Chapter 4
We will be interested in Schelling only insofar as he contributes (or at least seems to contribute) to the German idealist constructivist approach to cognition. Schelling’s labile position changed very rapidly. The transition from Fichte to Schelling reflects the latter’s early effort—initially successful but later unsuccessful—to cast himself as a mere Fichtean disciple, then his later emancipation from Fichte, including his qualified return behind Fichte toward Kant through the formulation of his own version of philosophy of nature. A series of new themes emerge in this period, including constructivism (or construction), Schelling’s version of the philosophy of identity, and his turn to the philosophy of art.
German idealist constructivism is often understood as a philosophy of identity. This identity takes two main forms: a complex identity of identity and difference, which is formulated in related ways by Kant, Fichte and Hegel, as noted above; and a simple identity formulated by Schelling, who, in following Spinoza, falls outside German idealism as understood here. Many—perhaps even most—observers agree that the later Schelling moves beyond German idealism. Yet if the latter movement is defined by the slogan of the identity of identity and difference, then perhaps Schelling was never a German idealist other than in name.
According to Harold Bloom, great poets misread each other in the course of working out their own poetry.1 This could be true of philosophers as well. Schelling’s beginning point in philosophy lies in his effort to develop Fichte’s difficult position. Schelling, who at least early on thought of himself as a faithful Fichtean, seems to have misunderstood Fichte as well as German idealism in general. It is arguable that the view he developed as a supplement to Fichte’s is neither compatible with the latter’s position nor with “German idealism.” Now, this term—about which there has never been agreement—is used in many, often incompatible ways. Yet if, as seems plausible, there is an overall unity running throughout Schelling’s protean position, and if this concerns “identity” but not “identity in difference,” then it is at least arguable he was never a German idealist, or at least never a German idealist in this specific sense.
Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature, Philosophy of Art, and Philosophy of Identity
Schelling, who is an unusually protean thinker, made contributions in a wide variety of fields. They include at a minimum philosophy of nature, philosophy of art, and philosophy of identity, as well as later the philosophy of mythology. Fichte, who is mainly a philosophical autodidact, is not well read in the history of philosophy, in which Schelling is unusually well versed. Schelling plays different roles in this period: as Fichte’s self-appointed disciple; as Hegel’s younger roommate in the Tübinger Stift and later sometime patron in Jena; as the inventor of a significant post-Kantian philosophy of nature; as supposedly the first to formulate a philosophical theory of aesthetics; and so on. During and after his Fichtean period he simultaneously favors philosophy of nature while also formulating theories of art and history.
Schelling—who was always an original thinker—in his early writings, in line with then current practice, adopted the pose of the disciple in masking his own originality. Yet even in these writings, when he was consciously striving to be a so-called authentic Fichtean, he was already on the way to formulating his own position. Fichte’s position differs from Kant’s—which, despite Fichte’s insistence, he never simply restates in his own language. A similar point is correct about Schelling. Even at its inception, Schelling’s view is always different from Fichte’s, above all through the philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie), which lacks even a partial equivalent in Fichte’s thought.
In part, because of the many different themes Schelling embraces, he is difficult to categorize. His writings are sometimes divided into different periods, including, for instance: transcendental philosophy and the philosophy of nature, then later the system of identity, followed by the system of freedom, and finally positive philosophy. The first and second phases are closely related to the constructivist strand of German idealism. Yet many of Schelling’s early and especially later concerns diverge from this model. Thus it is sometimes noted that his later interests in empiricism and materialism lie outside German idealism, however understood.2
Schelling’s most intensive interaction with German idealism occurs during the period leading up to and culminating in the System of Transcendental Idealism. The resulting subsequent break with Fichte led him toward other themes, including freedom, mysticism, and philosophy of religion.
There is an analogy between the emergence of Fichte’s and then Schelling’s positions. Fichte’s position arises in the midst of the ongoing effort to carry forward and complete the critical philosophy. Schelling’s emerges in the effort to carry forward and complete Fichte’s transcendental philosophy. Schelling, who was born in 1775, began to publish while still a teenager in 1793. He quickly turned to Fichte in “On the Possibility of the Form of Philosophy in General” (“Über die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie überhaupt,” 1794), which was followed in the next year by “On the Self as Principle of Philosophy, or on the Unrestricted in Human Knowledge” (“Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie, oder über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen,” 1795). Other contributions quickly followed.
