the ego feels constrained to break through this barrier, it reacts
against it, and gives itself a resting-place within itself; this last
ought to be concrete, but it is a negative resting-place alone. This
first form, Irony, has Friedrich von Schlegel as its leading exponent.
The subject here knows itself to be within itself the Absolute, and
all else to it is vain; all the conclusions which it draws for itself
respecting the right and good, it likewise knows how to destroy again.
It can make a pretence of knowing all things, but it only demonstrates
vanity, hypocrisy, and effrontery. Irony knows itself to be the master
of every possible content; it is serious about nothing, but plays with
all forms. The other side is this, that subjectivity has cast itself
into religious subjectivity. The utter despair in respect of thought, of
truth, and absolute objectivity, as also the incapacity to give oneself
any settled basis or spontaneity of action, induced the noble soul to
abandon itself to feeling and to seek in Religion something fixed and
steadfast; this steadfast basis, this inward satisfaction, is to be found
in religious sentiments and feelings. This instinct impelling us towards
something fixed has forced many into positive forms of religion, into
Catholicism, superstition and miracle working, in order that they may
find something on which they can rest, because to inward subjectivity
everything fluctuates and wavers. With the whole force of its mind
subjectivity tries to apply itself to what is positively given, to bend
its head beneath the positive, to cast itself, so to speak, into the arms
of externality, and it finds an inward power impelling it so to do.
b. SCHLEIERMACHER.
On the other hand the ego finds in the subjectivity and individuality
of the personal view of things the height of all its vanity—its
Religion. All the various individualities have God within themselves.
Dialectic is the last thing to arise and to maintain its place. As
this is expressed for philosophic self-consciousness, the foreign
intellectual world has lost all significance and truth for ordinary
culture; it is composed of three elements, a deity pertaining to a time
gone by, and individualized in space and existence, a world which is
outside the actuality of self-consciousness, and a world which had yet
to appear, and in which self-consciousness would first attain to its
reality. The spirit of culture has deserted it, and no longer recognizes
anything that is foreign to self-consciousness. In accordance with this
principle, the spiritual living essence has then transformed itself into
self-consciousness, and it thinks to know the unity of spirit immediately
from itself, and in this immediacy to be possessed of knowledge in a
poetic, or at least a prophetic manner. As regards the poetic manner, it
has a knowledge of the life and person of the Absolute immediately, by an
intuition, and not in the Notion, and it thinks it would lose the whole
as whole, as a self-penetrating unity, were it not to express the same
in poetic form; and what it thus expresses poetically is the intuition
of the personal life of self-consciousness. But the truth is absolute
motion, and since it is a motion of forms and figures [Gestalten], and
the universe is a kingdom of spirits, the Notion is the essence of this
movement, and likewise of each individual form; it is its ideal form
[Form] and not the real one, or that of figure [Gestalt]. In the latter
case necessity is lost sight of; individual action, life and heart,
remain within themselves, and undeveloped; and this poetry vacillates
betwixt the universality of the Notion and the determinateness and
indifference of the figure; it is neither flesh nor fish, neither poetry
nor philosophy. The prophetic utterance of truths which claim to be
philosophical, thus belongs to faith, to self-consciousness, which indeed
perceives the absolute spirit in itself, but does not comprehend itself
as self-consciousness, since it places absolute reality above Knowledge,
beyond self-conscious reason, as was done by Eschenmayer and Jacobi.
This uncomprehending, prophetic manner of speech affirms this or that
respecting absolute existence as from an oracle, and requires that each
man should find the same immediately in his own heart. The knowledge of
absolute reality becomes a matter pertaining to the heart; there are a
number of would-be inspired speakers, each of whom holds a monologue and
really does not understand the others, excepting by a pressure of the
hands and betrayal of dumb feeling. What they say is mainly composed of
trivialities, if these are taken in the sense in which they are uttered;
it is the feeling, the gesture, the fulness of the heart, which first
gives them their significance; to nothing of more importance is direct
expression given. They outbid one another in conceits of fancy, in ardent
poetry. But before the Truth vanity turns pale, spitefully sneering
it sneaks back into itself. Ask not after a criterion of the truth,
but after the Notion of the truth in and for itself; on that fix your
gaze. The glory of Philosophy is departed, for it presupposes a common
ground of thoughts and principles—which is what science demands—or at
least of opinions. But now particular subjectivity was everything,
each individual was proud and disdainful as regards all others. The
conception of independent thought—as though there could be a thought
which was not such (Vol. I. p. 60)—is very much the same; men have, it is
said, to bring forth a particularity of their own, or else they have not
thought for themselves. But the bad picture is that in which the artist
shows himself; originality is the production of what is in its entirety
universal. The folly of independent thought is that it results in each
bringing forth something more preposterous than another.
c. NOVALIS.
Subjectivity signifies the lack of a firm and steady basis, but likewise
the desire for such, and thus it evermore remains a yearning. These
yearnings of a lofty soul are set forth in the writings of Novalis.
This subjectivity does not reach substantiality, it dies away within
itself, and the standpoint it adopts is one of inward workings and fine
distinctions; it signifies an inward life and deals with the minutiæ
of the truth. The extravagances of subjectivity constantly pass into
madness; if they remain in thought they are whirled round and round
in the vortex of reflecting understanding, which is ever negative in
reference to itself.
d. FRIES, BOUTERWECK, KRUG.
Yet a last form of subjectivity is the subjectivity of arbitrary will and
ignorance. It maintained this, that the highest mode of cognition is an
immediate knowledge as a fact of consciousness; and that is so far right.
The Fichtian abstraction and its hard understanding has a repellent
effect on thought; slothful reason allowed itself to be told the result
of the philosophy of Kant and Jacobi, and renounced all consistent
thought, all construction. This arbitrariness gave itself entire
liberty—the liberty of the _Tabagie_—but in doing so it regarded itself
from a poetic or prophetic point of view, as we have just seen (pp. 508,
509). Then it was both more sober and more prosaic, and thus brought
the old logic and metaphysic once more into evidence, though with this
modification that they are made facts of consciousness. Thus Fries turns
back to the faith of Jacobi in the form of immediate judgments derived
from reason, and dark conceptions incapable of utterance.[406] He wished
to improve the critique of pure reason by apprehending the categories
as facts of consciousness; anything one chooses can in such a case be
introduced. Bouterweck speaks of “The virtue, the living nature of power;
the fact that subject and object are regarded as one, that is as absolute
virtue. With this absolute virtue we have all Being and action, namely
the eternal, absolute and pure unity; in one word we have grasped the
world within us and we have grasped ourselves in the world, and that
indeed not through conceptions and conclusions, but directly through the
power which itself constitutes our existence and our rational nature. To
know the All, or indeed to know God in any way, is, however, impossible
for any mortal.”[407] Krug wrote a “Groundwork of Philosophy,” setting
forth a “Transcendental Synthesis—that is a transcendental realism and a
transcendental idealism inseparably bound together,” It is an “original,
transcendental synthesis of the real and the ideal, the thinking subject
and the corresponding outer world;” this transcendental synthesis must
“be recognized and asserted without any attempt being made at explaining
it.”[408]
D. SCHELLING.
It was Schelling, finally, who made the most important, or, from
a philosophic point of view, the only important advance upon the
philosophy of Fichte; his philosophy rose higher than that of Fichte,
though undoubtedly it stood in close connection with it; indeed, he
himself professes to be a Fichtian. Now the philosophy of Schelling
from the first admitted the possibility of a knowledge of God, although
it likewise started from the philosophy of Kant, which denies such
knowledge. At the same time Schelling makes Jacobi’s principle of
the unity of thought and Being fundamental, although he begins to
determine it more closely.[409] To him concrete unity is this, that
the finite is no more true than the infinite, the subjective idea no
more than objectivity, and that combinations in which both untruths are
brought together in their independence in relation to one another, are
likewise combinations of untruths merely. Concrete unity can only be
comprehended as process and as the living movement in a proposition. This
inseparability is in God alone; the finite, on the other hand, is that
which has this separability within it. In so far as it is a truth it is
likewise this unity, but in a limited sphere, and for that reason in the
separability of both moments.
