1795-1809 - the Romantic appropriation of Kant (II) - Schelling

 
–:
the Romantic appropriation of Kant (II): Schelling
, ,   
Few people in modern philosophy rose faster in public esteem and estab-
lished a more celebrated career than F. W. J. Schelling. Born in southern
Germany, in W¨urttemberg, in , he was always a precocious stu-
dent; at the age of fifteen he was admitted to the Protestant Seminary at
T¨ubingen, where he shared a roomwith two other students who were
to become close friends, G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich H¨olderlin. (Both
H¨olderlin and Hegel were five years older than Schelling.) He published
his first major philosophical work at the age of nineteen and, by the
time he was twenty-nine, he had published more philosophy books than
most people could even transcribe in a lifetime. By  (at the age of
twenty-three), Schelling became an “extraordinary” professor at Jena
and Fichte’s successor. Each year, with each new publication, Schelling’s
system seemed to change, leading Hegel later sarcastically to remark in
his Berlin lectures that Schelling had conducted his philosophical edu-
cation in public. Josiah Royce quipped that Schelling was the “prince of
the romantics.” Both Hegel and Royce were right; Schelling was ambi-
tious and experimental in temperament, sometimes a bit reckless in his
arguments, and he was continually refining and testing out new ideas
and ever open to revising old ones. As one of the standard works on
Schelling’s thought puts it, Schelling’s process was always “becoming,”
never finished.

Hence, any presentation of “Schelling’s philosophy” can
only be either a presentation of some time-slice of it or else display the
developmental history of a train of thought that was cut short only by
Schelling’s death.
Nonetheless, Schelling’s whole early evolving corpus until  was

in some basic ways based on a dominant leitmotif that was already
apparent in a letter he wrote to Hegel in February, ,inwhichhe

Xavier Tilliette, Schelling: Une Philosophie en Devenir (Paris: Vrin, ).

–: Schelling 
proudly declared to his friend that: “In the meantime I have become
a Spinozist!” and explained that as he understood things (under the
influence of Fichte), the only real difference between idealist Kantian
systems and “dogmatic” systems had to do with their respective starting
points: “That the former takes as its starting-point the absolute I (not
yet conditioned by any object), the latter the absolute object or Not-I,”
whereas the truth of the matter has to lie in some way of reconciling those
two starting-points with each other that is nonetheless consistent with
human spontaneity and autonomy championed by Kant.

Schelling thus
accepted Fichte’s way of putting the issue, but he did not think, at least at
first, that the choice of starting points was simply a matter of one’s char-
acter, nor did he think that the two starting points formed an either/or
choice; both needed to be understood as different manifestations of some
one underlying “absolute” reality as Spinoza had thought. Moreover, this
renewed Spinozismhad to be such so as to answer Jacobi’s doubts and
to secure the reality of human freedom; as Schelling rather exuberantly
put it in his  monograph, Of the I as the Principle of Philosophy or On the
Unconditional in Human Knowledge: “The beginning and end of all philos-
ophy is freedom!”

Schelling quickly absorbed Fichte’s reworking of Kant, and he seems
to have immediately accepted the distinction Reinhold and Fichte pop-

ularized between the “spirit” and the “letter” of Kantian philosophy.
As he repeatedly stressed in his early writings, he was simply not inter-
ested in constructing exegeses of Kantian texts; his concerns were with
getting the arguments right for the Kantian conclusions (a sentiment still
widespread among interpreters of Kant today). Schelling was quite ab-
sorbed by the three dominant issues in the confrontation with Kantian
thought during that time: Aenesidemus had put the issue of Kant’s al-
leged refutation of skepticism(that is, of Hume) front and center; both
Fichte and Aenesidemus had thrown into question the issue of things-in-
themselves; and the answer to the questions about the status of freedom
in a disenchanted natural world was considered to be still outstanding.
The issue of things-in-themselves was particularly vexing and was seen
as key to the whole issue; Salomon Maimon, an early exegete and critic

G. W. F. Hegel, Briefe von und an Hegel (ed. Johannes Hoffmeister) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag,
), vol. ,no..