In the meantime, Schelling became interested in natural science, which nearly immediately led to his effort to formulate a philosophy of nature. Schelling left the Protestant seminary in Tübingen in 1795 and moved to Leipzig in 1796, where he briefly studied medicine, physics, and mathematics. As a result of his scientific studies, Schelling quickly developed a general theory of nature in moving away from his earlier Fichtean perspective while simultaneously striving to remain within a broadly Fichtean approach.
Though Schelling considered himself to be Fichte’s disciple until the publication of the System of Transcendental Idealism in 1800, there is much confusion about this claim. The lyric poet Heinrich Heine, a former Hegel student and an interested observer of the German philosophical scene, remarks that the emergence of philosophy of nature seemed to observers to suggest a replacement for idealism.3 In that case, it would lie outside this tendency. Fichte, who was clearly a partisan observer, suggested that, on the contrary, Schelling did not propose substantive changes to his (Fichte’s) position but merely remodeled the terminology.4
Schelling on Construction and Constructivism
Schelling’s theory of construction is closely related to his theories of art and philosophy of nature. Since there is little attention paid to German idealist constructivism, it is not surprising that Schelling’s role in the post-Kantian development of cognitive constructivism is not well understood. For instance, Grant writes: “Schelling’s post-Kantian confrontation with nature itself begins with the overthrow of the Copernican revolution.”5 Yet if, as seems plausible, Schelling’s philosophy of nature commits him to the view that what one experiences is in a sense constructed by the subject, this understanding seems doubtful. In reacting to Kant, Fichte, and others, Schelling does not abandon but rather transforms the constructivism arising in different ways in the critical philosophy and its Fichtean restatement.
According to Schelling, the theme of philosophical construction will be one of the most important future scientific philosophical themes. His concept of constructivism, like his overall position, changes very rapidly. The term “constructivism” appears in his writings as early as his “Allgemeine Übersicht der neuesten philosophischen Literatur” (1797–1798), at about the same time as he turns to philosophy of nature. Schelling’s view of constructivism initially appeared serially in the Philosophisches Journal. Since the journal was edited by Fichte and Niethammer, it not surprisingly reflected a “Fichtean” perspective.6 At this point, before Schelling has freed himself from his self-assigned role as Fichte’s disciple, he accepts the widespread Kantian view, influentially articulated several years later in Hegel’s Differenzschrift, that one cannot go beyond either Kant’s or Fichte’s conceptions of philosophy. Further like Schelling, Hegel also strives to gain a general perspective on recent philosophical literature.
In Schelling’s slightly earlier effort to gain a general perspective on the recent debate, “construction” refers inter alia in three ways to: (1) the original activity of the subject itself; (2) the interaction of its two original “tendencies,” an interaction that results in what the mind constructs, which in turn leads to the view that everything within consciousness is constructed by the mind (a view most clearly anticipated by Fichte); and (3) in a clear reference to the critical philosophy, to the table of categories of the understanding, which are expressions of “the primordial form in which the mind proceeds in all its constructions.”7
Schelling further appeals to construction in his speculative account of the construction of matter in his philosophy of nature. In his General Deduction of the Dynamic Process (1800), which appeared in the Zeitschrift für speculative Physik shortly before the System of Transcendental Idealism was published, Schelling describes the sole task of natural science as the “construction of matter.” This task can be accomplished only generally, not for each discrete appearance in nature. Since organic nature is a higher level or potency of the inorganic, the construction of matter is both the most basic as well as the most general task of a philosophy of nature.8 Schelling, who here sounds like a pre-Socratic cosmologist, makes the familiar ancient Greek heuristic assumption that nature can be understood through a primordial opposition of forces. This approach was certainly striking at the time of early Greek thought, and may still have appeared pertinent during the long period in which Aristotelianism held sway, but must already have seemed dated after the rise of modern science, hence well before Schelling.