Frederick Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, born on the 27th January, 1775, at
Schorndorf,[410] in Wurtemberg, studied in Leipzig and Jena, where he
came to be on terms of great intimacy with Fichte. In the year 1807 he
became secretary of the Academy of Science in Munich. We cannot with
propriety deal fully with his life, for he is still living.[411]
Schelling worked out his philosophy in view of the public. The series of
his philosophic writings also represents the history of his philosophic
development and the gradual process by which he raised himself above
the Fichtian principle and the Kantian content with which he began. It
does not thus contain a sequence of separately worked out divisions of
Philosophy, but only successive stages in his own development. If we
ask for a final work in which we shall find his philosophy represented
with complete definiteness none such can be named. Schelling’s first
writings are still quite Fichtian, and it is only by slow degrees that
he worked himself free of Fichte’s form. The form of the ego has the
ambiguity of being capable of signifying either the absolute Ego or
God, or ego in my particularity;[412] this supplied the first stimulus
to Schelling. His first and quite short work of four sheets which he
wrote in 1795 at Tubingen, while still at the university, was called,
“On the Possibility of any Form of Philosophy”; it contains propositions
respecting the Fichtian philosophy only. The next work, “On the Ego as
principle of Philosophy, or on the Unconditioned in Human Knowledge”
(Tubingen, 1795), is likewise quite Fichtian; in this case, however,
it is from a wider and more universal point of view, since the ego is
therein grasped as an original identity.[413] We find, however, a summary
of the Fichtian principle and the Kantian mode of presentation: “It is
only by something being originally set in opposition to the ego, and
by the ego being itself posited as the manifold (in time), that it is
possible for the ego to get beyond the unity which belongs to it of
merely being posited, and that, for example, it posits the same content
on more than one occasion.”[414] Schelling then passed on to natural
philosophy, adopted Kantian forms and reflective determinations, such as
those of repulsion and attraction, from Kant’s “Metaphysics of Nature,”
and likewise dealt with quite empirical phenomena in expressions taken
from Kant. All his first works on this subject come under this category,
viz.: “Ideas towards a Philosophy of Nature,” 1797; “On the World-Soul,”
1798, the second edition of which possesses appendices which are entirely
inconsistent with what goes before. In the writings of Herder and
Kielmeyer[415] we find sensibility, irritability, and reproduction dealt
with, as also their laws, such as that the greater the sensibility the
less the irritability, &c.—just as the powers or potencies were dealt
with by Eschenmayer. It was only later on in relation to these that
Schelling first apprehended nature in the categories of thought, and made
general attempts of a more definite character in the direction of greater
scientific development. It was only through what had been accomplished by
these men that he was enabled to come into public notice so young. The
spiritual and intellectual side, morality and the state, he represented
on the other hand purely in accordance with Kantian principles: thus in
his “Transcendental Idealism,” although it was written from a Fichtian
point of view, he goes no further than Kant did in his “Philosophy
of Rights” and his work “On Eternal Peace.” Schelling, indeed, later
on published a separate treatise on Freedom, deeply speculative in
character; this, however, remains isolated and independent, and deals
with this one point alone; in Philosophy, however, nothing isolated can
be worked out or developed. In the various presentations of his views
Schelling on each occasion began again from the beginning, because, as we
may see, what went before did not satisfy him; he has ever pressed on to
seek a new form, and thus he has tried various forms and terminologies
in succession without ever setting forth one complete and consistent
whole. His principal works in this connection are the “First Sketch of
a System of Natural Philosophy,” 1799; the “System of Transcendental
Idealism,” 1800, one of his most carefully thought-out works; “Bruno, a
Dialogue on the Divine and Natural Principle of Things,” 1802; “Journal
of Speculative Physics,” 1801; “New Journal of Speculative Physics,”
1802 _et_ In the second number of the second volume of his “Journal of
Speculative Physics,” Schelling made the commencement of a detailed
treatment of the whole of his philosophy. Here he likewise starts to
a certain measure, though unconsciously, from the Fichtian form of
construction; but the idea is already present that nature equally with
knowledge is a system of reason.
It is not feasible here to go into details respecting what is called the
philosophy of Schelling, even if time permitted. For it is not yet a
scientific whole organized in all its branches, since it rather consists
in certain general elements which do not fluctuate with the rest of his
opinions. Schelling’s philosophy must still be regarded as in process of
evolution, and it has not yet ripened into fruit;[416] we can hence give
a general idea of it only.
When Schelling made his first appearance the demands put forward by
Philosophy were as follows. With Descartes thought and extension were
in some incomprehensible way united in God, with Spinoza it was as
motionless substance; and beyond this point of view neither of them
ever passed. Later on we saw the form develop, partly in the sciences
and partly in the Kantian philosophy. Finally, in the Fichtian
philosophy, the form was subjectivity on its own account, from which
all determinations were held to develop. What is thus demanded is that
this subjectivity of infinite form which we saw dying into irony or
arbitrariness (pp. 507-510) should be delivered from its one-sidedness
in order to be united with objectivity and substantiality. To put it
otherwise, the substance of Spinoza should not be apprehended as the
unmoved, but as the intelligent, as a form which possesses activity
within itself of necessity, so that it is the forming power of nature,
but at the same time knowledge and comprehension. This then is the object
of Philosophy; it is not the formal union of Spinoza that is demanded,
nor the subjective totality of Fichte, but totality with the infinite
form. We see this developing in the philosophy of Schelling.
1. In one of his earlier writings, the “System of Transcendental
Idealism,” which we shall consider first of all, Schelling represented
transcendental philosophy and natural philosophy as the two sides of
scientific knowledge. Respecting the nature of the two, he expressly
declared himself in this work, where he once more adopts a Fichtian
starting-point: “All knowledge rests on the harmony of an objective with
a subjective.” In the common sense of the words this would be allowed;
absolute unity, where the Notion and the reality are undistinguished in
the perfected Idea, is the Absolute alone, or God; all else contains an
element of discord between the objective and subjective. “We may give
the name of nature to the entire objective content of our knowledge;
the entire subjective content, on the other hand, is called the ego
or intelligence.” They are in themselves identical and presupposed as
identical. The relation of nature to intelligence is given by Schelling
thus: “Now if all knowledge has two poles which mutually presuppose
and demand one another, there must be two fundamental sciences, and it
must be impossible to start from the one pole without being driven to
the other.” Thus nature is impelled to spirit, and spirit to nature;
either may be given the first place, and both must come to pass. “If the
objective is made the chief,” we have the natural sciences as result, and
“the necessary tendency,” the end, “of all natural science thus is to
pass from nature to intelligence. This is the meaning of the effort to
connect natural phenomena with theory. The highest perfection of natural
science would be the perfect spiritualization of all natural laws into
laws of intuitive perception and thought. The phenomenal (the material
element) must entirely disappear, and laws (the formal element) alone
remain. Hence it comes to pass that the more that which is in conformity
with law breaks forth in nature itself, the more the outward covering
disappears; the phenomena themselves become more spiritual, and finally
cease altogether. The perfect theory of nature would be that by which the
whole of nature should be resolved into an intelligence. The dead and
unconscious products of nature are only abortive attempts on the part
of nature to reflect itself, but the so-called dead nature is really
an immature,” torpid, fossilized “intelligence”; it is implicit only,
and thus remains in externality; “hence in its phenomena,” even though
“still unconsciously, the character of intelligence shines through. Its
highest end, which is to become object to itself, is first attained
by nature” (instead of nature we should call it the Idea of nature),
“through its highest and ultimate reflection, which is none other than
man, or, more generally, it is that which we call reason, through which
nature for the first time returns completely within itself, and whereby
it becomes evident that nature is originally identical with what is known
in us as intelligence or the conscious. Through this tendency to make
nature intelligent natural science becomes the philosophy of nature.”
The intelligent character of nature is thus spoken of as a postulate
of science. The other point of view is “to give the subjective the
foremost place.” Thus here “the problem is how to add an objective
element agreeing with it. To start from the subjective as from the first
and absolute, and to make the objective arise from it,” signifies a new
departure; its consideration forms the content of true Transcendental
Philosophy, or, as Schelling himself now named this science, “the
other science fundamental to Philosophy.” The organ of transcendental
philosophy is the subjective, the production of inward action. Production
and reflection upon this production, the unconscious and conscious in
one, is the æsthetic act of the imagination.[417] Thus these two separate
processes are as a whole very clearly expressed: the process which leads
from nature to the subject, and that leading from the ego to the object.
But the true process could only be traced out by means of logic, for it
contains pure thoughts; but the logical point of view was what Schelling
never arrived at in his presentation of things.
a. In respect of the ego, as principle of the transcendental philosophy,
Schelling sets to work in the same way as did Fichte, inasmuch as he
begins from the fact of knowledge “in which the content is conditioned
through the form, and the form through the content”; this is formal
A = A. But does A exist? The ego is “the point where subject and object
are one in their unmediated condition”; the ego is just Ego = Ego,
subject-object; and that is the act of self-consciousness wherein I am
for myself object to myself. In self-consciousness there is not to be
found a distinction between me and anything else; what are distinguished
are directly identical, and there is so far nothing at all in opposition
to this self-consciousness. How the case stands with regard to external
objects is the question which must be decided later, in the further
course of development. It is only the Notion of the ego which is to be
laid hold of: “The Notion of the ego, that is the act whereby thought
in general becomes object to itself, and the ego itself (the object)
are absolutely one; independently of this act the ego is nothing.” It
is the act whereby thought makes itself objective, and wherein the ego
is brought into harmony with the objective, with thought; and from
this standpoint it had to be demonstrated how the ego makes its way to
objectivity. “The ego, as pure act, as pure action, is not objective
in knowledge itself, for the reason that it is the principle of all
knowledge. If it is to be object of knowledge, this must come to pass
through a very different kind of knowledge than the ordinary.” The
immediate consciousness of this identity is intuition, but inwardly
it becomes “intellectual intuition”; it “is a knowledge which is the
production of its object: sensuous intuition or perception is perception
of such a nature that the perception itself appears to be different
from what is perceived. Now intellectual intuition is the organ of all
transcendental thought,” the act of pure self-consciousness generally.