F. W. J. Schelling, “Of the I as Principle of Philosophy,” Of the I as the Principle of Philosophy or On the
Unconditional in Human Knowledge, in F. W. J. Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four
Early Essays (–) (trans. Fritz Marti) (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, ), p. ;
Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie oder ¨uber das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen, in F. W. J. Schelling,
Ausgew¨ahlte Schriften (ed. Manfred Frank) (Frankfurt amMain: Suhrkamp, ), , p. .
 Part II The revolution continued: post-Kantians
of Kant’s critical philosophy had accused Kant of violating his own prin-
ciples in saying that things-in-themselves cause our sensations of them,
since causality on Kant’s view was a category restricted to appearances
and not applicable to things-in-themselves. Schelling saw, however, that
Fichte had implicitly carried this criticism one step further; what was
confusing in Kant’s own view was not simply the application of a cate-
gory of appearance to things-in-themselves – it was the ambiguity in the

way one spoke of the “ground” of appearances in things-in-themselves.
“Ground” (Grund, in the German) could mean that things-in-themselves
caused our sensations of them; or it could mean that it was the source
of whatever reason-giving force those sensations had. As Schelling under-
stood Fichte to have argued, causes cannot be reasons, and thus, even if
it were true that things-in-themselves caused our sensations, those causes
could never offer us reasons for belief. Causality involved facts; judgments
involved norms. However, Fichtean idealism had trouble making sense
of the relation between experience as ground of belief and experience
as caused by the world, since it viewed everything as a posit by the “I”;
even the “Not-I” was itself something posited by the “I.”
In “Of the I as Principle of Philosophy” – an essay published in 
(when he was twenty) – Schelling posed the issue quite starkly as that
between either knowledge as a systemof self-enclosed beliefs and reasons
having no contact with the world; or as some form of “foundationalism”
(as Reinhold had thought). If the only reasons for beliefs are other beliefs
and not causes, then the most we can have is “an eternal cycle of proposi-
tions, each continually and reciprocally flowing into the other, a chaos in
which no element can diverge from another,” in short, only a “spinning”
(a Kreislauf ) of the conceptual web internal to itself having “no reality.”

This seems to imply some form of “foundationalism,” one’s having to
know something basic without having to know anything else.

How-
ever, for such a “foundation” to work, it has to be self-certifying, which
(as Fichte had argued) only leads to some form of “intellectual intuition,”
which, if of the truth, must be an intuition of an identity of thought and
being.
Schelling’s key idea was to combine his newly found Spinozism with a

rejection of what he took to be Fichte’s key error. Fichte had argued that
the basic distinction between the subjective and the objective had itself
to be either a subjective or objective distinction; and that, since ranking

Schelling, “Of the I,” p. ; Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie,p..

As Schelling puts it: “If there is any genuine knowledge at all, there must be knowledge which I
do not reach by way of some other knowledge, but through which alone all other knowledge is
possible,”Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie,p.; “Of the I,” p. .
–: Schelling 
it to be an objective distinction would only result in yet another formof
discredited dogmatism (in a conflation of reasons and causes), the distinc-
tion itself therefore had to be a subjective distinction, to be a distinction
that the “I” itself “posited” between itself and the “Not-I.” In fact, so
Schelling was to argue, the distinction between subjective and objective
was itself neither subjective nor objective but relative to something else,
the “absolute,” and available therefore only to a formof “intuition,” as
awayofseeing things in terms of how both subjectivity and objectivity
were points of view stemming from something deeper than themselves.
Beginning philosophy with the distinction between subjects and objects
was already starting too late in the game, and all the problems of post-
Kantian philosophy, including Aenesidemus’s skepticism, stemmed from
beginning with the subject/object division being taken for granted. Both
should be seen instead as viewpoints arising together, co-equally.
Following Fichte, the youthful Schelling thought that the unity of the
subjective and the objective had nonetheless to be an “absolute I,” which
he nevertheless interpreted in Spinozistic, non-Fichtean terms as the
expression of some underlying “absolute” reality common to both the
ordinary (“empirical”) sense of the “I” and the natural world (the “Not-I”)
that it strives to know and transform. This “absolute I” straddles the

