its third conflict of transcendental ideas. The antithesis holds, given 
the very conditions for the possibility of experience, that “there is no 
freedom but rather everything in the world happens merely according 
to the laws of nature.” if this were the last word, of course, there could 
be no ethical autonomy and no capacity to obey the moral law. hence 
the thesis holds that “causality according to the laws of nature is not the 
only cause from which the appearances of the world could be collective-
ly derived.”18 The antinomy clearly disallows recourse to an experience 
of freedom. Nature, in order to appear to reason at all, follows the rules 
legislated by the intellect. everything appears as it must appear, in accor-
dance with the rules that gather the manifold into appearance. Freedom, 
the sine qua non for practical philosophy, does not and cannot appear 
in nature. instead, it commands from the noumenal kingdom of ends, 
from beyond the rule of nature. This, of course, is Kant’s famous bifur-
cation: human life simultaneously dwelling under the laws of nature 
and the deontological citizenship in the autonomous kingdom of ends.
With this account, it makes little sense to speak of natural history as 
anything other than the chronology of rule-bound happenings. There 
can be no real sense of history in the sense of what happened. What 
17 Kant, i. (1976), Kritik der reinen Vernunft (a edition 1781, B edition 1787). hamburg: Felix 
Meiner, p. 186. The citation appears in the a edition, p. 126–27.
18 ibid., p. 462 (a 444/B 472 – a 445/B 473).
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P o l i G r a F i
happened did not happen by happenstance. it had to happen. But the 
fossil record!
The possibility of anything like a living natural history (rather than 
the mechanical natural chronology) opens up in the third Kritik, which 
schelling regarded as “Kant’s deepest work, which, if he could have be-
gun with it in the way that he finished with it, would have probably 
given his whole philosophy another direction.”19 its project is nothing 
less than to try to reflect from the space that opens in the “incalculable 
chasm [die unübersehbare Kluft]” between nature and freedom, the laws 
of appearance and the non-appearance of freedom. in aesthetic judg-
ment (that is, in the exercise of taste), one reflects on the pleasure that 
one senses operating at the ground of and at odds with the laws of na-
ture, its “reference to the free lawfulness of the imagination [die freie 
Gesetzmäßigkeit der Einbildungskraft].”20 For example, Kant objects to 
William Marsden’s claim in his History of Sumatra that when, amid the 
overwhelming prodigality of “free beauties” in the sumatran forests, he 
discovered the beauty of a nice and tidy pepper patch, he had found 
real beauty, as opposed to the chaos of the jungle. For Kant, what made 
Marsden judge the pepper patch as beautiful was that it was unexpect-
ed, a surprise in the jungle. if he were to gaze exclusively at the pepper 
patch, he would soon grow bored, as the free play of nature that unex-
pectedly came to presence became the rule that pepper patches are the 
only beautiful things in the sumatran jungle. soon Marsden’s attention 
would turn to the “luxuriance of prodigal nature, which is not subjected 
to the coercions of any artificial rules” (Ku, §22, 86). When one finds 
oneself taking pleasure in the aqueous undulations of a waterfall, or 
the dancing flames of a campfire, or the quietly dynamic flow of a bab-
bling brook, does one not delight in one’s incapacity to comprehend the 
principle at play in their intuition (Ku, §22, 85–86)? it is the unbidden 
pleasure taken in the free play of nature’s rule.
it is as if nature presented itself in the element of water, capable 
of taking any form, but having no form of its own. in the water-con-
19 schelling, F.W.J. (1994), On the History of Modern Philosophy (1827) (translated by andrew 
Bowie). Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, p. 173. henceforth hMP.
20 Kant, i. (1990), Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790). hamburg: Felix Meiner, §22, p. 82.
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sciousness of aesthetic judgment, one does not seek to explain nature, 
but rather one becomes aware of the wonder of nature, of the miracle 
of its coming to presence. in the sublime, of course, this dynamic is in-
tensified as the immeasurability [Unangemessenheit] and boundlessness 
[Unbegrenztheit] of this freedom, which “makes the mind tremble,” fill-
ing one with a feeling of astonishment, respect, the shudder of the holy, 
and a quickening of life. one could say that the possibility of a living 
natural history, itself only possible with the shattering of the paradigm 
that dictates that nature’s temporality, is recursive, like a clock, begins 
to suggest itself in the dawning of the sense of a whole that holds to-
gether the antipodes of nature and freedom. For Kant, however, this 
whole does not come entirely to the fore. Freedom is but the feeling of 
the moral law within, projected upon the starry heavens above. he does 
not yet know alyosha Karamazov’s more difficult joy: “The silence of 
the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens, the mystery 
of the earth touched the mystery of the stars. . . . alyosha stood gazing 
and suddenly, as if he had been cut down, threw himself to the earth. 
he did not know why he was embracing it, he did not try to understand 
why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss all of it, but he was kiss-
ing it, weeping, sobbing, and watering it with his tears, and he vowed 
ecstatically to love it, to love it unto ages of ages.”21 For this to happen, 
Kant needed to remember his original face and therefore that the plea-
sure and shudders of nature are not found within ourselves but within 
the original face that always already shares and touches the original face 
of nature.