In earlier writings, Schelling used the terms “attraction” and “repulsion” to refer to these forces, which he now calls “expansive” or “retarding” and “attractive.” Yet the dualistic approach remains basically unchanged. The “expansive” force designates a pure production, which can never appear. The “retarding” or “attractive” force is the source of the real production that derives from the absolute opposition of these forces. As in Ideas, so here the different levels of inorganic nature (e.g., magnetism, electricity, and chemical interaction) are understood as aspects of the effort to reduce opposite factors to identity, hence to reinstate an original identity in place of the dualism that underlies nature as it appears.9 In other words, inorganic nature turns out to be a combination of three basic processes. Similarly, organic nature is explained through three further elementary constituents: sensibility, irritability, and reproduction. In the System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling later identifies phases in the history of self-consciousness. In this context, philosophy of nature functions in two ways: for the discovery of the natural science, and as a “physicalistic explanation of idealism,”10 the latter leading nearly immediately to the break with Fichte.
Schelling’s interest in constructivism survived his break with Fichte. He begins a text from 1803, two years after his break with Fichte, in stating that his aim is to surpass the narrow philosophical limits set by Kant and Fichte in directly addressing the method of construction.11 At this point, Schelling believes that philosophy of nature and philosophy are co-equal approaches to the absolute, which is manifest in philosophy.12 Philosophy of nature and constructivism are related in that the dualism between philosophy of nature and philosophy points to a single overall theory of what Schelling, in echoing Fichtean terminology, calls the absolute.
Philosophy of Nature and Transcendental Philosophy
The concept of identity is widespread in Schelling’s thought. It occurs, for instance, in the philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie), the theory of the absolute, the philosophy of art, and again in the so-called Wurzburg system (1804). Kantian explanation, which is dualist, relies on both causality as well as the subject’s activity. Fichte substitutes a monistic explanation solely through the subject’s activity. In reacting against him, Schelling restores a dualistic approach through the distinction between transcendental philosophy, which he takes over from Fichte, and philosophy of nature, which is probably his most distinctive philosophical contribution. In supplementing transcendental philosophy with philosophy of nature, Schelling transforms Fichte’s position in making a qualified, limited return to a form of Kantianism.
Schelling’s early work features two disparate interests, pulling him in opposing directions, whose incompatibility he only later realizes: his initial concern to remain within the scope of Fichte’s transcendental philosophy, and his effort, arising slightly later, to work out a philosophy of nature. Philosophy of nature, a dominant theme in Schelling’s early writings, is clearly inconsistent with Fichte’s transcendental philosophy. At the same time as he was most active with respect to philosophy of nature, Schelling was also still somewhat comically insisting that he was Fichte’s legitimate disciple. This is comical since as everyone but Schelling—specifically including Fichte—realized, the two projects are incompatible. Fichte, who was troubled by Schelling’s interest in philosophy of nature, seems never to have worked through Schelling’s philosophy of nature with care. As late as a letter from Fichte to Schelling dated October 3, 1800, we find him saying that he has still not thoroughly studied Schelling’s philosophy of nature. Slightly later, in a letter from Fichte to Schelling dated November 15, 1800, he reports his disagreement with Schelling’s distinction between transcendental philosophy and philosophy of nature. In his response on November 19, 1800, Schelling, not to be deterred, contends that philosophy is the material proof of idealism. He further stresses a basic difference between philosophy of nature and the Wissenschaftslehre. According to Schelling, both belong to the system of philosophy, in which they differ as the theoretical and practical parts of philosophy.
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant’s claim that objects must conform to our intuition suggests we cannot know nature as it is, or again, as it is in itself. In renewing the philosophy of nature, Schelling reaches back behind Fichte to Kant in taking natural scientific investigation a step further. Schelling’s philosophy of nature takes shape as an attempt literally to “construct” (or to “deduce”) nature not on quasi-Fichtean a posteriori but rather on quasi-Kantian a priori grounds, where “nature” is understood as what is in fact presupposed in the empirical investigations of the natural sciences as a so-called “objective system of reason.”
Schelling’s philosophy of nature is based on his vision of the unity of spirit and nature. This vision derives from different sources, including Kant’s a priori theory of nature, Herder’s dynamic view of nature, Schelling’s interest in Spinoza, and so on. Schelling’s attempt to think nature as a whole can be understood an effort to overcome Kant’s apparent inability to grasp the link between nature and freedom. His philosophy of nature is related to so-called romantic medicine (romantische Medizin), as distinguished from scientific medicine, which, through his influence, was popular around 1800.