boundary between subjective experience and the objective world, and
in intuiting the “I” in intellectual intuition, we are intuiting the basis by
which the natural world thereby manifests itself to us in our experience
and gives us reasons for belief. Only in this way does idealismescape skep-
ticism, namely, by doing away with the basic motivation for skepticism
in the first place, that picture of the world with subjective experiences on
the one side of a sharp divide and a realmof objective matters-of-fact
on the other side. Moreover, so Schelling concluded early on, since that
new picture requires an “intellectual intuition,” a new way of viewing the
problem, that aspect of philosophizing in principle cannot be a matter of
“argument” but a matter of “seeing,” of adopting a new view of things
that in effect dissolves rather than refutes the problem; or, as Schelling
expressed it: “Hence this question cannot be dissolved (aufgel¨ost) except
in the way in which Alexander dissolved the Gordian knot, that is, by
sublating (aufzuheben) the question. Hence it is quite simply unanswer-
able, because it can be answered only in such a way that it can never
again be raised.”

We must shift our pictures of ourselves fromone view
to another in an act of intellectual intuition; instead of seeing ourselves

Philosophische Briefe ¨uber Dogmatismus und Kritizismus,pp.–,inSchellings Werke (ed. Manfred
Schr¨oter) (Munich: C. H. Beck and Oldenburg, ), vol. ; Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and
Criticism,p..
 Part II The revolution continued: post-Kantians
or our experiences as separated by a boundary line between subjec-
tive and objective, we must “intuit” that in drawing such a boundary,
we are ourselves already on both sides of the dividing line, indeed, draw-
ing the boundary ourselves. This emphasis on “intuition” – Anschauung,
“viewing,” or “seeing” – remained with Schelling for his whole life; cen-

tral to this thought was his conviction that there was no way of ultimately
arguing for the basic ways we interpreted the world, since all forms of ar-
gument presupposed a basic “take” on the ultimate structure of things
which could not be demonstrated within that form of argument itself;
instead, at the level of basic ways of comprehending the world, we re-
solved basic problems and contradictions by learning to “see” or “view”
things – to “intuit” them– in a different way, to adopt a different basic
“picture” of things.
The “intellectual intuition” of the “absolute” is thus a view of our
subjective lives as united with the course of nature in such a way that
Aenesidemus’ style of skepticismsimply can no longer take hold of us –
not because we have been argued out of it but because it can no longer
have any grip on the kind of person we thereby come to be once we
have adopted that new picture of ourselves. Again, as Schelling put it
in : “We must be what we wish to call ourselves theoretically. And
nothing can convince us of being that, except our very striving to be
just that. This striving realizes our knowledge of ourselves, and thus this
knowledge becomes the pure product of our freedom. We ourselves must
have worked our way up to the point fromwhich we want to start. People
cannot get there by arguing themselves up to that point (hinaufvern¨unfteln),
nor can they be argued into that point by others.”

Moreover, it would seemto follow that this intellectual intuition cannot
itself be a piece of conceptual knowledge, since conceptual knowledge
has to do with the “subjective” aspect of the way in which the world
manifests itself; or, as Schelling puts it, “for the absolute cannot be me-
diated at all, hence it can never fall into the domain of demonstrable
concepts.”

To bring it under concepts would mean to bring it into the

inferential sphere, which would be to threaten the whole enterprise with
just being a “spinning” of concepts with each other and perhaps to have
no connection with a reality outside of themselves.
For this to work, though, spontaneity had to be somehow at one with
receptivity in human knowledge; to be led to the point where conceptual

Philosophische Briefe ¨uber Dogmatismus und Kritizismus,p.; Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and
Criticism,p..

Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie,p.; “Of the I,” p. .
–: Schelling 
argument is of no more value, Schelling concluded, is to be led “into a
region where I do not find firmground, but must produce it myself in
order to stand firmly upon it.”

The construction of such “firmground”
cannot be given to us but must be freely, spontaneously brought forth by
us; yet, at the same time, such spontaneity must not be unhinged from
the natural world.
As Schelling worked out the implications of this view, he also began
to break gradually, then more decisively with his Fichtean beginnings.
Fichte, so he concluded, was too subjective in his approach; the “Not-I”
was simply a posit that the “I” required for its own self-consciousness.
Such a view, while emphasizing the spontaneity of the “I,” could never
do justice to the independent reality of the world. By , Schelling
had worked out his own stance on these matters. The “intellectual in-
tuition” of the rational and necessary structure of the world required
philosophical reflection to go off on two “tracks” which meet only in
an “intuition,” an insight or “view” of the whole. That insight had to
bring together two different viewpoints, each of which is necessary for

our grasp of our lives as free, autonomous beings in a natural world. One
viewpoint understands us as a part of nature; the other understands us
as a self-determining being; the two together are, however, only manifes-
tations of one underlying reality, the “absolute.” In almost all of his early
writings in the s and s, Schelling appealed to Leibniz’s notion
of a “pre-established harmony” between mind and nature to make his
point, always stressing, though, that he did not think that this harmony
could be the result of some kind of external ordering – and thus that the
idea that God arranged our representations and things-in-themselves so
that they would match was not even to be seriously considered – but had
to be the result of some kind of deeper unity, even identity of mind and
nature, as Spinoza had thought.
Schelling began diagnosing the root of modern skepticism about
whether our representations match up with things-in-themselves as re-
sulting fromwhat he (and those who followed him) called “reflection” or
“reflective philosophy.”

“Reflection,” in the sense Schelling intended it,
was close in meaning to “analysis.” When we reflect on something – for
example, on the conditions under which we can know something about a

Philosophische Briefe ¨uber Dogmatismus und Kritizismus,p.; Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and
Criticism,p..

The best overall presentation and defense of Schelling’s thought in English is Andrew Bowie,
Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction (London: Routledge, ); Bowie’s work
draws on the pathbreaking work done by Manfred Frank; in particular, see Frank, Eine Einf¨uhrung
in Schellings Philosophie.
 Part II The revolution continued: post-Kantians
world independent of us – we necessarily break apart items that are orig-

inally at one with each other, and we arrange those items in some kind
of order. Thus, we separate “representations” fromthe objects that they
seemto represent, and we then wonder how it is that they are supposed
to be brought back together. What such “reflective” modes of thought
necessarily fail to grasp (because they are reflective) is that, unless there
were already a pre-reflective unity of thought and being, reflection could
not do its
work, that without our already
“being in
touch
” with things
,
we could not begin to reflect on the conditions for our making true asser-
tions. However, this original unity, as pre-reflective, cannot thereby itself
be reflectively established; it can only be apprehended in an “intellectual
intuition.”

Naturphilosophie
In , Schelling published his Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, and the
success of that book made what he took to calling Naturphilosophie,for
better or worse, one of the major areas in German philosophy for the
first half of the nineteenth century. Naturphilosophie was not philosophy
of science, and it was also not quite the same as a “philosophy of na-
ture”; rather, it was to be an a priori study of the “Idea” of nature. At
first, Schelling conceived of it as drawing on the findings of empirical
science to give us an understanding of how the results of empirical nat-
ural science were in fact compatible and at one with our own subjective,
more poetic, appreciation of nature – our intimations, for example, that
some ways of life went “against” our nature or that some ways of living
were more “in tune” with our natural proclivities than were others, even

though the Newtonian conception of nature had no roomwithin it for
such intimations. Nonetheless, although it was to be linked to empiri-
cal scientific research, such a Naturphilosophie, in Schelling’s mind, had
nothing to do with either applying abstract philosophical principles to
scientific practice or results – nothing, Schelling said, could be “a more
pitiful, workaday occupation” than such an endeavor – and it also had
to follow the “basic rule of admitting absolutely no hidden elemental