“The ego is nothing else than a process of production which ever makes
itself its own object. Science can start from nothing objective,” but
from “the non-objective which itself becomes object” as an “original
duplicity. Idealism is the mechanism of the origination of the objective
world from the inward principle of spiritual activity.”[418]
On the one hand Schelling’s system is related to the philosophy of
Fichte, and, on the other hand, he, like Jacobi, makes his principle
immediate knowledge—the intelligent intuitive perception which all who
wish to philosophize must have. But what comes next is that its content
is no longer the indeterminate, the essence of essence, but likewise
the Absolute, God, the absolutely self-existent, though expressed as
concrete, _i.e._ as mediating itself within itself, as the absolute
unity or indifference of subjective and objective. Intellectual intuition
is the Fichtian imagination oscillating between two different points.
We have already spoken above (p. 417) of the _form_ of intellectual
intuition; it is the most convenient manner of asserting knowledge
respecting—anything one likes. But the immediate knowledge of God as
spiritual is only in the consciousness of Christian nations, and not for
others. This immediate knowledge appears to be still more contingent
as the intellectual intuition of the concrete, or the identity of
subjectivity and objectivity. This intuition is intellectual indeed,
because it is a rational intuition, and as knowledge it is likewise
absolutely one with the object of knowledge. But this intuition,
although itself knowledge, is not as yet known; it is the unmediated,
the postulated. As it is in this way an immediate we must possess it,
and what may be possessed may likewise not be possessed. Thus since the
immediate presupposition in Philosophy is that individuals have the
immediate intuition of this identity of subjective and objective, this
gave the philosophy of Schelling the appearance of indicating that the
presence of this intuition in individuals demanded a special talent,
genius, or condition of mind of their own, or as though it were generally
speaking an accidental faculty which pertained to the specially favoured
few. For the immediate, the intuitively perceived, is in the form of an
existent, and is not thus an essential; and whoever does not understand
the intellectual intuition must come to the conclusion that he does not
possess it. Or else, in order to understand it, men must give themselves
the trouble of possessing it; but no one can tell whether he has it or
not—not even from understanding it, for we may merely think we understand
it. Philosophy, however, is in its own nature capable of being universal;
for its ground-work is thought, and it is through thought that man is
man. Schelling’s principle is thus indeed clearly a universal; but if
a definite intuition, a definite consciousness is demanded, such as the
consciousness or intuition of the identity of subjective and objective,
this determinate particular thought is not as yet to be found in it.
It was, however, in this form of knowledge of the absolute as concrete,
and, further, in the form of unity of subjective and objective, that
Philosophy as represented by Schelling more especially marked itself off
from the ordinary conceiving consciousness and its mode of reflection.
Even less than Fichte did Schelling attain to popularity (_supra_, pp.
504, 505), for the concrete in its nature is directly speculative.
The concrete content, God, life, or whatever particular form it has,
is indeed the content and object of natural consciousness; but the
difficulty lies in bringing what is contained in the concrete into
concrete thought in accordance with its different determinations, and
in laying hold of the unity. It pertains to the standpoint of the
understanding to divide and to distinguish, and to maintain the finite
thought-determinations in their opposition; but Philosophy demands that
these different thoughts should be brought together. Thought begins
by holding apart infinite and finite, cause and effect, positive and
negative; since this is the region of reflecting consciousness, the old
metaphysical consciousness was able to take part in so doing: but the
speculative point of view is to have this opposition before itself and
to reconcile it. With Schelling the speculative form has thus again come
to the front, and philosophy has again obtained a special character of
its own; the principle of Philosophy, rational thought in itself, has
obtained the form of thought. In the philosophy of Schelling the content,
the truth, has once more become the matter of chief importance, whereas
in the Kantian philosophy the point of interest was more especially
stated to be the necessity for investigating subjective knowledge. This
is the standpoint of Schelling’s philosophy in its general aspects.
b. Since in further analysis the distinction between subject and object
comes into view and is accepted, there follows the relationship of the
ego to its other; with Fichte that forms the second proposition, in
which the self-limitation of the ego is posited. The ego posits itself
in opposition to itself, since it posits itself as conditioned by the
non-ego; that is the infinite repulsion, for this conditionment is the
ego itself. Schelling, on the one hand, says: “The ego is unlimited as
the ego only in so far as it is limited,” as it relates to the non-ego.
Only thus does consciousness exist, self-consciousness is a barren
determination; through its intuition of self the ego becomes finite to
itself. “This contradiction only allows itself to be dissolved by the ego
becoming in this finitude infinite to itself, _i.e._ by its having an
intuitive perception of itself as an infinite Becoming.” The relation of
the ego to itself and to the infinite check or force of repulsion is a
constant one. On the other hand it is said: “The ego is limited only in
so far as it is unlimited;” this limitation is thus necessary in order to
be able to get beyond it. The contradiction which we find here remains
even if the ego always limits the non-ego. “Both activities—that which
makes for infinitude, the limitable, real, objective activity, and the
limiting and ideal, mutually presuppose one another. Idealism reflects
merely on the one, realism on the other, transcendental idealism on
both.”[419] All this is a tangled mass of abstractions.
c. “Neither through the limiting activity nor through the limited does
the ego arrive at self-consciousness. There consequently is a third
activity, compounded from the other two, through which the ego of
self-consciousness arises; this third is that which oscillates between
the two—the struggle between opposing tendencies.” There is essential
relation only, relative identity; the difference therein present thus
ever remains. “This struggle cannot be reconciled by one such action,
but only by an infinite succession of such,” _i.e._ the reconciliation
of the opposition between the two tendencies of the ego, the inward and
the outward, is, in the infinite course of progression, only an apparent
one. In order that it may be complete, the whole inward and outward
nature must be presented in all its details: but Philosophy can only
set forth the epochs which are most important. “If all the intermediate
links in sensation could be set forth, that would necessarily lead us to
a deduction of all the qualities in nature, which last is impossible.”
Now this third activity, which contains the union directly in itself,
is a thought in which particularity is already contained. It is the
intuitive understanding of Kant, the intelligent intuition or intuitively
perceiving intelligence; Schelling, indeed, definitely names this
absolute unity of contradictions intellectual intuition. The ego here
is not one-sided in regard to what is different; it is identity of the
unconscious and the conscious, but not an identity of such a nature that
its ground rests on the ego itself.[420]
This ego must be the absolute principle: “All philosophy starts from a
principle which as absolute identity is non-objective.” For if it is
objective, separation is at once posited and it is confronted by another;
but the principle is the reconciliation of the opposition, and therefore
in and for itself it is non-objective. “Now how should a principle such
as this be called forth to consciousness and understood, as is required
if it is the condition attached to the comprehension of all philosophy?
That it can no more be comprehended through Notions [Begriffe] than set
forth, requires no proof.” Notion to Schelling signifies a category of
the ordinary understanding; Notion is, however, the concrete thought
which in itself is infinite. “There thus remains nothing more than
that it should be set forth in an immediate intuition. If there were
such an intuition which had as object the absolutely identical, that
which in itself is neither subjective nor objective, and if for such,
which,” however, “can be an intellectual intuition only, one could
appeal to immediate experience,” the question would be: “How can this
intuition be again made objective, _i.e._ how can it be asserted without
doubt that it does not rest on a subjective deception, if there is
not a universal objectivity in that intuition, which is recognized by
all?” This intellectual principle in itself should thus be given in an
experience so that men may be able to appeal to it. “The objectivity of
intellectual intuition is art. The work of art alone reflects to me what
is otherwise reflected through nothing—that absolute identical which has
already separated itself in the ego itself.” The objectivity of identity
and the knowledge of the same is art; in one and the same intuition the
ego is here conscious of itself and unconscious.[421] This intellectual
intuition which has become objective is objective sensuous intuition—but
the Notion, the comprehended necessity, is a very different objectivity.
Thus a principle is presupposed both for the content of philosophy and
for subjective philosophizing: on the one hand it is demanded that the
attitude adopted should be one of intellectual intuition, and, on the
other hand, this principle has to be authenticated, and this takes place
in the work of art. This is the highest form of the objectivization of
reason, because in it sensuous conception is united with intellectuality,
sensuous existence is merely the expression of spirituality. The
highest objectivity which the subject attains, the highest identity of
subjective and objective, is that which Schelling terms the power of
imagination. Art is thus comprehended as what is inmost and highest, that
which produces the intellectual and real in one, and philosophizing is
conceived as this genius of art. But art and power of imagination are not
supreme. For the Idea, spirit, cannot be truly given expression to in
the manner in which art expresses its Idea. This last is always a method
pertaining to intuitive perception; and on account of this sensuous
form of existence the work of art cannot correspond to the spirit.
