Schelling and Modern European Philosophy

An Introduction

Andrew Bowie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134960712
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Andrew Bowie's book is the first introduction in English to present F. W. J. Schelling as a major European philosopher in his own right. Schelling and Modern European Philosophy, surveys the whole of Schelling's philosophical career, lucidly reconstructing his key arguments, particularly those against Hegel, and relating them to contemporary philosophical discussion.
For anyone interested in German romanticism and the development of Continental philosophy, this is an invaluable source book. The cogent and subtle argument of this book fills a major gap in our understanding of modern philosophy, in which Schelling emerges as a key transitional figure.

1
ABSOLUTE BEGINNINGS

FICHTE AND SPINOZISM

The importance of Kant’s ‘Copernican turn’ has generally been acknowledged in both the analytical and the European traditions of philosophy. Until recently only some areas of the European tradition have taken the critiques of Kant in German Idealism and Romanticism seriously: analytical philosophy, with very few exceptions, has tended to ignore them, assuming, usually without any argument, that they are misguided speculations of an effectively pre-Kantian nature. It is now clear that such a view is untenable, as recent works in English have suggested. Frederick Neuhouser (1990) has, for example, given a mainly analytical account of Fichte which shows that any philosophical engagement with Kant cannot ignore Fichte’s criticisms. Looking somewhat further afield, the initial thesis of Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere (Nagel 1986) is a Fichtean thesis: namely, that subjectivity cannot be understood in the same manner as the world of objects, because that which understands objects cannot have the same cognitive status as what it understands. The point is familiar from Sartre’s reflections upon subjectivity and freedom, as Manfred Frank, Neuhouser and others have pointed out, and has again become a significant issue in the analytical philosophy of mind, in relation to the issue of whether self-consciousness has a prepositional structure (on this, see Frank 1991).¹ Schelling takes up key aspects of the question of the subject in the light of Fichte’s critique of Kant, but eventually moves in a different direction from Fichte.

From the beginning Schelling tries to reconcile fundamentally divergent philosophical worlds: on the one hand he concurs with Fichte’s transcendental idealist emphasis on the primacy of the subject in the constitution of a world of objects, and on the other he is drawn to the monist, largely materialist conception of being as that which is self-caused and whose essence involves its existence, which Spinoza termed God. Schelling’s constant target is any form of dualism, yet he is fully aware that Kant has made certain monist positions impossible to defend. At the same time, Kant had established a dualism, which seemed equally indefensible, between our knowledge of things and ‘things in themselves’. Kant restricted the domain of knowledge to the laws governing phenomena as they are given to consciousness, which excluded knowledge of what was not given in intuition. It is only via our awareness of the moral law and in the experience of the sublime that we have a sense of that in us which is not constrained by our finite, law-determined nature. This awareness, however, does not have the same status as knowledge of the world of nature, in that it applies to ourselves as noumena, not as causally bound phenomena. The Kantian split between the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds is the primary target of German Idealism.

Because of his monism Spinoza is an obvious point of reference from the past. Seen in the light of Kant’s philosophy, however, Spinoza’s notion of God involves an indefensible claim to knowledge of the infinite from a finite position, as do all attempts to prove the existence of God or to describe His nature. However, despite Fichte’s conviction that he is completing Kant’s project, he and Spinoza do share a reliance on the causa sui in a manner Kant would not accept. In Fichte’s case the ‘I’ can have no prior determining ground because if it did its freedom to step back from itself and reflect upon itself in philosophy would become incomprehensible. In Spinoza’s case ‘substance’ must be its own ground, as otherwise the unity of the substance would be lost and there would have to be more than one substance, which would lead back to all the problems of Cartesian dualism. Fichte’s importance for Schelling lies in his suggestion of how, within the subject, there is an ‘infinite’ aspect which philosophy can show more emphatically than Kant thought possible. Schelling adopts from Spinoza the refusal to consider the ground of thought and the ground of material existence as ultimately separable.

The problem is that the positions seem thoroughly incompatible. Fichte’s notion of undetermined freedom derives from the spontaneity of the I, which he sees as absolute, in the sense that it cannot depend on anything else to be what it is; Spinoza is a determinist, in that everything follows of necessity from the absolute nature of that which is causa sui. Schelling is faced with trying to get beyond one conception, which sustains the absolute status of the subject, without which the world’s intelligibility and the possibility of moral autonomy seem incomprehensible, and another, which seems to provide much of the conceptual apparatus necessary for articulating the intelligibility of the finite world, but which does so at the price of turning that world into the mere mechanical articulation of itself by an infinite substance. In this view of Spinoza the answer to the question why that world should be revealed to itself in our consciousness is left in the dark. Is this tension, though, just a piece of metaphysical wrangling that merely repeats the basic error of metaphysics in looking for an absolute foundation, on either the subject or the object side of philosophy, that would guarantee the rationality of the world?² One can acknowledge that metaphysical debates of this kind are no longer straightforwardly on the agenda of contemporary philosophy. However, it may well be that what is at issue reappears later in a different form: the conception of a pure break between metaphysical and postmetaphysical thinking creates the risk of blindness to resources from the ‘metaphysical’ past. We saw how Habermas suggested that we are still in the situation of the Young Hegelians. The fact is that we can go back a stage further, as I shall try to show-in the course of the next section.

