History of Philosophy
by
Alfred Weber§ 65. Schelling(1)
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph SCHELLING, born 1775, at Leonberg, in Würtemberg, received the master's degree from the University of Tübingen, when seventeen years old, and continued his studies at Leipsic. In 1798 he was made professor of philosophy at Jena, where he became acquainted with Fichte and renewed his friendship with his fellow-countryman Hegel. In 1803 we find him at the University of Würzburg; then he becomes the General Secretary of the Munich Academy of Plastic Arts (1806-1820). After serving as a professor in the Universities of Erlangen, Munich, and Berlin, he died (1854) in the seventy-ninth year of his age. A precocious and fruitful(2) writer, but an inconsistent thinker, Schelling passed from Fichte to Spinoza, from Spinoza to Neo-Platonism, from Neo-Platonism to J. Böhme, with whom his friend and colleague Franz Baader(3) had made him acquainted. The following works(4) belong to his Spinozistic and Neo-Platonic phase, which he calls his "negative philosophy": Ideen zu einer Philosophic der Natur(5) (1797); Von der Weltseele (1798); System des transcendentalen Idealismus(6) (1800); Bruno, oder über das natürliche und göttliche Princip der Dinge (1802); Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums (1803); Philosophic und Religion (1804). To his "positive" period, which is characterized by the influence of Böhme and a more or less pronounced tendency to orthodoxy, belong: Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809); Ueber die Gottheiten von Samothrake (1816); Vorlesungen über die Philosophic der Mythologie und Offenbarung, published by his son.
1. The non-ego, Fichte had said, is the unconscious product of the ego, or, what amounts to the same thing, the product of the unconscious ego. But, Schelling objects, the unconscious ego is not really the ego; what is unconscious is not yet ego or subject, but both subject and object, or rather, neither one nor the other. Since the ego does not exist without the non-ego, we cannot say that it, produces the non-ego, without adding, conversely: the non-ego produces the ego. There is no object without a subject, - as Berkeley had previously declared, - and in this sense Fichte truly says that the subject makes the object; but neither can there be a subject without an object. Hence the existence of the objective world is as much the condition sine qua non of the existence of the ego, as conversely. Fichte, who implicitly recognized this in his profession of pantheistic faith, regards the distinction between the empirical ego and the absolute ego as fundamental to his thought. But what right has he to speak of an absolute ego, when it is certain that the ego, or the subject, is never absolute, but limited, as it necessarily is, by an object? Hence we must abandon the attempt to make an absolute of the ego.
Is the non-ego absolute? Not at all, for it does not exist unconditionally; it is nothing without the thinking subject. Hence we must either deny the absolute or seek it beyond the ego and the non-ego, or beyond all opposition. If the absolute exists, - and how can it be otherwise! - it can merely be the synthesis of all contraries, it can only be outside of and beyond all conditions of existence,(7) since it is itself the highest and first condition, the source and end of all subjective as well as of all objective existence.
Consequently, we can neither say that the ego produces the non-ego (subjective idealism), nor that the non-ego produces the ego (sensationalism); the ego and the non-ego, thought and being, are both derived from a higher principle which is neither one nor the other, although it is the cause of both: a neutral principle, the indifference and identity of contraries.(8) This brings us to Spinoza's point of view; though different terms are used, we find ourselves face to face with the infinite substance and the parallelism of things emanating from it: thought (the ego) and extension (the non-ego).
Philosophy is the science of the absolute in its double manifestation: nature and mind. It is philosophy of nature and transcendental philosophy, or philosophy of mind. By adding the science of nature to the science of mind, Schelling fills the great gap in Fichte's system. His method does not essentially differ from that of his predecessor. Schelling, it is true, recognizes that the universe is not, strictly speaking, the creation of the ego, and, consequently, has an existence relatively distinct from the thinking subject. To think is not to produce, but to reproduce. Nature is, according to him, what it is not for Fichte: a datum or a fact. He cannot, therefore, escape the necessity of partially recognizing experience and observation; he even goes so far as to call them the source of knowledge.
