SCHELLING.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph (von) Schelling was born January 27, 1775, at
Leonberg (in Würtemberg), and died August 20, 1854, at the baths of Ragatz
(in Switzerland). In 1790-95 he attended the seminary at Tübingen, in
company with Hölderlin and Hegel, who were five years older than himself;
at seventeen he published a dissertation on the Fall of Man, and a
year later an essay on Religious Myths; and was called in 1798 from
Leipsic--where, after several treatises[1] in explanation of the Science
of Knowledge, he had issued, in 1797, the _Ideas for a Philosophy of
Nature_--to Jena. In the latter place he became acquainted with his future
wife, Caroline,[2] _née_ Michaëlis (1763-1809), widow of Böhmer and at this
time the brilliant wife of August Wilhelm Schlegel. From 1803 to 1806 he
served as professor in Würzburg; then followed two residences of fourteen
years each in Munich, separated by seven years in Erlangen: 1806-20 as
Member of the Academy of Sciences and General Secretary of the Academy of
the Plastic Arts (he received this latter position after delivering on the
king's birthday his celebrated address on "The Relation of the Plastic
Arts to Nature," 1807); and 1827-41 as professor in the newly established
university, and President of the Academy of Sciences. In 1812 Schelling
married his second wife, Pauline Gotter. Besides various journals[3] and
the works to be noticed later, two polemic treatises should be mentioned,
the _Exposition of the True Relation of the Philosophy of Nature to the
Improved Doctrine of Fichte_, 1806, in which his former friend is charged
with plagiarism, and the _Memorial of the Treatise on Divine Things by Herr
Jacobi_, 1812, which answers a bitter attack of Jacobi still more bitterly.
From this on our philosopher, once so fond of writing, becomes silent.[4]
The often promised issue of the positive philosophy, which had already been
twice commenced in print (_The Ages of the World_, 1815; _Mythological
Lectures_, 1830), was both times suspended. Being called to the Berlin
Academy by Frederick William IV., in order to counterbalance the prevailing
Hegelianism, Schelling delivered lectures in the university also (on
Mythology and Revelation), which he ceased, however, when notes taken by
his hearers were printed without his consent.[5] His collected works were
published in fourteen volumes (1856-61) under the care of his son, K.E.A.
Schelling.[6]
[Footnote 1: _On the Possibility of a Form of Philosophy in General_, _On
the Ego as Principle of Philosophy_, both in 1795; _Letters on Dogmatism
and Criticism_, 1796; _Essays in Explanation of the Science of Knowledge_,
1797.]
[Footnote 2: _Karoline_, Letters, edited by G. Waitz, 1871.]
[Footnote 3: _Kritisches Journal der Philosophie_ (with Hegel), 1802;
_Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik_, 1800 (continued as _Neue Zeitschrift
für spekulative Physik_); _Jahrbücher der Medizin als Wissenschaft_ (with
Marcus), 1806-08; _Allgemeine Zeitschrift von Deutschen für Deutsche_,
1813.]
[Footnote 4: Besides a supplement to _Die Weltalter_ and his inaugural
lecture at Berlin, he published only two prefaces, one to _Viktor Cousin
über französische und deutsche Philosophie_, done into German by Hubert
Beckers, 1834, and one to Steffens's _Nachgelassene Schriften_, 1846.]
[Footnote 5: Paulus, _Die endüch offenbar gewordene positive Philosophie
der Offenbarung_, 1843. Frauenstädt had previously published a sketch from
this later doctrine, 1842.]
[Footnote 6: On Schelling cf. the Lectures by K. Rosenkranz, 1843; the
articles by Heyder in vol. xiii. of Herzog's _Realencyclopädie für
protestantische Theologie_, 1860, and Jodl in the _Allgemeine deutsche
Biographie_; R. Haym, _Die romantische Schule_, 1870; _Aus Schellings
Leben, in Briefen_, edited by Plitt, 3 vols., 1869-70. [Cf. also Watson's
_Schelling's Transcendental Idealism_ (Griggs's Philosophical Classics,
1882); and several translations from Schelling in the _Journal of
Speculative Philosophy_.--TR.]]