Thus because the point last arrived at is designated as the faculty of
imagination, as art, even in the subject this is a subordinate point
of view, and thus in itself this point is not the absolute identity
of subjectivity and objectivity. In subjective thought, rational,
speculative thought is thus indeed demanded, but if this appears false to
you nothing farther can be said than that you do not possess intellectual
intuition. The proving of anything, the making it comprehensible, is thus
abandoned; a correct apprehension of it is directly demanded, and the
Idea is thus assertorically pre-established as principle. The Absolute
is the absolute identity of subjective and objective, the absolute
indifference of real and ideal, of form and essence, of universal and
particular; in this identity of the two there is neither the one nor
the other. But the unity is not abstract, empty, and dry; that would
signify logical identity, classification according to something common
to both, in which the difference remains all the while outside. The
identity is concrete: it is subjectivity as well as objectivity; the two
are present therein as abrogated and ideal. This identity may easily be
shown in the ordinary conception: the conception, we may for example
say, is subjective; it has, too, the determinate content of exclusion in
reference to other conceptions; nevertheless, the conception is simple—it
is one act, one unity.
What is lacking in Schelling’s philosophy is thus the fact that the
point of indifference of subjectivity and objectivity, or the Notion of
reason, is absolutely presupposed, without any attempt being made at
showing that this is the truth. Schelling often uses Spinoza’s form
of procedure, and sets up axioms. In philosophy, when we desire to
establish a position, we demand proof. But if we begin with intellectual
intuition, that constitutes an oracle to which we have to give way, since
the existence of intellectual intuition was made our postulate. The true
proof that this identity of subjective and objective is the truth, could
only be brought about by means of each of the two being investigated in
its logical, _i.e._ essential determinations; and in regard to them,
it must then be shown that the subjective signifies the transformation
of itself into the objective, and that the objective signifies its not
remaining such, but making itself subjective. Similarly in the finite,
it would have to be shown that it contained a contradiction in itself,
and made itself infinite; in this way we should have the unity of finite
and infinite. In so doing, this unity of opposites is not asserted
beforehand, but in the opposites themselves it is shown that their truth
is their unity, but that each taken by itself is one-sided—that their
difference veers round, casting itself headlong into this unity—while the
understanding all the time thinks that in these differences it possesses
something fixed and secure. The result of thinking contemplation would in
this former case be that each moment would secretly make itself into its
opposite, the identity of both being alone the truth. The understanding
certainly calls this transformation sophistry, humbug, juggling, and
what-not. As a result, this identity would, according to Jacobi, be
one which was no doubt conditioned and of set purpose produced. But we
must remark that a one-sided point of view is involved in apprehending
the result of development merely as a result; it is a process which is
likewise mediation within itself, of such a nature that this mediation is
again abrogated and asserted as immediate. Schelling, indeed, had this
conception in a general way, but he did not follow it out in a definite
logical method, for with him it remained an immediate truth, which can
only be verified by means of intellectual intuition. That is the great
difficulty in the philosophy of Schelling. And then it was misunderstood
and all interest taken from it. It is easy enough to show that subjective
and objective are different. Were they not different, nothing could be
made of them any more than of A = A; but they are in opposition _as one_.
In all that is finite, an identity is present, and this alone is actual;
but besides the fact that the finite is this identity, it is also true
that it is the absence of harmony between subjectivity and objectivity,
Notion and reality; and it is in this that finitude consists. To this
principle of Schelling’s, form, or necessity, is thus lacking, it is only
asserted. Schelling appears to have this in common with Plato and the
Neo-Platonists, that knowledge is to be found in the inward intuition
of eternal Ideas wherein knowledge is unmediated in the Absolute. But
when Plato speaks of this intuition of the soul, which has freed itself
from all knowledge that is finite, empirical, or reflected, and the
Neo-Platonists tell of the ecstasy of thought in which knowledge is the
immediate knowledge of the Absolute, this definite distinction must be
noticed, viz., that with Plato’s knowledge of the universal, or with
his intellectuality, wherein all opposition as a reality is abrogated,
dialectic is associated, or the recognized necessity for the abrogation
of these opposites; Plato does not begin with this, for with him the
movement in which they abrogate themselves is present. The Absolute is
itself to be looked at as this movement of self-abrogation; this is the
only actual knowledge and knowledge of the Absolute. With Schelling this
idea has, however, no dialectic present in it whereby those opposites may
determine themselves to pass over into their unity, and in so doing to be
comprehended.
2. Schelling begins with the idea of the Absolute as identity of the
subjective and objective, and accordingly there evinced itself in the
presentations of his system which followed, the further necessity of
proving this idea; this he attempted to do in the two Journals of
Speculative Physics. But if that method be once adopted, the procedure
is not immanent development from the speculative Idea, but it follows
the mode of external reflection. Schelling’s proofs are adduced in such
an exceedingly formal manner that they really invariably presuppose the
very thing that was to be proved. The axiom assumes the main point in
question, and all the rest follows as a matter of course. Here is an
instance: “The innermost essence of the Absolute can only be thought of
as identity absolute, altogether pure and undisturbed. For the Absolute
is only absolute, and what is thought in it is necessarily and invariably
the same, or in other words, is necessarily and invariably absolute. If
the idea of the Absolute were a general Notion” (or conception), “this
would not prevent a difference being met with in it, notwithstanding
this unity of the absolute. For things the most different are yet in the
Notion always one and identical, just as a rectangle, a polygon and a
circle are all figures. The possibility of the difference of all things
in association with perfect unity in the Notion lies in the manner in
which the particular in them is combined with the universal. In the
Absolute this altogether disappears, because it pertains to the very idea
of the Absolute that the particular in it is also the universal, and
the universal the particular; and further that by means of this unity
form and existence are also one in it. Consequently, in regard to the
Absolute, from the fact of its being the Absolute, there likewise follows
the absolute exclusion from its existence of all difference, and that at
once.”[422]
In the former of the two above-named works, the “Journal of Speculative
Physics,” Schelling began by again bringing forward the Substance
of Spinoza, simple, absolute Existence, inasmuch as he makes his
starting-point the absolute identity of the subjective and objective.
Here, like Spinoza, he employed the method of geometry, laying down
axioms and proving by means of propositions, then going on to deduce
other propositions from these, and so on. But this method has no real
application to philosophy. Schelling at this point laid down certain
forms of difference, to which he gave the name of potencies, adopting
the term from Eschenmayer, who made use of it (p. 514);[423] they are
ready-made differences, which Schelling avails himself of. But philosophy
must not take any forms from other sciences, as here from mathematics.
With Schelling, the leading form is that which was brought into
remembrance again by Kant, the form of triplicity as first, second, and
third potency.
Schelling, like Fichte, begins with I = I, or with the absolute
intuition, expressed as proposition or definition of the Absolute, that
“Reason is the absolute indifference of subject and object”: so that
it is neither the one nor the other, for both have in it their true
determination; and their opposition, like all others, is utterly done
away with. The true reality of subject and object is placed in this
alone, that the subject is not posited in the determination of subject
against object, as in the philosophy of Fichte; it is not determined
as in itself existent, but as subject-object, as the identity of the
two; in the same way the object is not posited according to its ideal
determination as object, but in as far as it is itself absolute, or
the identity of the subjective and objective. But the expression
“indifference” is ambiguous, for it means indifference in regard to
both the one and the other; and thus it appears as if the content of
indifference, the only thing which makes it concrete, were indifferent.
Schelling’s next requirement is that the subject must not be hampered
with reflection; that would be bringing it under the determination of
the understanding, which, equally with sensuous perception, implies
the separateness of sensuous things. As to the form of its existence,
absolute indifference is with Schelling posited as A = A; and this
form is for him the knowledge of absolute identity, which, however, is
inseparable from the Being or existence of the same.[424]
Thus, therefore, opposition, as form and reality or existence, no doubt
appears in this Absolute, but it is determined as a merely relative
or unessential opposition: “Between subject and object no other than
quantitative difference is possible. For no qualitative difference as
regards the two is thinkable,” because absolute identity “is posited as
subject and object only as regards the form of its Being, not as regards
its existence. There is consequently only a quantitative difference
left,” _i.e._ only that of magnitude: and yet difference must really be
understood as qualitative, and must thus be shown to be a difference
which abrogates itself. This quantitative difference, says Schelling,
is the form _actu_: “The quantitative difference of subjective and
objective is the basis of all finitude. Each determined potency marks
a determined quantitative difference of the subjective and objective.
Each individual Being is the result of a quantitative difference of
subjectivity and objectivity. The individual expresses absolute identity
under a determined form of Being:” so that each side is itself a relative
totality, A = B, and at the same time the one factor preponderates in
the one, and the other factor in the other, but both remain absolute
identity.[425] This is insufficient, for there are other determinations;
difference is undoubtedly qualitative, although this is not the absolute
determination. Quantitative difference is no true difference, but an
entirely external relation; and likewise the preponderance of subjective
and objective is not a determination of thought, but a merely sensuous
determination.
The Absolute itself, in so far as the positing of difference is taken
into account, is defined by Schelling as the quantitative indifference of
subjective and objective: in respect to absolute identity no quantitative
difference is thinkable. “Quantitative difference is only possible
outside of absolute identity, and outside of absolute totality. There
is nothing in itself outside of totality, excepting by virtue of an
arbitrary separation of the individual from the whole. Absolute identity
exists only under the form of the quantitative indifference of subjective
and objective.” Quantitative difference, which appears outside of
absolute identity and totality, is therefore, according to Schelling, in
itself absolute identity, and consequently thinkable only under the form
of the quantitative indifference of the subjective and objective. “This
opposition does not therefore occur in itself, or from the standpoint of
speculation. From this standpoint A exists just as much as B does; for A
like B is the whole absolute identity, which only exists under the two
forms, but under both of them alike. Absolute identity is the universe
itself. The form of its Being can be thought of under the image of a
line,” as shown by the following scheme:
+ +
A = B A = B
-----------------
A = A
“in which the same identity is posited in each direction, but with A or B
preponderating in opposite directions.”[426] If we go into details, the
main points from an elementary point of view are the following.