The general problem is very old. A precursor of philosophy of nature is developed by the pre-Socratic Ionian cosmologists, then later by Plato in the Timaeus, a dialogue Schelling studied intensively. The form of philosophy of nature, which arises in reaction to Kant, is a critique of—as well as an alternative to—mechanistic, reductionist, or materialist accounts of nature. This approach, which goes all the way back to ancient Greek materialism, reaches a new peak in Kant. Philosophy of nature is a constant concern throughout Schelling’s corpus. He seeks to rehabilitate nature objectively in making a transition, in Hegelian language, from subjective idealism to objective idealism.
Schelling developed his approach to the philosophy of nature in a series of early essays. He began to publish on philosophy of nature in 1797; at the same time as he strove (finally unsuccessfully) to maintain his claim to be a Fichtean before breaking with Fichte, he rapidly brought out three important works in this field (and a series of more minor works): Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797), On the World Soul (1798), and First Outline of a System of Philosophy of Nature (1799). At this point, his approach to philosophy of nature is organized around the principles of polarity and dualism. In On the World Soul, Schelling writes: “It is the first principle of a philosophical doctrine of nature to go in search of polarity and dualism throughout all nature.”13 Schelling later claims that the two forces of “universal attraction and repulsion” suffice to identify “conditions for the possibility of all objective knowledge.”14 This approach reaches its peak almost immediately prior to the System of Transcendental Idealism, consummating the break with Fichte and quickly leading to Schelling’s post-Fichtean identity philosophy. Schelling’s interest in philosophy of nature, which survived this break, later continues in “On the Relationship of the Fine Arts to Nature” (1807), as well as in “Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom” (1809). In the latter work, he curiously but incorrectly says that up until that point, everything he had done centered on philosophy of nature (VIII, 333; 1986, p. 3).15 This same interest continues even later—for instance, in the Introduction to Philosophy (1830)—as well as in his last unpublished writings.
What is Schelling’s philosophy of nature?16 He has at least three things in mind. First, he undertakes a qualified return to Kant in carrying philosophy of nature—suitably modified—beyond the place it reached in the critical philosophy. Second, as he only later realized, in working out a philosophy of nature he differentiates his position from Fichte’s in providing an empirical dimension to transcendental philosophy. And third, starting in 1799, he reacts against Eschenmayer’s criticism of the supposed independence of the philosophy of nature.
In his Presentation of My System of Philosophy (1801), Schelling develops the view that nature is not a product of reason; reason is not independent of, but rather arises within, nature. This makes the transition from what Hegel later calls subjective idealism to objective idealism. In keeping with his belief that the supposed sciences of transcendental philosophy and philosophy of nature are “complementary,” Schelling claims the standpoint of philosophy is all inclusive, absolute reason, which yields knowledge of what he describes as “things as they are in themselves, i.e., as they are in reason.”17 In other words, everything is in reason and there is nothing outside reason.
Schelling, who understands philosophy from the standpoint of the absolute, contends that “Reason is simply one and self-identical.”18 He describes reason, following Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, as the law of identity (A = A). This suggests the further point: “The sole unconditioned cognition is that of absolute identity”19 Schelling has in mind the Fichtean claim that the proposition A = A is the sole absolutely true proposition. This leads him to the very Fichtean statement that, as he writes, “Absolute identity simply IS and is as certain as the proposition A = A is.”20 In the remainder of the text, Schelling expands his view of absolute identity, which he describes in various ways. He emphasizes, for instance, the unity of transcendental philosophy and philosophy of nature in vindicating his quasi-Spinozistic dualism against Fichte’s transcendental philosophy. And he restates Kant’s Copernican claim for the identity of subject and object as a necessary condition of cognition.
Schelling’s deep interest in the history of philosophy provides a useful clue to understanding his philosophy of nature, which is obviously multiply determined. Schelling’s speculative philosophy of nature is an effort to revive Plato’s speculative physics in the Timaeus. It is known that the very young Schelling was interested in this dialogue.21 Schelling’s philosophy of nature is also a qualified return, behind German idealism to empiricism as the true parallel to transcendental philosophy. Empiricism is linked to metaphysical realism through the claim that by grasping the empirical, one grasps what is. German idealism beginning in Kant rejects empiricism in favor of a Copernican reversal as well as a categorial approach to experience. Schelling’s further philosophy of nature revives empiricism in reversing the Kantian Copernican reversal, hence in returning to the traditional concern with metaphysical realism.