In the  System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling makes the point that since consciousness
presupposes the basic distinction in all intentionality between thought and object, sensing and
sensed, “a philosophy which starts fromconsciousness will therefore never be able to explain this
conformity [of thought and object], nor is it explicable at all without an original identity, whose
principle necessarily lies beyond consciousness,” F. W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism
(trans. Peter Heath) (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, ), p.  (); Ausgew¨ahlte
Schriften,p..
–: Schelling 
substances in bodies, the reality of which can in no way be established by
experience.”

As Schelling thus originally conceived of it, Naturphilosophie
was to construct the a priori view of nature that empirical investigations
in fact presupposed in their experimental procedures; as he worked it
out, however, it came more and more to signify a specific – many would
say idiosyncratic – approach to philosophy. (It is therefore best simply to
leave the term, Naturphilosophie, in the original German than to suggest
that it was only a distinct field of philosophy, “philosophy of nature.”)
The rise of natural science had originally seemed to split philosophy
into the dueling camps of rationalists and empiricists; the motive for
each camp had been the necessity to account for the way in which the
findings of natural science seemed at first blush to contradict the basic

elements of the human experience of the world – rationalists explained
this by arguing that the mind could apprehend the secrets of nature
independently of experience through, for example, mathematical inves-
tigation, and the empiricists argued that the findings of natural science
were no more than methodologically purified extrapolations from our
own experience. Schelling concluded that, since Kant had finally put an
end to the endless seesaw between the two camps, and since Fichte had
drawn out the proper implications of the Kantian view, it was now time
to show that the new dueling camps of modern philosophy – “realism”
and “idealism” – were themselves only manifestations of some deeper
underlying worldview that was the unity of the two, and the vehicle to do
that would be the dual development of transcendental philosophy and
Naturphilosophie united in a doctrine of the “intellectual intuition” of the
absolute.
Moreover, Naturphilosophie had to show how freedomwas compatible
with nature without having to invoke any kind of suspension of natural
law or noumenal realm where such laws did not hold sway. That meant,
Schelling concluded, that the mechanistic view of nature could not be
correct. As he put it: “Suppose I am myself a mere piece of mecha-
nism. But what is caught up in mere mechanism cannot step out of the
mechanism and ask: How has all this become possible?”

In drawing
out his own answer to that question, Schelling took his own inspira-
tion not so much from Fichte, Spinoza, or Leibniz but from Kant. In the
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant had criticized what he took
to be the Newtonian conception of motion because of the way he took it

F. W. J. Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath) (Cambridge
University Press, ), pp. –.


Ibid., p. .
 Part II The revolution continued: post-Kantians
to rest on suppositions about absolute space that were ruled out by Kant’s
own systemof transcendental idealism.

Kant was therefore led to see
Newton’s absolute space instead as an “Idea” of reason, a conception of
an ideal end-point toward which the kinds of judgments that one makes
on the basis of a Newtonian systemtend to converge. (That ideal end-
point would be the center of mass of the entire universe, something that
could never be given in experience.

) However, if the concept of absolute
space could not be assumed and could only function instead as a regula-
tive ideal in terms of which we investigated nature, then, so Kant argued,
we could not go on to do as Newton had done, namely, to use absolute
space as the basis for defining the laws of “true” motion (as opposed to
“relative” or merely apparent motions, such as the sun “appearing” to
move while the earth “appears” to be at rest). Therefore, for Newtonian
investigations to be possible in the first place, we must have a method for
distinguishing true fromapparent motion, which required investigations
that rested on a priori presuppositions about the nature of what was
movable – which, for Kant, was equivalent to determining the a priori
determinations of the empirically constituted conception of matter. This,
in turn, led Kant to hold that there must a priori be two different forces at
work in matter, those of attraction and repulsion. Attraction is necessary
because, in presupposing a center of mass, we need a concept of univer-
sal gravitation, of matter as exhibiting essentially a universal attraction
for all other matter; in doing that, however, we must also presuppose

a countervailing force of repulsion, since if there were only attraction,
all matter would condense to one point (just as, if there were only re-
pulsion, all matter would scatter into virtual nothingness). Mechanics,
Kant concluded, rests on a priori determinations more properly set by
transcendental philosophy.