For schelling, operating in the unity of the “incalculable chasm” ar-
ticulated by Kant, natural history speaks from nature as the progression 
of freedom and necessity. as Grant articulates it: “Natural history, then, 
does not consist solely in empirical accounts of the development of or-
ganizations on the earth’s surface, nor in any synchronic cataloguing of 
these. its philosophical foundations make it a science that attempts to 
straddle the gulf between history, as the product of freedom, and nature, 
as the product of necessity” (18). in a small essay from 1798, “is a Phi-
21 Dostoevsky, F. (2002), The Brothers Karamazov (translated by richard Pevear and larissa 
Volokhonsky). New york: FsG, p. 362.
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losophy of history Possible?”, schelling defines history according to its 
etymology as “knowledge of what happened” (i/1, 466). hence, “what is 
a priori calculable, what happens according to necessary laws, is not an 
object of history; and vice versa, what is an object of history must not be 
calculated a priori” (i/7, 467). history in relationship to nature, then, is 
the play or chance occurrence of freedom in nature, not in the sense that 
nature becomes a chaotic free-for-all and collapses into mere “unruliness 
[Gesetzlosigkeit],” but rather that it is not merely subject to rules. There 
is also variance and deviation [Abweichung] (i/1, 469), instances where 
the rule did not hold. in this sense, “history overall only exists where an 
ideal and where infinitely-manifold deviations from the ideal take place 
in individuals, which nonetheless remain congruent with the ideal as a 
whole” (i/7, 469). in other words, progression assumes deviation from 
the ideal and, as such, is the expression of the course of a free activity 
that cannot be determined a priori. “What is not progressive is not an 
object of history” (i/1, 470).
schelling, perhaps not to his credit, did not regard animals as having 
history “because each particular individual consummately expressed the 
concept of its species” and there was therefore no “overstepping of its 
boundaries” and no “further construction on the foundation of earlier” 
individuals (i/1, 471). an individual bear acts in accordance with how 
bears as such generally behave. of course, animals do not need to act 
freely because they are not subject to the original sin of self-conscious-
ness. since an animal is not tempted to remain faithful to its imago, 
it does not experience its freedom in overstepping its imago. What is 
freedom from the perspective of natura naturans is tacit necessity from 
the experience of animals because they are not self-consciously free. 
That being said, the non-human animal community is full of surprises, 
and it is wise not to speak too confidently about them. Nonetheless, 
schelling’s sensitivity to the general problem, beyond the complex and 
vexing problem with non-human animals, remains acute: “where there 
is mechanism, there is no history, and vice versa, where there is history, 
there is no mechanism” (i/1, 471).
even if one granted that animals do not have a history, that is to say, 
a history that belongs to animals as animals, it does not follow that na-
ture does not have a history of animals. There is not a history of animals, 
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M a s s  e X t i N C t i o N :  s C h e l l i N G  a N D  N a t u r a l  h i s t o r y
but there is a natural history of animals, just as there is a natural history 
of everything, from subatomic particles to black holes. Just as deviation 
from oneself is the possibility of humans having history, that is, of act-
ing freely, nature’s progressivity is its capacity not to be held hostage to 
its manifold appearances, to deviate from itself ever anew. as schelling 
articulated it in his introduction to Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, writ-
ten around the same time as the small piece on history, “Nature should 
be visible spirit, spirit should be invisible nature” (i/2, 56).
The very idea of Naturphilosophie is not to define nature as a philo-
sophical object, but rather to recover nature as “the infinite subject, i.e. 
the subject which can never stop being a subject, can never be lost in 
the object, become mere object, as it does for spinoza” (hMP, 114). as 
such, its translation as “the philosophy of nature” is potentially mislead-
ing. Naturphilosophie in schelling’s sense is more like doing philosophy 
in accordance with nature (not as an elective activity originating at the 
whim and command of the res cogitans). it is not therefore a kind of 
philosophy, or a topic within philosophy, but rather a gateway into the 
originating experience of philosophizing.