Schelling’s SYSTEM OF TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM
Kant’s response to Hume’s naturalist attack on causality reinstates causality as a transcendental condition of knowledge. Kant and then Fichte each work out approaches to cognition based on the constructivist identity in difference that Kant introduces in the Copernican turn. Schelling’s philosophy of nature returns behind Fichte and Kant to a Spinozistic parallel between thought and being founded in a transcendental absolute.
Schelling, who is deeply steeped in the history of philosophy, is influenced by Plato, Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, Böhme, Spinoza, and many others. In System, he returns behind Fichte and Kant to Spinoza. After a period in which his thought was effectively proscribed because of the so-called Pantheismusstreit, beginning in the mid-1780s Spinoza came back into favor. Other contemporaries interested in Spinoza include F. Schlegel, Hegel, Hölderlin, and Goethe. Schelling’s concern with Spinoza appears very early—prior to his turn to philosophy of nature, in which it arguably plays a role. Schelling claims to be a Spinozist as early as the letter to Hegel dated February 4, 1795. In the letter, Schelling uses Fichtean terminology in drawing attention to the critical philosophy: according to Schelling, who employs a Fichtean term incompatible with Kant, the critical philosophy begins from an absolute self; and dogmatic philosophy, which Kant rejects, starts from an absolute not-self, as in Spinoza.22 At stake is the Fichtean alternative of whether (as Fichte thinks, and Schelling here accepts) philosophy worthy of the name must be idealism and start with the subject; or whether, on the contrary, it begins with object in taking shape as realism, which Fichte equates with dogmatism. Schelling, who does not wish to choose, subscribes simultaneously to both alternatives by favoring both idealism and dogmatism, or Fichte’s transcendental idealism and philosophy of nature.
In his reaction to Descartes, Spinoza, a pantheist, identifies God with nature in considering thought and extension (or being) as two modes of substance. He famously insists on the parallel between ideas and things, or mind and nature.23 It is not an exaggeration to say that in this way, Spinoza anticipates a central concern of German idealism, or the problem of the relation of thought and being leading to cognitive constructivism. Schelling adopts the dualistic Spinozistic approach in suggesting that neither transcendental philosophy (that is, Fichte’s position) nor philosophy of nature—through which the young Schelling supplements Fichte’s transcendental philosophy—is adequate by itself. Since each science is incomplete and presupposes the other (STI, p. 34), a successful theory must combine both. Schelling regards his task as providing a theoretical proof of the complementary nature of these two opposing sciences (STI, p. 18).
In System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling further differs with Fichte in three important ways. One is the concept of the absolute, or absolute identity, as the harmony between the subjective and the objective (see (STI, p. 4). A second is the emphasis on history, which is not important in Fichte’s early Science of Knowledge.24 This theme only becomes a significant factor Fichte’s position later and in an inadequate, stunted form.25 Finally there is a philosophy of art wholly lacking in Fichte, but which occupies the final part of Schelling’s System.
Subjectivity is a central theme present throughout the entire modern tradition, including German idealism. It has already been pointed out that Kant’s critical philosophy features an unresolved dualism between an abstract subject and philosophical anthropology, which he is never able to bring together in a single overall synthesis. Fichte uses “self” (das Ich) to refer to finite human being understood practically (or within the social context) and “absolute self” (das absolute Ich) to refer to the human subject understood theoretically (or in isolation from the prevailing social context). In working out his conception of identity from a Spinozistic perspective, Schelling isolates the absolute from finite human being, or the Fichtean self. Schelling’s concept of the absolute transforms Fichte’s view of ordinary human being into an abstract principle intended to function as the ultimate source of subjectivity, objectivity, and their relation.
Kant employs “absolute” to designate what is not merely comparative or conditionally valid (CPR, B 362, p. 401). In this way, he calls attention to the subject as wholly undetermined, hence capable of unrestricted self-determination. Fichte introduces a distinction between finite human being and the absolute (or undetermined) self-determining subject in directing attention to the absolute, or absolute self. The latter term points to a conception of the object as constructed by and knowable by the subject. In other words, in reacting to Fichte’s solution to the problem of knowledge, Schelling separates the absolute, understood as an autonomous subject, from subjectivity and objectivity.