Absolute space, like the idea of a common
center of mass, is thus, for Kant, an Idea of reason.
For Schelling, though, if nature is purely a mechanical system (as
Kant argued in his first Critique), and if one eschews appeal to things-
in-themselves (and therefore eschews any notion of transcendental
causality), and if we are necessarily to construe ourselves as free, natural

Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (trans. James W. Ellington) (Indiana-
polis: Hackett Publishing Company, ).

See Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences. Friedman notes: “Newton presents the laws of
motion as facts, as it were, about a notion of true motion that is antecedently well defined ...For
Kant, on the other hand, since there is no such antecedently well-defined notion of true motion,
the laws of motions are not facts but rather conditions under which alone the notion of true
motion first has objective meaning,” p. .

My own understanding of these issues has drawn heavily on Michael Friedman’s discussion in
Kant and the Exact Sciences,ch., “Metaphysical Foundations of Newtonian Science.”
–: Schelling 
beings, then we are left with an insoluble contradiction unless we hold
that nature, regarded as a whole, as “Idea,” is not a mechanical system
but a series of basic “forces” or “impulses” that mirror at the basic level
the same kind of determinations that are operative in us at the level of
self-conscious freedom. The a priori study of the basic forces at work in

nature – Naturphilosophie itself – must construct an account of nature that
is continuous with our freedom; it must “re-enchant” nature so that we
once more have a place in it.
The re-enchantment of nature would have to consist in understand-
ing nature as a whole in organic and not in purely mechanical terms;
indeed, Kant’s own notion of reflective, teleological judgments pointed
to that very solution. We must think of organisms as having their pur-
posiveness within themselves, as being what Kant called in a footnote
an “organization,” where “each member of such a whole should in-
deed be not merely a means, but also an end.”

Organisms are such
“wholes”; moreover, it does no good to suppose that they are the results
of some external hand (such as God) organizing them, since that would
merely bestow an external, instead of an internal purpose on them, and
it does equally no good to postulate some special “life force” (in any
event, a “completely self-contradictory concept,” as Schelling put it).

Purposiveness, which is necessary in thinking of organisms, exists only
for a judging intellect; and, since this intellect cannot be outside of the
organism, it must be somehow immanent within it. “Intellect,” that is,
must somehow already be at work in nature, even if only in a sub-
merged form, and nature as a whole, considered philosophically, must
be viewed as a formof “organization” in the Kantian sense. Nature
exhibits Kant’s sense of “purposiveness without a purpose” in that its
basic tendencies (like attraction and repulsion) tend toward a growing
kind of unity and inwardness that culminates in human communities –
Schelling uses the term, Geist, mind or “spirit” in its communal sense –
coming to self-consciousness, to an intellectual intuition of itself. Matter
gradually organizes itself (quite blindly) into various wholes (having to


Kant, Critique of Judgment,
§
. The whole citation, which is crucial for understanding Schelling’s
notion of “organization” goes as the following: “On the other hand, the analogy of these direct
natural purposes can serve to elucidate a certain association [among people], though one found
more often as an idea than in actuality: in speaking of the complete transformation of a large
people into a state, which took place recently, the word organization was frequently and very aptly
applied to the establishment of legal authorities, etc. and even to the entire body politic. For
each member in such a whole should indeed be not merely a means but also an end; and while
each member contributes to making the whole possible, the Idea of that whole should in turn
determine the member’s position and function.”

Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature,p..