Living and Dead Forms: The Factuality of Meaning in Schelling and Other Naturalists

The aim of this chapter is to describe a set of post-Kantian accounts of meaning, according to which: (i) meaningful properties are formal ones; (ii) these properties should be described in terms of the natural processes out of which they emerge; (iii) meanings should therefore be considered natural forms and be explained in the same way as any other natural fact. This is a set of naturalist positions that typically construes meaning as a ‘living form’, but equally—at its most radical—exceeds this organicist framework to think inorganic meanings. I consider this tradition through a detailed interrogation of Lectures Eight and Nine of F. W. J. Schelling’s Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, arguing that this is one exemplary instance of the confusion of forms and grounds in such a post-Kantian tradition. Ultimately, I suggest it is a position that puts into question typical understandings of meaning itself.