Life at the Margins of Matter

‘Circumcising’ Schelling’s Organicist Philosophy with Hans Jonas

Abstract

Drawing on a playful notebook entry from Hans Jonas’s student years, this article examines why Jonas consistently sidestepped Friedrich Schelling’s Naturphilosophie in his writings on philosophical biology. It begins by outlining the many affinities between the two thinkers, as noted in previous scholarship: both articulate an asubjective teleology, both understand organisms as self-individuating unities, and both reject mechanistic reductions of life. It then considers several possible explanations for Jonas’s dismissal of Schelling, arguing that their deepest point of divergence lies in their differing attitudes toward the anorganic realm. Whereas Schelling understands nature – organic and inorganic alike – as animated by a primordial, dynamic freedom, Jonas draws a sharp ontological boundary between living and nonliving matter: arguing that freedom originates only with metabolism, while the inorganic world is characterized by blind necessity and existential opacity. This split yields fundamentally different conceptions of the relationship between philosophy and nature, of action, and, ultimately, of what it means to live and act responsibly.