The first potency is that the first quantitative difference of the
Absolute, or “the first relative totality is matter. Proof: A = B is
not anything real either as relative identity or as relative duplicity.
As identity A = B, in the individual as in the whole, can be expressed
only by the line,”—the first dimension. “But in that line A is posited
throughout as existent,” _i.e._ it is at the same time related to B.
“Therefore this line presupposes A = B as relative totality throughout;
relative totality is therefore the first presupposition, and if relative
identity exists, it exists only through relative totality,”—this is
duplicity, the second dimension. “In the same way relative duplicity
presupposes relative identity. Relative identity and duplicity are
contained in relative totality, not indeed _actu_, but yet _potentia_.
Therefore the two opposites must mutually extinguish each other in
a third” dimension. “Absolute identity as the immediate basis of
the reality of A and B in matter, is the force of gravitation. If A
preponderates we have the force of attraction, if B preponderates we have
that of expansion. The quantitative positing of the forces of attraction
and expansion passes into the infinite; their equilibrium exists in the
whole, not in the individual.”[427] From matter as the first indifference
in immediacy Schelling now passes on to further determinations.
The second potency (A²) is light, this identity itself posited as
existent; in so far as A = B, A² is also posited. The same identity,
“posited under the form of relative identity,” _i.e._ of the polarity
which we find appearing “in A and B, is the force of cohesion. Cohesion
is the impression made on matter by the self-hood” of light “or by
personality, whereby matter first emerges as particular out of the
universal identity, and raises itself into the realm of form.” Planets,
metals and other bodies form a series which under the form of dynamic
cohesion expresses particular relations of cohesion, in which on the
one hand contraction preponderates, and on the other hand expansion.
These potencies appear with Schelling as north and south, east and west
polarity: their developments further appear as north-west, south-east,
&c. He counts as the last potency Mercury, Venus, the Earth, &c. He
continues: “Cohesion outside of the point of indifference I term passive.
Towards the negative side” (or pole) “fall some of the metals which
stand next to iron, after them the so-called precious metals,” then the
“diamond, and lastly carbon, the greatest passive cohesion. Towards the
positive side, again, some metals fall, in which the cohesive nature of
iron gradually diminishes,” _i.e._ approaches disintegration, and lastly
“disappears in nitrogen.” Active cohesion is magnetism, and the material
universe is an infinite magnet. The magnetic process is difference in
indifference, and indifference in difference, and therefore absolute
identity as such. The indifference point of the magnet is the “neither
nor” and the “as well as”; the poles are potentially the same essence,
only posited under two factors which are opposed. Both poles depend “only
upon whether + or - preponderates”; they are not pure abstractions. “In
the total magnet the empirical magnet is the indifference point. The
empirical magnet is iron. All bodies are mere metamorphoses of iron—they
are potentially contained in iron. Every two different bodies which touch
each other set up mutually in each other relative diminution and increase
of cohesion. This mutual alteration of cohesion by means of the contact
of two different bodies is electricity; the cohesion-diminishing factor
+E is the potency of hydrogen,-E is the potency of oxygen. The totality
of the dynamic process is represented only by the chemical process.”[428]
“By the positing of the dynamic totality the addition of light is
directly posited as a product. The expression, the total product,
therefore signifies light combined with the force of gravitation; by the
positing of the relative totality of the whole potency, the force of
gravity is directly reduced to the mere form of the Being of absolute
identity.” Thus is the third potency (A³), the organism.[429] Schelling
launched out into too many individual details, if he desired to indicate
the construction of the whole universe. On the one hand, however, he
did not complete this representation, and on the other hand, he has
confined himself mainly to implicit existence, and has mixed therewith
the formalism of external construction according to a presupposed scheme.
In this representation he advanced only as far as the organism, and did
not reach the presentation of the other side of knowledge, _i.e._ the
philosophy of spirit. Schelling began time after time, in accordance
with the idea implied in this construction, to work out the natural
universe, and especially the organism. He banishes all such meaningless
terms as perfection, wisdom, outward adaptability; or, in other words,
the Kantian formula, that a thing appears so and so to our faculty of
knowledge, is transformed by him into this other formula, that such and
such is the constitution of Nature. Following up Kant’s meagre attempt
at demonstrating spirit in nature, he devoted special attention to
inaugurating anew this mode of regarding nature, so as to recognize in
objective existence the same schematism, the same rhythm, as is present
in the ideal. Hence nature represents itself therein not as something
alien to spirit, but as being in its general aspect a projection of
spirit into an objective mode.
We have further to remark that Schelling by this theory became the
originator of modern Natural Philosophy, since he was the first to
exhibit Nature as the sensuous perception or the expression of the
Notion and its determinations. Natural Philosophy is no new science; we
met with it continually—in the works of Aristotle, for instance, and
elsewhere. English Philosophy is also a mere apprehension in thought of
the physical; forces, laws of Nature, are its fundamental determinations.
The opposition of physics and Natural Philosophy is therefore not the
opposition of the unthinking and the thinking view of Nature; Natural
Philosophy means, if we take it in its whole extent, nothing else
than the thoughtful contemplation of Nature; but this is the work of
ordinary physics also, since its determinations of forces, laws, &c.,
are thoughts. The only difference is that in physics thoughts are formal
thoughts of the understanding, whose material and content cannot, as
regards their details, be determined by thought itself, but must be
taken from experience. But concrete thought contains its determination
and its content in itself, and merely the external mode of appearance
pertains to the senses. If, then, Philosophy passes beyond the form of
the understanding, and has apprehended the speculative Notion, it must
alter the determinations of thought, the categories of the understanding
regarding Nature. Kant was the first to set about this; and Schelling has
sought to grasp the Notion of Nature, instead of contenting himself with
the ordinary metaphysics of the same. Nature is to him nothing but the
external mode of existence as regards the system of thought-forms, just
as mind is the existence of the same system in the form of consciousness.
That for which we have to thank Schelling, therefore, is not that he
brought thought to bear on the comprehension of Nature, but that he
altered the categories according to which thought applied itself to
Nature; he introduced forms of Reason, and applied them—as he did the
form of the syllogism in magnetism, for instance—in place of the ordinary
categories of the understanding. He has not only shown these forms in
Nature, but has also sought to evolve Nature out of a principle of this
kind.
In the “Further Exposition of the System of Philosophy” which the “New
Journal for Speculative Physics” furnishes, Schelling chose other forms;
for, by reason of incompletely developed form and lack of dialectic,
he had recourse to various forms one after another, because he found
none of them sufficient. Instead of the equilibrium of subjectivity
and objectivity, he now speaks of the identity of existence and form,
of universal and particular, of finite and infinite, of positive and
negative, and he defines absolute indifference sometimes in one and
sometimes in another form of opposition, just according to chance. All
such oppositions may be employed; but they are only abstract, and refer
to different stages in the development of the logical principle itself.
Form and essence are distinguished by Schelling in this way, that
form, regarded on its own account, is the particular, or the emerging
of difference, subjectivity. But real existence is absolute form or
absolute knowledge immediately in itself, a self-conscious existence in
the sense of thinking knowledge, just as with Spinoza it had the form
of something objective or in thought. Speculative Philosophy is to be
found in this assertion, not that it asserts an independent philosophy,
for it is purely organization; knowledge is based on the Absolute. Thus
Schelling has again given to transcendental Idealism the significance of
absolute Idealism. This unity of existence and form is thus, according
to Schelling, the Absolute; or if we regard reality as the universal,
and form as the particular, the Absolute is the absolute unity of
universal and particular, or of Being and knowledge. The different
aspects, subject and object, or universal and particular, are only ideal
oppositions; they are in the Absolute entirely and altogether one. This
unity as form is intellectual intuition, which posits Thinking and
Being as absolutely alike, and as it formally expresses the Absolute,
it becomes at the same time the expression of its essence. He who has
not the power of imagination, whereby he may represent this unity to
himself, is deficient in the organ of Philosophy. But in this consists
the true absoluteness of all and each, that the one is not recognized as
universal, and the other as particular, but the universal in this its
determination is recognized as unity of the universal and particular,
and in like manner the particular is recognized as the unity of both.