But, the reader will please observe, though Schelling denies that the ego makes the non-ego, he denies, with equal emphasis, that the non-ego makes the ego, that sense-perception constitutes thought (Locke, Hume, Condillac). Thought, knowledge, science, cannot be derived from the non-ego and outer or inner perception; they have their source and principle in that which also constitutes the source and principle of the non-ego, in the absolute. Experience is but the starting-point of speculation, the point of departure in the literal sense of the term: a priori speculation continues to be the philosophical method. Speculation operates with the facts of experience, but these facts cannot contradict a priori thought; they must, therefore, conform to its laws, because the world of facts (the real order) and the world of thoughts (the ideal order) have a common source, the absolute, and cannot contradict each other. Nature is existing reason, mind is thinking reason. Thought must accustom itself to separating the notion of reason from the idea of mind; it must conceive an impersonal reason, and no longer regard this formula as a contradiction in terms. We must conceive the substance of Spinoza as impersonal reason embracing the ego and the non-ego; we must look upon things as the images of thought, and thought as the twin brother of things. There is a thoroughgoing parallelism between nature and thought, and they have a common origin: the one develops according to the same law as the other.(9)
Thought, as Fichte, inspired by Kant, had said, is invariably thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Nature, the image of thought, is (1) matter or gravity (thesis: brutal affirmation of matter); (2) form or light (antithesis : negation of matter, principle of organization and individuation, ideal principle); (3) organized matter (synthesis of matter and form). The three stages of material evolution are not separated in nature; no more so than the three original acts of thought. The whole of nature is organized even in its smallest details (Leibniz), and the so-called inorganic world, the earth itself, and the heavenly bodies, are living organisms. If nature were not alive, it could not produce life. The so-called inorganic kingdom is the vegetable kingdom in germ; the animal kingdom is the vegetable kingdom raised to a higher power. The human brain is the climax of universal organization, the last stage of organic evolution.(10) Magnetism, electricity, irritability, and sensibility are manifestations of the same force, in different degrees (correlation and equivalence of forces). Nothing is dead, nothing is stationary in nature; everything is life, movement, becoming, perpetual oscillation between two extremes, productivity (11) and product, polarity (electricity, magnetism, and intellectual life), expansion and contraction, action and reaction, struggle between two contrary and (at the same time) correlative principles,(12) the synthesis of which is the soul of the world.(13)
The philosophy of mind or transcendental philosophy(14) has for its subject-matter the evolution of psychical life, the genesis of the ego, and aims to demonstrate the parallelism of the physical and moral orders.
The stages in the evolution of mind are: sensation, outer and inner perception (by means of the a priori intuitions and the categories), and rational abstraction. Sensation, perception, and abstraction constitute the theoretical ego, the different degrees of the understanding. Through absolute abstraction, i.e., the absolute distinction which the intelligence draws between itself and what it produces, the understanding becomes will: the theoretical ego becomes the practical ego. Like magnetism and the principle of sensibility, intelligence and will are different degrees of the same thing.(15) They are merged in the notion of productivity, or creative activity. The intellect is creative without knowing it; its productivity is unconscious and necessary; will is conscious of itself; it produces with the consciousness of being the source of what it produces: hence the feeling of freedom accompanying its manifestations.
Just as life in nature is the result of two contrary forces, so the life of the mind springs from the reciprocal action of the intellect, which posits the non-ego, and of the will, which overcomes it. These are not new forces; they are the same forces which, after having been gravity and light, magnetism and electricity, irritability and sensibility, manifest themselves, in the sphere of mind, as intelligence and will. Their antagonism constitutes the life of the race: history.
History unfolds itself in three ages which run parallel with the three stages of organic evolution, corresponding to the three kingdoms. The primitive age is characterized by the predominance of the fatalistic element (thesis: matter, gravity, intelligence without will); the second, which was inaugurated by the Roman people and still continues, is the reaction of the active and voluntary element against the ancient fatum; the third, finally, which belongs to the future, will be the synthesis of these two principles. Mind and nature will gradually be blended into a harmonious and living unity. The idea will become more and more real; reality will become more and more ideal. In other words: the absolute, which is the identity of the ideal and the real, will manifest and realize itself more and more.
However, as history is developed in time, and as time has no limits, history necessarily consists in infinite progress, and the realized absolute remains an ideal which cannot be definitively and completely realized. Hence if the ego were merely theoretical and practical, it could never realize the absolute; for, reflection as well as action is necessarily subject to the law of the dualism of subject and object, of the ideal and the real. Thought, it is true, can and must rise beyond reflection and its dualism; through the intellectual intuition(16) we deny the dualism of the ideal and the real, we affirm that the ego and the non-ego spring from a higher unity in which all antitheses are blended; we rise, in a measure, beyond personal thought and ourselves; we identify ourselves with impersonal reason, which becomes objectified in the world and is personified in the ego. In a word, we partially return into the absolute whence we came.
But even this intuition cannot completely free itself from the law of opposition; consequently it is still a polarity, forming, on the one hand, a perceiving subject, on the other, an object perceived from without. The ego is on one side, God on the other; the dualism continues; the absolute is not a reality possessed or assimilated by the mind. The mind does not attain or realize the absolute, either as intelligence or action, but as the feeling of the beautiful in nature and in art.(17) Art, religion, and revelation are one and the same thing, superior even to philosophy. Philosophy conceives God; art is God. Knowledge is the ideal presence, art the real presence of the Deity.(18)
2. Schelling's "positive" philosophy, inaugurated in 1809 by the dissertation on human freedom, accentuates the mystical element contained in the foregoing sentences. Under the influence of Böhme, the philosopher becomes a theosophist; the pantheist, a monotheist. He insists on the reality of the divine idea, on the personality of God, on the cardinal importance of the Trinity. However, when we peer beneath the strange forms enveloping his romanticism, we find that there is less change in the essence of his thought than one would suppose: this essence is monism, a form of monism, however, which, under the influence of Böhme, is clearly defined as voluntarism.(19) The absolute, the absolute indifference or identity, of "negative" philosophy exists, but it now receives the name applied to it by the Saxon theosophist: primitive will (ungründlicher Wille). The foundation or first principle of the divine being, and of all being, is not thought or reason, but will striving for being and individual and personal existence, or the desire-to-be. Before being (ex-istere), every being, God included, desires to be. This desire or unconscious will precedes all intelligence and all conscious will. For God, the evolution by which he realizes himself, personifies himself, or makes himself God, is eternal, and the stages through which this evolution passes (the persons or hypostases of the Trinity) are merged into each other; but they are distinguished from each other in the human consciousness, appearing successively and forming stages in the religious development of humanity. The evil in the world has its source, not in God considered as a person, but in what precedes his personality, in that which, in God, is not God himself, i.e., in the desiderium essendi which we have just recognized as the first cause of all things, and which Schelling does not hesitate to call the divine egoism. In God, this principle is eternally merged in his love; in man, it becomes an independent principle and the source of moral evil. But however great the latter may be, it serves the purposes of the absolute, no less than the good.
