438 i Flora Unveiled
In this way biologists can strive to discover the hidden rules that govern the harmony of
living organisms, but, as with art, their attempts to fully comprehend living organisms will
ultimately fail, just as Michelangelo’s hewing of the excess marble from his masterpiece fails
to account for the masterpiece itself. Thus, Kant believed that biology, like art, could never
become a true science.
Fichte’s Subjective Idealism and Schelling’s
Nature PhilosophyNature philosophers were in general agreement that the senses were not transparent win-
dows through which information passed directly to the reasoning faculties of the brain.
Instead, the senses were filters that allowed only certain types of information to be rec-
ognized, corresponding to Kant’s categories of understanding. An object’s “noumenal”
properties, which Kant referred to as das Ding an sich (“the thing in itself ”), would forever
remain unknowable.
As for free will, Kant stated in the introduction to Critique of Judgement that natural
laws seem to have been specifically designed to accommodate human freedom of action
and moral choice in an otherwise determinate universe.^28 This was exactly what Goethe
and his young friends, who valued their personal freedom above all else, wanted to hear.
But Kant agreed with Hume that self- knowledge, without which free will is useless, is also
limited because of its dependence on unreliable memories. Kant called the knowable self
the “empirical ego.” But he proposed that there was another self, the “transcendental ego,”
which was united to nature and therefore unknowable.
One of Kant’s young disciples, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, took the subjective element in
Kant’s philosophy to its logical extreme. According to Fichte, because all our ideas about the
natural world are based on mental constructs, there is no way to demonstrate that external
reality actually exists. Everything we know about the external world (which Fichte called
the “not- I”) emanates from our own minds, and Fichte went so far as to claim that the “abso-
lute ego,” roughly equivalent to Kant’s transcendental ego, creates its own reality, which we
mistake for the “real world.”
Goethe and his close friend, the poet, dramatist, and historian Friedrich Schiller,^29 both
considered Fichte’s rejection of external reality absurd. When a disgruntled university stu-
dent threw a stone through Fichte’s office window at Jena, Goethe remarked to Schiller that
it was a “most unpleasant way to become convinced of the existence of the not- I.” ^30
It was Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, the boyish “philosopher king” of the
Romantics, who coined the term “Naturphilosophie” in his book Ideas for a Philosophy
of Nature (1797). An ardent admirer of both Fichte and Goethe, Schelling set himself the
goal of finding the golden mean between Fichte’s subjective idealism and Goethe’s rela-
tively hard- minded objectivism. But rather than achieving the synthesis he hoped for, he
oscillated between these two opposing perspectives throughout his career. As a student, he
was a pure Fichtean, but upon joining the faculty at the University of Jena he came under
Goethe’s influence. His enthusiasm for subjective idealism was further dampened by a skep-
tical reviewer of one of his books, who wrote: “Is not the [subjective] idealist fortunate that
he is able to consider as his own the divine works of Plato, Sophocles, and all the other great
minds?”^31