Construction merely consists in leading back everything determined and
particular into the Absolute, or regarding it as it is in absolute unity;
its determinateness is only its ideal moment, but its truth is really
its Being in the Absolute. These three moments or potencies—that of the
passing of existence (the infinite) into form (the finite), and of form
into existence (which are both relative unities), and the third, the
absolute unity, thus recur anew in each individual. Hence Nature, the
real or actual aspect, as the passing of existence into form or of the
universal into the particular, itself again possesses these three unities
in itself, and in the same way the ideal aspect does so; therefore each
potency is on its own account once more absolute. This is the general
idea of the scientific construction of the universe—to repeat in each
individual alike the triplicity which is the scheme of the whole, thereby
to show the identity of all things, and in doing so to regard them in
their absolute essence, so that they all express the same unity.[430]
The more detailed explanation is extremely formal: “Existence passes into
form—this taken by itself being the particular (the finite)—by means of
the infinite being added to it; unity is received into multiplicity,
indifference into difference.” The other assertion is: “Form passes into
existence by the finite being received into the infinite, difference into
indifference.” But passing into and receiving into are merely sensuous
expressions. “Otherwise expressed, the particular becomes absolute
form by the universal becoming one with it, and the universal becomes
absolute existence by the particular becoming one with it. But these two
unities, as in the Absolute, are not outside of one another, but in one
another, and therefore the Absolute is absolute indifference of form and
existence,” as unity of this double passing-into-one. “By means of these
two unities two different potencies are determined, but in themselves
they are both the exactly equal roots of the Absolute.”[431] That is a
mere assertion, the continual return after each differentiation, which is
perpetually again removed out of the Absolute.
“Of the first absolute transformation there are copies in phenomenal
Nature; therefore Nature, regarded in itself, is nothing else than
that first transformation as it exists in the absolute (unseparated
from the other). For by means of the infinite passing into the finite,
existence passes into form; since then form obtains reality only by
means of existence, existence, when it has passed into form without form
having (according to the assumption) similarly passed into existence,
can be represented only as potentiality or ground of reality, but not
as indifference of possibility and actuality. But that which may be
described thus, namely as existence, in so far as that is mere ground of
reality, and therefore has really passed into form, although form has not
in turn passed into it, is what presents itself as Nature.—Existence
makes its appearance in form, but in return form also makes its
appearance in existence; this is the other unity,” that of mind. “This
unity is established by the finite being received into the infinite. At
this point form, as the particular, strikes into existence, and itself
becomes absolute. Form which passes into existence places itself as
absolute activity and positive cause of reality in opposition to the
existence which passes into form, and which appears only as ground. The
passing of absolute form into existence is what we think of as God, and
the images or copies of this transformation are in the ideal world, which
is therefore in its implicitude the other unity.”[432] Each of these
two transformations, then, is the whole totality, not, however, posited
and not appearing as totality, but with the one or the other factor
preponderating; each of the two spheres has, therefore, in itself again
these differences, and thus in each of them the three potencies are to be
found.
The ground or basis, Nature as basis merely, is matter, gravity, as the
first potency; this passing of form into existence is in the actual world
universal mechanism, necessity. But the second potency is “the light
which shineth in darkness, form which has passed into existence. The
absolute unification of the two unities in actuality, so that matter is
altogether form, and form is altogether matter, is organism, the highest
expression of Nature as it is in God, and of God as He is in Nature, in
the finite.” On the ideal side “Knowledge is the essence of the Absolute
brought into the daylight of form; action is a transformation of form, as
the particular, into the essence of the Absolute. As in the real world
form that is identified with essence appears as light, so in the ideal
world God Himself appears in particular manifestation as the living form
which has emerged in the passing of form into essence, so that in every
respect the ideal and real world are again related as likeness and
symbol. The absolute unification of the two unities in the ideal, so that
material is wholly form and form wholly material, is the work of art;
and that secret hidden in the Absolute which is the root of all reality
comes here into view, in the reflected world itself, in the highest
potency and highest union of God and Nature as the power of imagination.”
On account of that permeation art and poetry therefore hold the highest
rank in Schelling’s estimation. But art is the Absolute in sensuous form
alone. Where and what could the work of art be, which should correspond
to the Idea of the spirit? “The universe is formed in the Absolute as
the most perfect organic existence and the most perfect work of art: for
Reason, which recognizes the Absolute in it, it possesses absolute truth;
for the imagination, which represents the Absolute in it, it possesses
absolute Beauty. Each of these expresses the very same unity,” regarded
“from different sides; and both arrive at the absolute indifference point
in the recognition of which lies both the beginning and the aim of real
knowledge.”[433] This highest Idea, these differences, are grasped as a
whole in a very formal manner only.
3. The relation of Nature to Spirit, and to God, the Absolute, has
been stated by Schelling elsewhere, _i.e._ in his later expositions,
as follows: he defines the existence of God as Nature—in so far as God
constitutes Himself its ground or basis, as infinite perception—and
Nature is thus the negative moment in God, since intelligence and
thought exist only by means of the opposition of one Being. For in one
of his writings, directed on some particular occasion against Jacobi,
Schelling explains himself further with regard to the nature of God and
His relation to Nature. He says: “God, or more properly the existence
which is God, is ground: He is ground of Himself as a moral Being.
But” then “it is ground that He makes Himself”—not cause. Something
must precede intelligence, and that something is Being—“since thought
is the exact opposite of Being. That which is the beginning of an
intelligence cannot be in its turn intelligent, since there would
otherwise be no distinction; but it cannot be absolutely unintelligent,
for the very reason that it is the potentiality of an intelligence. It
will accordingly be something between these, _i.e._ it will operate
with wisdom, but as it were with an innate, instinctive, blind, and
yet unconscious wisdom; just as we often hear those who are under a
spell uttering words full of understanding, but not uttering them with
comprehension of their meaning, but as it were owing to an inspiration.”
God, therefore, as this ground of Himself, is Nature—Nature as it is in
God; this is the view taken of Nature in Natural Philosophy.[434] But
the work of the Absolute is to abrogate this ground, and to constitute
itself Intelligence. On this account Schelling’s philosophy has later
been termed a Philosophy of Nature, and that in the sense of a universal
philosophy, while at first Natural Philosophy was held to be only a part
of the whole.
It is not incumbent on us here to give a more detailed account of
Schelling’s philosophy, or to show points in the expositions hitherto
given by him which are far from satisfactory. The system is the latest
form of Philosophy which we had to consider, and it is a form both
interesting and true. In the first place special emphasis, in dealing
with Schelling, must be laid on the idea that he has grasped the true
as the concrete, as the unity of subjective and objective. The main
point in Schelling’s philosophy thus is that its interest centres round
that deep, speculative content, which, as content, is the content with
which Philosophy in the entire course of its history has had to do.
The Thought which is free and independent, not abstract, but in itself
concrete, comprehends itself in itself as an intellectually actual
world; and this is the truth of Nature, Nature in itself. The second
great merit possessed by Schelling is to have pointed out in Nature the
forms of Spirit; thus electricity, magnetism, &c., are for him only
external modes of the Idea. His defect is that this Idea in general,
its distinction into the ideal and the natural world, and also the
totality of these determinations, are not shown forth and developed as
necessitated in themselves by the Notion. As Schelling has not risen to
this point of view, he has misconceived the nature of thought; the work
of art thus becomes for him the supreme and only mode in which the Idea
exists for spirit. But the supreme mode of the Idea is really its own
element; thought, the Idea apprehended, is therefore higher than the work
of art. The Idea is the truth, and all that is true is the Idea; the
systematizing of the Idea into the world must be proved to be a necessary
unveiling and revelation. With Schelling, on the other hand, form is
really an external scheme, and his method is the artificial application
of this scheme to external objects. This externally applied scheme
takes the place of dialectic progress; and this is the special reason
why the philosophy of Nature has brought itself into discredit, that it
has proceeded on an altogether external plan, has made its foundation a
ready-made scheme, and fitted into it Nature as we perceive it. These
forms were potencies with Schelling, but instead of mathematical forms
or a type of thought like this, by some other men sensuous forms have
been taken as basis, just as were sulphur and mercury by Jacob Boehme.
For instance, magnetism, electricity, and chemistry have been defined to
be the three potencies in Nature, and thus in the organism reproduction
has been termed chemistry; irritability, electricity; and sensibility,
magnetism.[435] In this way there has crept into Natural Philosophy
the great formalism of representing everything as a series, which is a
superficial determination without necessity, since instead of Notions
we find formulas. Brilliant powers of imagination are displayed, such
as were exhibited by Görres. This mistake of applying forms which are
taken from one sphere of Nature to another sphere of the same has been
carried a long way; Oken, for example, calls wood-fibres the nerves and
brain of the plant, and is almost crazy on the subject. Philosophy would
in this way become a play of mere analogical reflections; and it is not
with these but with thoughts that we have to do. Nerves are not thoughts,
any more than such expressions as pole of contraction, of expansion,
masculine, feminine, &c. The formal plan of applying an external scheme
to the sphere of Nature which one wishes to observe, is the external
work of Natural Philosophy, and this scheme is itself derived from the
imagination. That is a most false mode of proceeding; Schelling took
advantage of it to some extent, others have made a complete misuse of it.
All this is done to escape thought; nevertheless, thought is the ultimate
simple determination which has to be dealt with.