Kant’s stress on system as the unity of cognition under a single idea suggests the need for post-Kantian German idealists to organize their theories around a single basic explanatory principle. Fichte’s absolute subject takes the place of Reinhold’s principle of consciousness as the ultimate explanatory principle, for which Schelling in turn substitutes his own view of the absolute. Spinoza makes subjectivity and objectivity depend on substance. Schelling’s concept of the absolute modifies the Fichtean concept of the absolute in Spinozistic fashion. In “The Aenesidemus Review,” from his theoretical perspective, Fichte posits the absolute subject as wholly undetermined as well as self-determining. The absolute subject explains the relation of the internal and the external, the subject and its surroundings.
Schelling’s absolute (or autonomous) subject functions as the mediating link between subject and object, subjectivity and objectivity. He seems to be suggesting, against Fichte, there is at least in principle knowledge of the absolute—or, if it is God, knowledge of God. Other contemporary thinkers (such as Novalis) claim, on the contrary, the impossibility of knowing an absolute.26
In rethinking the absolute as neither subjective nor objective, Schelling adds historical and artistic dimensions. The concept of the absolute continually evolves in his text. He initially introduces it during his Fichtean phase as a purely speculative concept in borrowing heavily from Spinoza. In the Statement of My System, where he displays his system as his own following the break with Fichte, Schelling writes:
The absolute is that which is in itself neither thought nor being, but which, for that very reason, is absolute. Since reason is challenged to think the absolute neither as thought nor as being, but to think it nonetheless, a contradiction arises for reflection, since it conceives the absolute either as a case of being or a case of thinking. But intellectual intuition enters even into this contradiction and produces the absolute. In this breakthrough lies the luminous point where the absolute is positively intuited.27
At this point, Schelling thinks the absolute can be intellectually intuited. He further suggests in his second theorem that “outside reason is nothing, and in it is everything.” This suggestion points to Spinoza’s insight: “Whatever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be or be conceived.”28 In the Fernere Darstellungen, Schelling says: “The essence of the absolute in and for itself says nothing to us, it fills us with images of an infinite enclosure, of an impenetrable stillness and concealment,” until the absolute’s form asserts itself in its own shape, “the day in which we comprehend that [essential] night and the wonders hidden in it, the light in which we clearly discern the absolute.”29
In the introduction to the System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling situates his task with respect to Fichte’s position. Here he describes transcendental idealism as a system of all knowledge (STI, p. 1). Fichte, who typically poses as a seamless Kantian, leaves Kant’s transcendental philosophy behind in rejecting Kant’s abstract analysis of the general conditions of knowledge in favor of what, in the Wissenschaftslehre (1794), he describes as “a pragmatic history of the human mind” (SK, pp. 198–99). Schelling similarly describes philosophy as “a progressive history of self-consciousness” (STI, p. 2). Unlike Fichte but like Spinoza, he presents the different stages as a sequence in depicting the supposed parallelism between nature and intelligence (STI, p. 2). At this point, Schelling still thinks of himself as a Fichtean, and of his position as no more than a further development of transcendental idealism. Yet he has already left Fichte behind in a qualified return to Kant and the pre-Kantian Spinoza. According to Schelling, the sciences of nature and intelligence—the philosophy of nature and the transcendental philosophy—are equally important. Neither is prior to the other and neither is adequate by itself (STI, pp. 2–3). This statement points to, but does not mention, the absolute as the third factor linking subjectivity and objectivity in Schelling’s analysis.
Intuition plays a different role in Kant and in his German idealist successors. Kant famously denies intellectual intuition but allows sensory intuition. At stake is whether the cognitive subject has or even in principle could have a quasi-Platonic direct, unmediated grasp of either itself in the form of self-consciousness or of the external object. In reacting to Kant, Fichte restores intellectual intuition. According to Fichte, the subject has intellectual intuition in that it acts (SK, p. 38), hence comes to exist for itself (SK, p. 34). For Schelling, who further develops this concept, the subject intuits itself as productive (see (STI, pp. 94–95).