in his startling and exceptionally lucid thought experiment at the be-
ginning of his introduction to Ideas, we see schelling orchestrating the 
“originating [Entstehen]” of this subject “before the eyes of the reader” 
(i/2, 11). This origination and “coming to the fore” happens in simply 
reflecting on the nature of philosophy itself. is philosophy any particu-
lar philosophy? if philosophy is not a philosophy, what is philosophy 
which includes the remnants of all philosophies heretofore, but which 
is exhausted by none of them? Philosophy, one could say, is the free, 
historical act of philosophizing, not any particular philosophy. or: the 
subject of philosophy is reducible to no philosophical objects. hence, 
schelling claimed in the first (1797) version of this introduction that 
“the idea of philosophy is merely the result of philosophy itself, but a 
universally valid philosophy is an inglorious pipedream [ein ruhmloses 
Hirngespinst]” (i/2, 11). one might say that the very desire to make a 
philosophy out of philosophy is itself undignified illness, recoiling in 
anxiety from the freedom of philosophizing.
This origination of the subject also comes to the fore when one ex-
tends the subject of philosophy to nature. it begins with reflecting on 
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being able to ask simple questions like: What is nature? how is nature 
possible? if nature were merely mechanistic, one could not ask this ques-
tion. reflection by its very nature is what David Wood has called “the 
step back, the promulgation of negative capability” which resists “un-
thinking identifications.”22 in reflection we divorce ourselves from na-
ture, separating ourselves from an absorption in nature. We ask if what 
we see of nature and what we already think of nature is sufficient to ap-
preciate nature. as if one were in Plato’s cave, reflection, the eruption of 
the radically interrogative mode, “strives to wrench oneself away from 
the shackles of nature and her provisions” (i/2, 12).
however, one does not tear oneself away from nature as an end in it-
self. one rejects the grip of nature as a means to grasp nature itself more 
fully. Mere reflection, that is, reflection for the sake of reflection, is ac-
cordingly, and in anticipation of the Freedom essay, eine Geisteskrankheit 
des Menschen (i/2, 13). a Geisteskrankheit is a psychopathology or mental 
disease, literally, a sickness of the spirit. one pulls away from the center 
of nature and its stubborn hold and retreats to the periphery of reflec-
tion. if, however, one remains on the periphery, separated, alone in the 
delusion of one’s ipseity, this is the experience of sickness and radical 
evil. in the language of the introduction, when reflection reaches “do-
minion over the whole person,” it “kills” her “spiritual life at its root” 
(i/2, 13). reflection has no positive value in itself. it has “negative value,” 
enabling the divorce from nature that is the original experience of phi-
losophy, but it should endeavor to reunite with that which it first knows 
only as necessity. reflection is “merely a necessary evil [ein notwendi-
ges Übel]” that, left to itself, attaches to the root, aggressing against the 
very root of nature that prompted the original divorce from the chains 
of nature. Philosophy, born of the abdication of nature, is the art of the 
return to nature. in such a return, the self of nature, so to speak, comes 
to fore as the eternal beginning of nature. Just as the root of philosophy 
is exhausted in no exercise of philosophy, the root of nature is exhausted 
by none of its expressions. The history of nature is the unfolding legacy 
of what is always already gone in all that originates and comes to pres-
22 Wood, D. (2005), The Step Back: Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction. New york: state 
university of New york Press, p. 7.
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ence. since it expresses everything in its coming to presence, as well as 
the mortality of all presence, its origination and points of access are as 
multiple as things themselves.
in the temporality of nature, what is oldest in nature, whose rem-
nants are its history, but which in itself remains always still to come, 
promises fatality as the truth of natality. The “eternal beginning [ewiger 
Anfang]” begins ever anew because of the generativity of finitude. Bereft 
of the radical interruption that is both finitude and the incessant natal-
ity of the future, nature is populated by angels, perfect beings, wholly 
obedient to their forms. angels do not partake in history; Klee’s and 
Benjamin’s angel of history is the murderous face of history that falsely 
and ruinously imagines that it has become immanent to itself, as it does 
in hegel. already in 1798 history essay schelling dismissed angels as “the 
most boring beings of all” (i/1, 473) and almost thirty years later said of 
hegel’s God that “he is the God who only ever does what he has al-
ways done, and who therefore cannot create anything new” (hMP, 160). 
one might say, then, that hegel’s great angel is not merely boring, but 
rather the wrath of the boring.