JACOBI, FICHTE AND THE PANTHEISM CONTROVERSY

Schelling’s fears about Spinoza were shared by many philosophers at the end of the eighteenth century, as Frederick Beiser has shown in his erudite philosophical thriller The Fate of Reason (Beiser 1987). The vital point in the ‘Pantheism controversy’, which began in 1783 and exercised many of the great minds of a remarkable intellectual era, is that Spinoza is perceived as the ‘prophet of modern science’ (ibid. p. 83). This is most graphically expressed in the conviction that Spinozism leads to what F.H. Jacobi prophetically termed ‘nihilism’. ‘Nihilism’, Jacobi maintains, results from thinking based solely on the principle of sufficient reason; he thinks nihilism is also the result of Kant’s separation of knowledge based on the judgements of the understanding from things in themselves. Spinozism is seen as reducing our understanding of what we are to what science can tell us on the basis of causal laws. The road is therefore open to what is now familiar to us from the worst aspects of scientism and materialist reductionism, and certain aspects, as we shall see, of structuralism. One of the aims of Kant’s philosophy was, of course, to find a way of taking on board natural determinism as the basis of modern science whilst sustaining the autonomy of rational beings. Kant achieves this by separating the realms of legislation of the laws of nature and the moral law, but he thereby splits the world in half. The question is how to avoid this separation.

Fichte’s strategy was to suggest that these realms had a common source, which Kant himself had necessarily invoked but had not made as central as it must be if his arguments are to work. In Kant the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’ is the necessary condition of theoretical knowledge: The I think must be able to accompany all my representations’, as ‘otherwise I would have a self which is as differently multi-coloured as I have ideas of which I am conscious’ (Kant 1968 B p. 132). Kant sees this condition as a ‘fact’, but a fact which cannot appear in empirical consciousness because it is the condition of our ability to synthesise intuitions, and thus of the very intelligibility of empirical consciousness. Fichte seizes upon this condition, which Kant leaves largely unexplicated. For Fichte it is ‘the ground of explanation of all facts of empirical consciousness that before all positing in the I the I must itself previously be posited’ (Fichte 1971 p. 95). Instead of this being a ‘fact’ (Tatsache), it is to be conceived of as an action (Tathandlung), literally a ‘deed–action’, which combines both practical and theoretical reason, the latter depending on the former. We cannot have theoretical access to this action because it, as the act which is the condition of possibility of objectivity, cannot itself be an object. Access to the I can only be by the I itself, in the act of reflection upon itself. What allows this access is ‘that through which I know something because I do it’ (ibid. p. 463), which Fichte terms ‘intellectual intuition’. Neuhouser says of ‘intellectual intuition’:

such awareness is nondiscursive in nature. This implies that the subject’s immediate positing of its representations as its own is not to be understood as involving a synthesis of diverse, otherwise unconnected units which are given independently of the activity that brings them together. Self-positing is not to be thought of as a composite of two distinguishable elements, concept and intuition, but as a simple unitary awareness.

(Neuhouser 1990 p. 84)

The I is therefore the condition of there being representations. Kant had himself already hinted at such a conception in his initial version of the Critique of Pure Reason, in which the imagination had played a hybrid role, by both producing and receiving intuitions.

There is in Fichte’s view, then, pace Davidson and Rorty, no division of scheme and content, because both are simply aspects of the primary spontaneity of the I. If there were such a division, I would have no way of being able to account for how the content of my experience is my experience, because the relationship of scheme and content always already separates concept and intuition, leaving the insoluble problem of reuniting them. This thoroughgoing Idealism is a result of Fichte’s opposition to ‘dogmatism’: Spinozism as he (and others, like Jacobi) understood it. As Neuhouser puts it, Spinozism

takes the thing in itself – or ‘substance’ – as its point of departure and from there attempts to give an account of all of reality, including subjectivity. Such a system, on Fichte’s view, is obligated to understand all of the features of consciousness as effects of the action of external things upon the subject.