Schelling links his position to constructivism in contending that “all proofs for the existence of external things must be derived from the primordial mechanism of intuition itself, that is, by a genuine construction of objects” (STI, p. 3). Hence for Schelling intuition turns out to be constructive or constituting. Schelling further goes beyond history in linking knowledge and history. Fichte, who discusses history, to the best of my knowledge never directly links knowledge and history. Rather, in The Characteristics of the Present Age (Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters (1806), he proposes a stepwise development of human history that, in reacting to Schelling, builds on the latter’s division of human history into destiny, nature, and Providence.
Schelling and the Philosophy of Art
In System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling further works out theories of art and history. His view of history is typically complex. According to Schelling, the truths of practical philosophy emerge objectively in history in the form of a harmony between subjectivity and objectivity (STI, p. 4). Yet from the perspective of transcendental idealism as expounded in the Wissenschaftslehre, the proof that all knowledge must be derived from the self or subject leaves unexplained the objective world, including history (STI, p. 34).
In the foreword, Schelling immediately announces his intention to present the solution to all possible problems in a single system. Both transcendental philosophy and philosophy of nature are necessary, but neither is sufficient. Through the proposed deduction of history, he claims to prove the harmony between the subjective and the objective through an absolute identity. This is, he tells us, the solution to the problem of the coexistence of mechanism and purpose, or the unsolved problem running throughout Kant’s third Critique. Schelling’s demonstration peaks in what he now calls the philosophy of art.
Schelling adopts a form of the familiar teleological approach to history30 in denying it can be devoid of necessity. According to Schelling, there is, for example, no history of nature since history is neither absolutely lawful nor absolutely free (STI, p. 199). Like Kant, he claims that history features an ideal realized not in the individual, but rather in the species (STI, pp. 200, 202, 207)—according to Schelling, through the progressive so-called self-disclosing of the absolute (STI, p. 211). History, which is opposed to theory, is composed of events that cannot be calculated nor foreseen since, as Schelling darkly says, “choice is . . . the goddess of history” (STI, p. 200), which progresses toward “a political world order” (STI, p. 202). What Schelling depicts in Spinozistic fashion as the preestablished harmony of the objective and the subjective, of unconscious as well as conscious historical acts, can be understood only if both are united in a “higher thing” that “can be neither subject nor object, nor both at once, but [are] only the absolute identity” (STI, p. 209; see also p. 221). According to this view, the absolute unites not only the subjective and the objective but also the entire species.
Schelling’s ontological reinterpretation of the absolute identifies an intrinsic connection between epistemology and aesthetics in reestablishing a link broken by Plato. In developing both Kant’s concept of genius as someone who creates beyond rules and Fichte’s theory of activity, Schelling suggests the work of art is a product of spontaneity. Science and art are both means of revealing the absolute. This approach quickly leads to systematic philosophical presentation of various kinds of art in Schelling’s Philosophy of Art and in Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art.
In part 6 of his System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling sketches his philosophy of art. Art unites freedom and necessity in a product common to both. The absolute is the common ground of a preestablished harmony between the conscious and the unconscious. Schelling follows Kant’s view that art is the result of genius. He describes art as a revelation that is neither objective nor subjective, and that, since it is not the result of mere talent, can neither be learned nor acquired. Artworks depict the identity of the conscious and the unconscious. The identity between the subjective and objective dimensions is given in intellectual intuition via philosophy and in artworks via aesthetics. According to Schelling, “art” serves “as the only true and eternal organ and document of philosophy, which ever and again continues to speak to us of what philosophy cannot depict in external form, namely the unconscious element in acting and producing, and its original identity with the conscious” (STI, p. 231). For Plato, knowledge of reality is unavailable through art and art objects of all kinds; it is available only through philosophy. According to Schelling, in and through works of art we accede to knowledge of what cannot otherwise be known, and which cannot be known rationally, but which is known aesthetically. We can only know the absolute underlying the difference between human being and nature through art. The highest form of life is not the philosophical but rather the artistic, since “art brings the whole man, as he is, to that point, namely to a knowledge of the highest” (STI, p. 233).