We shall not here consider the philosophy of mythology and revelation, which we have set forth in another work,(20) and which interests the historian of religion rather than the historian of philosophy. Our main purpose was to outline the contents of the principal treatises written by Schelling from 1795 to 1809, and to elucidate: (1) his masterly critique of Fichte's egoism (Ichlehre) ; (2) his conception of the absolute as will, the common ground of the object and subject (Kant), of the ego and non-ego (Fichte), of thought and extension (Spinoza); (3) his philosophy of nature, which, though abandoned by positive science, produced such naturalists as Burdach, Oken, Carus, Oersted, Steffens, G. H. Schubert, and, by carrying speculation into a field from which ideological investigations had banished it, prepared the way for the fusion of metaphysics and science, which we are now endeavoring to bring about; (4) his philosophy of history, a happy prelude to Hegel's philosophy of mind.
The philosophy of Schelling, the influence of which was partially counteracted and obscured by the Hegelian school,(21) really consists of two very distinct systems, which are connected by a common principle:(22) according to the first, which forms its starting-point, thought precedes being (idealism); according to the second, (potential) being is the antecedent of thought (realism). Under the influence of the former, he speaks of intellectual intuition and conceives his Transcendentalphilosophie, while the latter exalts experience and the philosophy of nature. The one leads to Hegel and the a priori construction of the universe and of history, the other, to Schopenhauer and contemporaneous empiricism.
1. Complete works in two series, ed. by his son, 14 vols., Stuttgart and Augsburg, 1856 ff. [Engl. translations in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.] French translations: Selections, by C. Bénard; System of Transcendental Idealism, by Grimblot; Bruno, by Husson. [Cf. Rosenkranz, Schelling, Dantzic, 1843] ; Mignet, Notice historique sur la vie et les travaux de Schelling, Paris, 1858; [J. Watson, Schelling's Transcendental Idealism (Griggs's Philosophical Classics), Chicago, 1882. See also Willm, o. c., vol. Ill.; Kuno Fischer, o. c., vol. VI. ; and R. Haym, Die romantische Schule, 1870,-TR.].
2. At least during his earlier stage.
3. See § 71.
4. We mention only the most important.
5. In this work he cuts loose from Fichte.
6. The most consistent and systematic of his writings.
7. Cf. §§ 25 and 31.
8. Works, first series, vol. X., pp. 92-93.
9. Works, IV., pp. 105 ff.
10. Giordano Bruno.
11. The Wille of Schopenhauer.
12. re: Heraclitus.
13. Plato and the Stoics.
14. Works, III., pp. 327 ff.
15. Spinoza and Fichte.
16. Plato, Plotinus, St. Augustine, and the Mystics.
17. Kant.
18. Neo-Platonism.
19. The voluntaristic conception is, it is true, already found in the Abhandlungen zur Erldäuterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre, published by Schelling in the Philosophisches Journal (1796 and 1797), as well as in numerous passages in Fichte, whose philosophy is entirely impregnated with it. But he clearly and consciously affirms the principle in his treatise on liberty: Es giebt in der letzten und höchsten Instanz gar kein anderes Sein als Wollen. Wollen ist Ursein, und auf, dieses allein passen alle Prädikate desselben: Grundlosigkeit, Ewigkeit, Unabhängigkeit von der Zeit, Selbstbejahung. Die ganze Philosophie strebt nur dakin,diesen höchsten Ausdruck zu finden. (Works, first series, vol. VII. p. 350.)
20. Examen critique de la philosophie religieuse de Schelling, Strasburg, 1860.
21. Nevertheless, this influence was considerable. Even omitting the disciples properly so-called, we can detect it in most of the thinkers mentioned in § 71. Observe that the most celebrated among contemporaneous German philosophers, Eduard von Hartmann, is as much a disciple of Schelling as of Schopenhauer, and that the most original of our French metaphysicians, Charles Secrétan, is an avowed adherent of the "positive philosophy."
22. We noticed the same dualism in Plotinus.