(ibid. pp. 55–6)

For Fichte the difficulty in all this lies in explaining our encounter with an external world of brute sensation and resistance. If the I is unlimited, why should it feel limited by the world? Fichte’s answer is that this limitation is the reflection back into the subject of its own unlimited activity by what he terms the Anstoss (usually translated as the ‘check’), which takes the place of Kant’s ‘thing in itself’. This makes sense in as much as a feeling of compulsion has as its prior condition that which can feel compelled, which must therefore be aware of its freedom. The I thus depends upon a not-I to reflect its activity back into itself. This dependence, though, contradicts the essence of the I, its spontaneity and independence of external causality. The ultimate goal of the ‘striving’ of the I is, then, to overcome this resistance. Our awareness of the striving derives for Fichte from our sense of Kant’s moral law, which demands that the object world be brought into conformity with practical reason. The unity of subject and object would be a result of the completion of the process, which in these terms depends on the I. Importantly, Fichte has to argue in terms that require a relative I and not-I within an Absolute which is still conceived of as I. None of this, of course, explains why Fichte’s I should split itself in this way to begin with.

Schelling later becomes prophetically aware of the dangers that ensue from accepting Fichte’s version of overcoming the Kantian divisions.³ He also realises, however, that one cannot so easily dismiss certain aspects of what Fichte proposes, without falling prey to the problems inherent in Spinozism. Two texts of 1795 are informative in this respect. The very title of On the I as Principle of Philosophy, or On the Absolute (das Unbedingte) in Human Knowledge has a Fichtean ring; Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism is more circumspect. On the I as Principle of Philosophy begins with the demand for an absolute ground: The last ground of all reality is namely a something which is only thinkable via itself, i.e. thinkable via its being, which is only thought insofar as it is, in short, in which the principle of being and of thinking coincide’ (I/1 p. 163). This formulation could be either Spinozist or Fichtean. Schelling goes on to insist against Spinoza, though, that the ground cannot be an object, for, in line with Kant, an object can only be such for a prior subject. At the same time, however, at this level, the subject is only determinable by the fact of its not being the object.

Schelling is therefore led to the demand for an ‘Absolute’ that would encompass the relationship of the two. By using the word unbedingt (understood as ‘unthinged’, rather than just ‘absolute’), he is able to play on the etymology, which suggests ‘nothing (nichts) can be posited by itself as a thing, i.e. an absolute thing (unbedingtes Ding) is a contradiction’ (ibid. p. 166). The consequence is a Fichtean move, which demands an absolute I, as that which could never finally become an object. As is the case for Fichte, there can be no objective proof of this I, because this would mean the I was conditioned (bedingt) by our objective knowledge of it, and thus not absolute. Schelling exclaims, echoing the Fichtean inversion of Descartes: ‘I am! My I contains a being which precedes all thinking and representing. It is by being thought and it is thought because it is; the reason for this is that it only is and is only thought to the extent to which it thinks itself’ (ibid. p. 167). The overall argument here depends, however, on the Spinozist thought, which recurs in various ways in all of German Idealism, that the determination of something is the determination of what it is not. Each object is part of a chain of ob-jects (Gegen-stände), which ‘stand against’ each other. Objects, then, are not absolutely real because they only become themselves by not being other objects. In this sense objects are ‘negative’ in a specific sense that will become vital later: both Schelling and Hegel understand that which depends on its relation to an other for it to be itself as ‘negative’. German Idealism demands an account of what makes these interrelated moments intelligible as objects, which cannot therefore itself be an object. They therefore term it the ‘Absolute’, because it cannot be understood in terms of its relation to something else. The ‘Absolute’, which will concern us constantly from now on, should not, then, be thought of in mystical terms: it is initially just the result of the realisation of the relative status of anything that can be explained causally. A vital factor in the development of this notion of the Absolute was Jacobi’s understanding of Spinozism.

Jacobi’s argument is that a complete system of reason that purports to explain the world, of the kind present in the notion of determination by negation in the Ethics, has a fatal lack. Birgit Sandkaulen-Bock explains, citing Jacobi’s On the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn of 1789:

Reason is a mechanism ‘. . . all philosophical cognition, as it is effected in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason, i.e. by mediation can therefore ‘necessarily always only be a mediated cognition’. If rational comprehension consists in nothing other than the logical ‘mediation’ of ground and consequence in the ‘dissection, linking, judging, concluding and grasping again’ then it obviously always only moves in a connection which it has constructed itself.

(Sandkaulen-Bock 1990 p. 15)

Explaining the world is based on finding its ‘condition’ (Bedingung). Finding the condition of something is the basis of all explanation, but ‘to the extent to which something can only be considered to be grasped whose condition is discovered, it is itself conditioned’ (i...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. ABSOLUTE BEGINNINGS
• 2. THE HERMENEUTICS OF NATURE
• 3. THE HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE TRUTH OF ART
• 4. IDENTITY PHILOSOPHY
• 5. FREEDOM, ONTOLOGY AND LANGUAGE
• 6. SCHELLING OR HEGEL?
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• A LIST OF TRANSLATIONS OF SCHELLING’S WORKS