Schelling’s Philosophy of Identity
It is often held that through reflection, consciousness becomes self-conscious. Thus Jacobi argues that self-consciousness presupposes an original, “irreflexive” identity.31 In his conception of the absolute, Schelling contributes to a form of identity arising out of—but different from—Kantian constructivism, in re-centering the relation between subjectivity and objectivity. Schelling evokes this form of identity in the first sketch of his philosophy of the Ages of the World (Weltalter), where, in sounding a Spinozistic theme, he typically suggests that the spiritual and the bodily are two sides of the same existence.32
This new form of identity—arising through Schelling’s effort to supplement transcendental philosophy through philosophy of nature—falls outside German idealist constructivism. In his conception of the absolute, Schelling directs attention to the identity between subjectivity and objectivity, subject and object, knower and known in displacing the central point that Fichte locates in the subject to an identity prior to either subject or object. In other words, the central point shifts back from the subject to an identity prior to either subject or object, in what appears as a qualified return behind Fichte to Kant.
Kant’s Copernican turn suggests a structured identity—more precisely, the identity between identity and difference, between subject and object (or objectivity and subjectivity). It is this Kantian identity that Fichte restates as the first absolute unconditioned principle of the Science of Knowledge, or A = A (see SK, pp. 93–102). Fichte’s analysis of knowledge presupposes an identity between thought and being. In “The First Introduction,” he claims that approaches to knowledge through either idealism or realism are equivalent since neither can refute the other. Yet he denies that idealism and realism are on the same plane, which Schelling later asserts against Fichte in turning to philosophy of nature. Schelling’s solution is to return to a form of Leibniz’s pre-established harmony. In the Herz letter and throughout the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant rejects this strategy as unintelligible. Yet Schelling revives it early in his Fichtean period in simply assuming without argument “the fact that the absolute-ideal is also the absolute-real” since in the final analysis there is no difference—none whatsoever—between the activity of the transcendental subject and the primordial activity of nature.33
This approach takes different forms in his position. One is the so-called point of indifference (Indifferenzpunkt), which expresses the absolute identity that, according to Schelling, is the condition of the differentiation into objectivity and subjectivity. Thus in his early account of philosophy of nature, he suggests “an indifference between absolute knowing and the absolute itself.”34 And he further describes nature as the visible spirit, and spirit as the invisible nature.35
This insight returns in different forms throughout Schelling’s writings. For instance, in System, written at the very end of Schelling’s Fichtean period, the absolute assumes the form of a preestablished harmony between both. In relation to history, he writes: “This deduction of history leads directly to the proof that what we have to regard as the ultimate ground of harmony between the subjective and the objective in action must first be conceived as an absolute identity” (STI, p. 4).
Schelling’s reflections on identity are still surprisingly up to date. Under the influence of Spinoza as well as modern science, Schelling refuses any causal interaction between mind and matter, which he describes as two aspects of substance. It is easy to see here an anticipation of contemporary mind-brain identity theory. According to Schelling, there is no causal link between the real and the ideal, being and thought.36 The quasi-Spinozistic result is neither idealism nor realism, but a supposed “fusion” of both under the heading “Real-Idealismus.” The point—which is important, but rarely understood in the haste to criticize idealism as anti-realist—is that, as Leibniz earlier thought and Schelling here notes, idealism is not only compatible with but also based on realism, whose understanding differs according to the idealist in question. In other words, according to Schelling, realism is the basis of idealism, which arises out of it.37 In short, rather than denying realism (as is often thought), idealism expressly features it.
Schelling’s investment in the theme of identity has an equivocal result. In adopting a conception of the absolute that, like the thing in itself, can neither be directly experienced nor known, he turns resolutely against a constructivist solution to the cognitive problem, hence resolutely against Kant. This means that the identity in question—which for Fichte is central to the Kantian project, and for Hegel later becomes the cornerstone of his theory of knowledge—is for Schelling beyond conceptual bounds, always and infinitely postponed, never given in experience, and in fact not practically possible. Rather than furthering the constructivist theme of the complex, structured identity of identity and difference, Schelling should rather be understood as someone who strongly opposes this entire approach. One way to put the point is to say that in different ways, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel are centrally concerned with the logic of the identity of identity and difference as the condition of knowledge. Yet Schelling paradoxically contributes to, but also decisively abandons, the entire problem. For this reason, it is best to regard him not as reaching the high point of German idealism, but rather as someone whose thinking—though stimulated by his interaction with the great German idealists—simply falls outside German idealism.