It is therefore of the greatest importance to distinguish Schelling’s
philosophy, on the one hand, from that imitation of it which throws
itself into an unspiritual farrago of words regarding the Absolute; and,
on the other hand, from the philosophy of those imitators, who, owing to
a failure to understand intellectual intuition, give up comprehension,
and with it the leading moment of knowledge, and speak from so-called
intuition, _i.e._ they take a glance at the thing in question, and having
fastened on it some superficial analogy or definition, they fancy they
have expressed its whole nature, while in point of fact they put an
end to all capacity for attaining to scientific knowledge. This whole
tendency places itself, in the first place, in opposition to reflective
thought, or to progress in fixed, steadfast, immovable Notions. But
instead of remaining in the Notion and recognizing it as the unresting
ego, they have lighted on the opposite extreme of passive intuition,
of immediate Being, of fixed implicitude; and they think that they can
make up for the lack of fixity by superficial observation, and can
render this observation intellectual by determining it once more by some
fixed Notion or other; or they bring their minds to bear on the object
of consideration by saying, for instance, that the ostrich is the fish
among birds, because he has a long neck—fish becomes a general term, but
not a Notion. This whole mode of reasoning, which has forced its way
into natural history and natural science, as well as into medicine, is a
miserable formalism, an irrational medley of the crudest empiricism with
the most superficial ideal determinations that formalism ever descended
to. The philosophy of Locke is not so crude as it is, for it is not a
whit better in either its content or its form, and it is combined with
foolish self-conceit into the bargain. Philosophy on this account sank
into general and well-deserved contempt, such as is for the most part
extended to those who assert that they have a monopoly of philosophy.
Instead of earnestness of apprehension and circumspection of thought,
we find in them a juggling with idle fancies, which pass for deep
conceptions, lofty surmises, and even for poetry; and they think they
are right in the centre of things when they are only on the surface.
Five-and-twenty years ago[436] the case was the same with poetic art; a
taste for ingenious conceits took possession of it, and the effusions
of its poetic inspiration came forth blindly from itself, shot out as
from a pistol. The results were either crazy ravings, or, if they were
not ravings, they were prose so dull that it was unworthy of the name of
prose. It is just the same in the later philosophies. What is not utterly
senseless drivel about the indifference-point and polarity, about oxygen,
the holy, the infinite, &c., is made up of thoughts so trivial that we
might well doubt our having correctly apprehended their meaning, in the
first place because they are given forth with such arrogant effrontery,
and in the second place because we cannot help trusting that what was
said was not so trivial as it seems. As in the Philosophy of Nature men
forgot the Notion and proceeded in a dead unspiritual course, so here
they lose sight of spirit entirely. They have strayed from the right
road; for by their principle, Notion and perception are one unity, but in
point of fact this unity, this spirit, itself emerges in immediacy, and
is therefore in intuitive perception, and not in the Notion.
E. FINAL RESULT.
The present standpoint of philosophy is that the Idea is known in its
necessity; the sides of its diremption, Nature and Spirit, are each of
them recognized as representing the totality of the Idea, and not only as
being in themselves identical, but as producing this one identity from
themselves; and in this way the identity is recognized as necessary.
Nature, and the world or history of spirit, are the two realities; what
exists as actual Nature is an image of divine Reason; the forms of
self-conscious Reason are also the forms of Nature. The ultimate aim
and business of philosophy is to reconcile thought or the Notion with
reality. It is easy from subordinate standpoints to find satisfaction
in modes of intuitive perception and of feeling. But the deeper the
spirit goes within itself, the more vehement is the opposition, the
more abundant is the wealth without; the depth is to be measured by
the greatness of the craving with which spirit seeks to find itself
in what lies outside of itself. We saw the thought which apprehends
itself appearing; it strove to make itself concrete within itself. Its
first activity is formal; Aristotle was the first to say that νοῦς is
the thought of thought. The result is the thought which is at home
with itself, and at the same time embraces the universe therein, and
transforms it into an intelligent world. In apprehension the spiritual
and the natural universe are interpenetrated as one harmonious universe,
which withdraws into itself, and in its various aspects develops the
Absolute into a totality, in order, by the very process of so doing, to
become conscious of itself in its unity, in Thought. Philosophy is thus
the true theodicy, as contrasted with art and religion and the feelings
which these call up—a reconciliation of spirit, namely of the spirit
which has apprehended itself in its freedom and in the riches of its
reality.
To this point the World-spirit has come, and each stage has its own form
in the true system of Philosophy; nothing is lost, all principles are
preserved, since Philosophy in its final aspect is the totality of forms.
This concrete idea is the result of the strivings of spirit during almost
twenty-five centuries of earnest work to become objective to itself, to
know itself:
_Tantæ molis erat, se ipsam cognoscere mentem._
All this time was required to produce the philosophy of our day; so
tardily and slowly did the World-spirit work to reach this goal. What we
pass in rapid review when we recall it, stretched itself out in reality
to this great length of time. For in this lengthened period, the Notion
of Spirit, invested with its entire concrete development, its external
subsistence, its wealth, is striving to bring spirit to perfection, to
make progress itself and to develop from spirit. It goes ever on and on,
because spirit is progress alone. Spirit often seems to have forgotten
and lost itself, but inwardly opposed to itself, it is inwardly working
ever forward (as when Hamlet says of the ghost of his father, “Well said,
old mole! canst work i’ the ground so fast?”[437]), until grown strong
in itself it bursts asunder the crust of earth which divided it from the
sun, its Notion, so that the earth crumbles away. At such a time, when
the encircling crust, like a soulless decaying tenement, crumbles away,
and spirit displays itself arrayed in new youth, the seven league boots
are at length adopted. This work of the spirit to know itself, this
activity to find itself, is the life of the spirit and the spirit itself.
Its result is the Notion which it takes up of itself; the history of
Philosophy is a revelation of what has been the aim of spirit throughout
its history; it is therefore the world’s history in its innermost
signification. This work of the human spirit in the recesses of thought
is parallel with all the stages of reality; and therefore no philosophy
oversteps its own time. The importance which the determinations of
thought possessed is another matter, which does not belong to the history
of Philosophy. These Notions are the simplest revelation of the World
spirit: in their more concrete form they are history.
We must, therefore, in the first place not esteem lightly what spirit has
won, namely its gains up to the present day. Ancient Philosophy is to be
reverenced as necessary, and as a link in this sacred chain, but all the
same nothing more than a link. The present is the highest stage reached.
In the second place, all the various philosophies are no mere fashionable
theories of the time, or anything of a similar nature; they are neither
chance products nor the blaze of a fire of straw, nor casual eruptions
here and there, but a spiritual, reasonable, forward advance; they are of
necessity one Philosophy in its development, the revelation of God, as He
knows Himself to be. Where several philosophies appear at the same time,
they are different sides which make up one totality forming their basis;
and on account of their one-sidedness we see the refutation of the one by
the other. In the third place we do not find here feeble little efforts
to establish or to criticize this or that particular point; instead of
that, each philosophy sets up a new principle of its own, and this must
be recognized.
If we glance at the main epochs in the whole history of Philosophy, and
grasp the necessary succession of stages in the leading moments, each of
which expresses a determinate Idea, we find that after the Oriental whirl
of subjectivity, which attains to no intelligibility and therefore to no
subsistence, the light of thought dawned among the Greeks.
1. The philosophy of the ancients had the absolute Idea as its thought;
and the realization or reality of the same consisted in comprehending the
existing present world, and regarding it as it is in its absolute nature.
This philosophy did not make its starting-point the Idea itself, but
proceeded from the objective as from something given, and transformed the
same into the Idea; the Being of Parmenides.
2. Abstract thought, νοῦς, became known to itself as universal essence or
existence, not as subjective thought; the Universal of Plato.
3. In Aristotle the Notion emerges, free and unconstrained, as
comprehending thought, permeating and spiritualizing all the forms which
the universe contains.
4. The Notion as subject, its independence, its inwardness, abstract
separation, is represented by the Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics: here
we have not the free, concrete form, but universality abstract and in
itself formal.
5. The thought of totality, the intelligible world, is the concrete
Idea as we have seen it with the Neo-Platonists. This principle is
ideality generally speaking, which is present in all reality, but not
the Idea which knows itself: this is not reached until the principle
of subjectivity, individuality, found a place in it, and God as spirit
became actual to Himself in self-consciousness.
6. But it has been the work of modern times to grasp this Idea as spirit,
as the Idea that knows itself. In order to proceed from the conscious
Idea to the self-conscious, we must have the infinite opposition, namely
the fact that the Idea has come to the consciousness of being absolutely
sundered in twain. As spirit had the thought of objective existence,
Philosophy thus perfected the intellectuality of the world, and produced
this spiritual world as an object existing beyond present reality,
like Nature,—the first creation of spirit. The work of the spirit now
consisted in bringing this Beyond back to reality, and guiding it into
self-consciousness. This is accomplished by self-consciousness thinking
itself, and recognizing absolute existence to be the self-consciousness
that thinks itself. With Descartes pure thought directed itself on
that separation which we spoke of above. Self-consciousness, in the
first place, thinks of itself as consciousness; therein is contained
all objective reality, and the positive, intuitive reference of its
reality to the other side. With Spinoza Thought and Being are opposed
and yet identical; he has the intuitive perception of substance, but
the knowledge of substance in his case is external. We have here the
principle of reconciliation taking its rise from thought as such, in
order to abrogate the subjectivity of thought: this is the case in
Leibnitz’s monad, which possesses the power of representation.