The time of nature is its abyssal past returning as the Unvordenklich-
keit (unprethinkability) of the future. as such, the past is not therefore 
the record of the continuous history of some grand object=x. it is rather 
the evidence of the at times catastrophic record of discontinuity, and 
the history of the ruptures of time that persist, for example, in the in-
tersection of different ages. in The Ages of the World, schelling offered 
the example of comets, those mysterious emissaries from another age:
We still now see those enigmatic members of the planetary whole, comets, 
in this state of fiery electrical dissolution. Comets are, as i expressed myself 
earlier but would now like to say, celestial bodies in becoming and which are 
still unreconciled. They are, so to speak, living witnesses of that primordial 
time, since nothing prevents the earlier time from migrating through later time 
via particular phenomena. or, conversely, nothing prevents a later time from 
having emerged earlier in some parts of the universe than in others. in all ages, 
human feeling has only regarded comets with a shudder as, so to speak, har-
bingers of the recurrence of a past age, of universal destruction, of the dissolu-
tion of things again into chaos. evidently, the individual center of gravity (the 
separate life) in a comet is not reconciled with the universal center of gravity. 
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This is demonstrated by the directions and positions of their paths that deviate 
from those of the settled planets. (1/8, 329–330)
Nature is bizarre—Comets are strange, as strange as the mastodons 
that Jefferson hoped that lewis and Clark would find in their travels. 
That they did not find mastodons was no less strange than that they 
did find grizzly bears. Nancy, in his beautiful way, reflected that “’Na-
ture’ is also ‘strange [bizarre],’ and we exist there; we exist in it in the 
mode of a constantly renewed singularity” (BsP, 9). The term bizarre 
is of uncertain origin, perhaps originating from the Basque word for 
beard, perhaps in so doing recording the strangeness of the appearance 
of bearded spanish warriors. in addition to the element of wonder and 
surprise, it also speaks to the dignity and grandeur of that surprise. This 
“’strangeness’ refers to the fact that each singularity is another access to 
the world” (BsP, 14).
The sudden reemergence of the dignity of nature’s strangeness re-
unites (without dissolving singularity into identification) thinking with 
the nature that it had forsaken. in the famous 1797 System fragment, 
written by hegel, hölderlin, and schelling, the dignity of nature’s 
strangeness, something that hegel would in an important respect later 
renounce, was designated the practice of natural religion, and schelling, 
even in the late Berlin lectures on mythology and revelation, never loses 
sight of it.
What schelling calls for in this origination of the strangeness of na-
ture, in the cultivation of natural religion, is a practice of the wild. i 
take this term, of course, from Gary snyder. in the final chapter, called 
“Grace”, of his duly celebrated Practice of the Wild, he explains that at his 
house they say a Buddhist grace, which begins, “We venerate the Three 
treasures [teachers, the wild, and friends].”23 The three treasures are uni-
versally acknowledged by all negotiators of the Buddha Dharma to be 
the Buddha, which snyder, using his own upaya or skillful means, ren-
ders as “teachers,” the sangha, the community of practitioners, whom 
snyder renders as “friends,” and finally, and most strikingly, the Dhar-
ma, which snyder renders as “the wild.”
23 snyder, G. (1990), The Practice of the Wild. California: North Point Press, p.185. henceforth 
PW.
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in what manner can the Dharma, the very matter that is transmit-
ted from Buddha Dharma to Buddhist negotiator, be translated as the 
wild? it all depends on how one hears the word “wild.” typically “wild” 
and “feral” (ferus) are “largely defined in our dictionaries by what—from 
a human standpoint—it is not. it cannot be seen by this approach for 
what it is” (PW, 9). hence, a wild animal is an animal that has not been 
trained to live in our house (undomesticated) and has not been success-
fully subjected to our rule (unruly).
But what happens if we “turn it the other way”? What is the wild to 
the wild? animals become “free agents, each with its own endowments, 
living within natural systems” (PW, 9). as snyder begins to explore this 
turn, he indicates the ways in which the wild “comes very close to being 
how the Chinese define the term Dao, the way of Great Nature: elud-
ing analysis, beyond categories, self-organizing, self-informing, playful, 
surprising, impermanent, insubstantial, independent, complete, orderly, 
unmediated . . .” (PW, 10). and the Dao, as we know from the rich in-
terpenetration of Mahāyāna and Daoist traditions in east asia, is “not 
far from the Buddhist term Dharma with its original senses of forming 
and firming” (PW, 10). The early Daoists spoke of Dao as “the great 
mother” and schelling emphasized that the etymology of natura is that 
which has been born, and that natura thereby speaks of prodigal natality.
What are we to make of ourselves as the occasion of the sixth great 
extinction? This question is inseparable from the management of our 
cities, the cultivation of our bodies, the way that we read books—every-
thing depends on the recuperation of the wildness that we share with 
all of being, the wildness (beyond the ruinous dichotomy of wild and 
civilized) that is our abdicated being together with and as nature.