Andrew Bowie (Schelling and Modern European Philosophy) explains how Schelling’s conception of the PRODUCTIVITY of nature cannot be conceived as being the same thing as force. Rather, productivity is different from anything assumed by (conventional, 19th-cent.) vitalism: “the essence of a thing is the concatenation of forces which it is, not something else beyond this concatenation. The opposing forces in nature which are observable via their effects when they encounter each other require that within which they relate to each other, which cannot be a force… The play of forces at this level makes life possible, which is therefore not something added externally, but is the immanent movement of this play, upon which there cannot be any external perspective” (37). This leads to a proto-Prigogine conception of dissipation of  energy as productive. “Rather than the principle of entropy, which moves towards a static balance of all forces, being the primary process, the primary process must actually be self-constitution” (38).

The genesis of subjectivity is thus one example of the genesis of nature via/as productivity. Schelling extends Kant’s notion of organization in living things to a wider principle of the immanent organization of all nature (not just “life”). — Isn’t this also how the neo-vitalism of Bergson and Deleuze (and perhaps Simondon) (and more recently Grant, who rejects the idea of restricting productivity just to “life”) sees things?

The question is how to relate this notion of productivity to “creative advance” — which certainly will involve Whitehead’s event epochalism; but nonetheless this doesn’t make Whitehead as radically opposed to Deleuze etc as Harman claims.

This is also linked to the question of “ground.” If we see a system of internal relations (e.g. Saussure’s negative terms without anything positive), then how do we account for the genesis of such a system? For Bowie, this is the problem both of structuralism in the late 20th century, and of Spinoza for Schelling (22). So, just as Deleuze demands a genesis of the transcendental, so Schelling demands of the Spinozists a ground for the system of substance/necessity.