7. In the second place, self-consciousness thinks of itself as being
self-consciousness; in being self-conscious it is independent, but
still in this independence it has a negative relation to what is
outside self-consciousness. This is infinite subjectivity, which
appears at one time as the critique of thought in the case of Kant, and
at another time, in the case of Fichte, as the tendency or impulse
towards the concrete. Absolute, pure, infinite form is expressed as
self-consciousness, the Ego.
8. This is a light that breaks forth on spiritual substance, and shows
absolute content and absolute form to be identical;—substance is in
itself identical with knowledge. Self-consciousness thus, in the third
place, recognizes its positive relation as its negative, and its negative
as its positive,—or, in other words, recognizes these opposite activities
as the same, _i.e._ it recognizes pure Thought or Being as self-identity,
and this again as separation. This is intellectual perception; but it
is requisite in order that it should be in truth intellectual, that it
should not be that merely immediate perception of the eternal and the
divine which we hear of, but should be absolute knowledge. This intuitive
perception which does not recognize itself is taken as starting-point as
if it were absolutely presupposed; it has in itself intuitive perception
only as immediate knowledge, and not as self-knowledge: or it knows
nothing, and what it perceives it does not really know,—for, taken at its
best, it consists of beautiful thoughts, but not knowledge.
But intellectual intuition is knowledge, since, in the first place, in
spite of the separation of each of the opposed sides from the other, all
external reality is known as internal. If it is known according to its
essence, as it is, it shows itself as not existing of itself, but as
essentially consisting in the movement of transition. This Heraclitean
or Sceptical principle, that nothing is at rest, must be demonstrated of
each individual thing; and thus in this consciousness—that the essence of
each thing lies in determination, in what is the opposite of itself—there
appears the apprehended unity with its opposite. Similarly this unity is,
in the second place, to be recognized even in its essence; its essence
as this identity is, in the same way, to pass over into its opposite, or
to realize itself, to become for itself something different; and thus
the opposition in it is brought about by itself. Again, it may be said
of the opposition, in the third place, that it is not in the Absolute;
this Absolute is existence, the eternal, &c. This is, however, itself an
abstraction in which the Absolute is apprehended in a one-sided manner
only, and the opposition is apprehended only as ideal (_supra_, p.
536); but in fact it is form, as the essential moment of the movement
of the Absolute. This Absolute is not at rest, and that opposition is
not the unresting Notion; for the Idea, unresting though it is, is
yet at rest and satisfied in itself. Pure thought has advanced to the
opposition of the subjective and objective; the true reconciliation of
the opposition is the perception that this opposition, when pushed to
its absolute extreme, resolves itself; as Schelling says, the opposites
are in themselves identical—and not only in themselves, but eternal life
consists in the very process of continually producing the opposition and
continually reconciling it. To know opposition in unity, and unity in
opposition—this is absolute knowledge; and science is the knowledge of
this unity in its whole development by means of itself.
This is then the demand of all time and of Philosophy. A new epoch has
arisen in the world. It would appear as if the World-spirit had at last
succeeded in stripping off from itself all alien objective existence,
and apprehending itself at last as absolute Spirit, in developing
from itself what for it is objective, and keeping it within its own
power, yet remaining at rest all the while. The strife of the finite
self-consciousness with the absolute self-consciousness, which last
seemed to the other to lie outside of itself, now comes to an end. Finite
self-consciousness has ceased to be finite; and in this way absolute
self-consciousness has, on the other hand, attained to the reality which
it lacked before. This is the whole history of the world in general up
to the present time, and the history of Philosophy in particular, the
sole work of which is to depict this strife. Now, indeed, it seems to
have reached its goal, when this absolute self-consciousness, which it
had the work of representing, has ceased to be alien, and when spirit
accordingly is realized as spirit. For it becomes such only as the result
of its knowing itself to be absolute spirit, and this it knows in real
scientific knowledge. Spirit produces itself as Nature, as the State;
nature is its unconscious work, in the course of which it appears to
itself something different, and not spirit; but in the State, in the
deeds and life of History, as also of Art, it brings itself to pass with
consciousness; it knows very various modes of its reality, yet they are
only modes. In scientific knowledge alone it knows itself as absolute
spirit; and this knowledge, or spirit, is its only true existence. This
then is the standpoint of the present day, and the series of spiritual
forms is with it for the present concluded.
At this point I bring this history of Philosophy to a close. It has been
my desire that you should learn from it that the history of Philosophy is
not a blind collection of fanciful ideas, nor a fortuitous progression.
I have rather sought to show the necessary development of the successive
philosophies from one another, so that the one of necessity presupposes
another preceding it. The general result of the history of Philosophy is
this: in the first place, that throughout all time there has been only
one Philosophy, the contemporary differences of which constitute the
necessary aspects of the one principle; in the second place, that the
succession of philosophic systems is not due to chance, but represents
the necessary succession of stages in the development of this science;
in the third place, that the final philosophy of a period is the
result of this development, and is truth in the highest form which the
self-consciousness of spirit affords of itself. The latest philosophy
contains therefore those which went before; it embraces in itself all the
different stages thereof; it is the product and result of those that
preceded it. We can now, for example, be Platonists no longer. Moreover
we must raise ourselves once for all above the pettinesses of individual
opinions, thoughts, objections, and difficulties; and also above our
own vanity, as if our individual thoughts were of any particular value.
For to apprehend the inward substantial spirit is the standpoint of the
individual; as parts of the whole, individuals are like blind men, who
are driven forward by the indwelling spirit of the whole. Our standpoint
now is accordingly the knowledge of this Idea as spirit, as absolute
Spirit, which in this way opposes to itself another spirit, the finite,
the principle of which is to know absolute spirit, in order that absolute
spirit may become existent for it. I have tried to develop and bring
before your thoughts this series of successive spiritual forms pertaining
to Philosophy in its progress, and to indicate the connection between
them. This series is the true kingdom of spirits, the only kingdom of
spirits that there is—it is a series which is not a multiplicity, nor
does it even remain a series, if we understand thereby that one of its
members merely follows on another; but in the very process of coming to
the knowledge of itself it is transformed into the moments of the one
Spirit, or the one self-present Spirit. This long procession of spirits
is formed by the individual pulses which beat in its life; they are the
organism of our substance, an absolutely necessary progression, which
expresses nothing less than the nature of spirit itself, and which
lives in us all. We have to give ear to its urgency—when the mole that
is within forces its way on—and we have to make it a reality. It is my
desire that this history of Philosophy should contain for you a summons
to grasp the spirit of the time, which is present in us by nature,
and—each in his own place—consciously to bring it from its natural
condition, _i.e._ from its lifeless seclusion, into the light of day.
I have to express my thanks to you for the attention with which you have
listened to me while I have been making this attempt; it is in great
measure due to you that my efforts have met with so great a measure of
success. And it has been a source of pleasure to myself to have been
associated with you in this spiritual community; I ought not to speak of
it as if it were a thing of the past, for I hope that a spiritual bond
has been knit between us which will prove permanent. I bid you a most
hearty farewell.
* * * * *
(The closing lecture of the series was given on the 22nd March, 1817; on
the 14th March, 1818; on the 12th August, 1819; on the 23rd March, 1821;
on the 30th March, 1824; on the 28th March, 1828; and on the 26th March,
1830.)
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Neander. Genet. Entwickelung d. vornehmsten gnost. Systeme, p. 43.
[2] Neander. Genetische Entwickelung, &c., pp. 87-91.
[3] Tennemann, Vol. VIII Section I. p. 366; Buhle: Lehrb. d. Gesch. d.
Phil. Part V. p. 36; Brucker. Hist. crit. phil. T. III. pp. 23, 24; 28,
29.
[4] Moses Maimonides: More Nevochim, P. I. c. 71, pp. 133, 134 (Basil.
1629).
[5] Abulphar. Dynast. IX. pp. 153, 171, 208, 209; Brucker. Hist. crit.
phil. T. III. pp. 27-29, 44.
[6] Moses Maimonides: More Nevochim, P. I. c. 73, pp. 152-155, 157-159.
[7] Pocock. Specim. hist. Arab. pp. 78, 79; Hottinger. Biblioth. orient.
c. 2, p. 219; Brucker. Hist. cr. phil. T. III. pp. 65, 66; Tennemann,
Vol. VIII. Section I. p. 374.
[8] Hottinger. Biblioth. orient. c. 2, p. 221; Gabriel Sionita: De
moribus Orient. p. 16; Brucker. Hist. cr. phil. T. III. pp. 73, 74;
Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section I. pp. 374, 375.
[9] Leo Africanus: De illustrib. Arabum viris, c. 9, p. 268; Abulphar.
Dynast. IX. p. 230, Tiedemann, Geist. d. spec. Phil. Vol. IV. p. 112,
_sqq._, Brucker. Hist. cr. phil. T. III. pp. 80-84.
[10] Leo Afric. De illustrib. Arabum viris, c. 12, p. 274; Brucker. Hist.
cr. phil. T. III. pp. 93-95; Tiedemann, Geist. d. spec. Phil. Vol. IV.
pp. 120-126, Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section I. pp. 383-396.
[11] Brucker. Hist. cr. phil. T. III. p. 97.
[12] Brucker. Hist. cr. phil. T. III. p. 101; Tennemann, Vol. III.