ASEBL Journal – Volume 13 Issue 1, January 201 8
Neurobiology, Intention and Decision
Clayton Shoppa
Very late in his philosophical career, Friedrich Schelling gives a lecture on the principles
of philosophy in Berlin. He devotes a portion of his talk to what he calls “The Exhibition
of the Process of Nature.” Darwin was in his 30s when these lectures occurred, busy writ-
ing about geology, volcanoes and barnacles. Not unlike Darwin, Schelling thinks we
are thoroughly natural entities. Working at a very high altitude, Schelling wonders
about what kind of thing the cosmos must be for it to permit philosophy. The universe,
as we are supposed to call it today, really does emerge, really does move, and really
does decay. Likewise with entities. If beavers know how to build dams, the universe
does too. If you know how to ride the subway, the universe does too. If you fall in love,
the universe does too. Physics studies motion, the universe in so far as it moves, chemis-
try the active and reactive qualities of bodies by which elemental bodies form compounds
according to ratios, and so on through the list of sciences and their proper objects. For
Schelling philosophy studies “the existent in general,” the ordered network of operations
of being.
Again working from a very high altitude, Schelling reconstructs and rejects previous
generations of philosophers. As he exhibits nature as a process, he reviews his theory
of the potencies – the idea that sailed a thousand philosophy dissertations – and he
reaches back to Aristotle, pretending Aristotle reaches exactly the same conclusion as
he does, but it is the end of the lecture that is most interesting to us here. The network
of plants and animals, what we might call non-human nature, serves as a precondition to
consciousness. The natural ascent from stellar corpses to planets to grasses, tall trees
and predatory birds and creatures of the deep seas, of creeping things, of three-toed
sloths and chimpanzees, all of this Schelling labels “becoming conscious.” Non-human
nature starts what we complete. It serves as the metaphysical premise, the precursor, for
humanity, and humanity, he says, is nothing but consciousness. Each of us contributes to
the idea of humanity. The record of our choices adds to, contributes to, the record of
humanity in the sense of the meaning of humanity.
With typical post-Kantian grandeur Schelling writes, “We must of course assume that the
Earth is the point of emergence for humanity – why, we do not know, it refers to rela-
tions we cannot survey, but humanity is therefore not specifically a product of the
Earth – it is a product of the entire process – not the Earth alone, the entire cosmos
contributes to humanity, and if of the Earth, as continuing from the earlier standpoint, he is,
then humanity is not exclusively created for the Earth, but for all the stars, since hu-
manity is created as the final goal of the cosmos.” Other animals have their niches; we
have the cosmos. The universe catches itself in the act of emerging, moving, and dy-
ing because consciousness is real in it. In contrast, today’s evolutionary studies are often
more modest, a deflated, thoroughly terrestrial account of creative nature and of “higher
creatures,” as Darwin calls us.
Evolution, a word Darwin uses rarely, first in the sixth edition of On the Origin of Species,
is a theory of development the target of which is the natural world. For Darwin it per-
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