The leading motive in Schelling's thinking is an unusually powerful fancy,
which gives to his philosophy a lively, stimulating, and attractive
character, without making it to a like degree logically satisfactory. If
the systems of Fichte and Hegel, which in their content are closely related
to Schelling's, impress us by their logical severity, Schelling chains us
by his lively intuition and his suggestive power of feeling his way into
the inner nature of things. With him analogies outweigh reasons; he is
more concerned about the rich content of concepts than about their sharp
definition; and in the endeavor to show the unity of the universe, both in
the great and in the little, especially to show the unity of nature and
spirit, he dwells longer on the relationship of objects than on their
antitheses, which he is glad to reduce to mere quantitative and temporary
differences. He adds to this an astonishing mobility of thought, in virtue
of which every offered suggestion is at once seized and worked into his own
system, though in this the previous standpoint is unconsciously exchanged
for a somewhat altered one. Schelling's philosophy is, therefore, in a
continual state of flux, nearly every work shows it in a new form, and it
is always ideas from without whose incorporation has caused the transition.
Besides Leibnitz, Kant, and Fichte, who were already familiar to Schelling
as a pupil at Tübingen, it was first Herder, then Spinoza and Bruno, who
exerted a transforming influence on his system, to be followed later by
Neoplatonism and Böhme's mysticism, and, finally, by Aristotle and
the Gnostics, not to speak of his intercourse with his contemporaries
Kielmeyer, Steffens, Baader, Eschenmayer, and others. Omitting his early
adherence to Fichte, at least three periods must be distinguished
in Schelling's thinking. The first period (1797-1800) includes the
epoch-making feat of his youth, the _philosophy of nature_, and, as an
equally legitimate second part of his system, the philosophy of spirit or
_transcendental philosophy_. The latter is a supplementary recasting of
Fichte's Science of Knowledge, while in the former Schelling follows Kant
and Herder. The second period, from 1801, adds to these two co-ordinate
parts, the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit, and as a
fundamental discipline, a science of the absolute, the _philosophy of
identity_, which may be characterized as Spinozism revived on a Fichtean
basis. Besides the example of Spinoza, Giordano Bruno had most influence on
this form of Schelling's philosophy. With the year 1809, after the signs of
a new phase had become perceptible from 1804 on, his system enters on its
third, the theosophical, period, the period of the _positive philosophy_,
in which we shall distinguish a mystical and a scholastic stage. The former
is represented by the doctrine of freedom inspired by Jacob Böhme; the
latter, by the philosophy of mythology and revelation, which goes back to
Aristotle and the Gnostics. In the first period the absolute for Schelling
is creative nature; in the second, the identity of opposites; in the third
it is an antemundane process which advances from the not-yet-present of
the contraries to their overcoming. In neither of these advances is it
Schelling's intention to break with his previous teachings, but in each
case only to add a supplement. That which has hitherto been the whole is
retained as a part. The philosophy of nature takes its place beside the
completed Fichtean transcendental philosophy, with equal rights, though
with a reversed procedure; then the theory of identity assumes a place
above both; finally, a positive (existential) philosophy is added to the
previous negative (rational) philosophy.
%1a. Philosophy of Nature.%
Schelling agrees with Fichte that philosophy is transcendental science,
the doctrine of the conditions of consciousness, and has to answer the
question, What must take place in order that knowledge may arise? They
agree, further, that these conditions of knowledge are necessary acts,
outgoings of an active original ground which is not yet conscious self, but
seeks to become such, and that the material world is the product of these
actions. Nature exists in order that the ego may develop. But while Fichte
correctly understood the purpose of nature, to help intelligence into
being, he failed to recognize the dignity of nature, for he deprived it of
all self-dependence, all life of its own, all generative power, and treated
it merely as a dead tool, as a passive, merely posited non-ego. Nature
is not a board which the original ego nails up before itself in order,
striking against it, to be driven back upon itself, to be compelled to
reflection, and thereby to become theoretical ego; in order, further,
working over the non-ego, and transforming it, to exercise its practical
activity: but it is a ladder on which spirit rises to itself. Spirit
develops out of nature; nature itself has a spiritual element in it; it
is undeveloped, slumbering, unconscious, benumbed intelligence. By
transferring to nature the power of self-position or of being subject,
Schelling exalts the drudge of the Science of Knowledge to the throne.
The threefold division, "infinite original activity--nature or
object--individual ego or subject," remains as in Fichte, only that the
first member is not termed pure ego, but nature, yet creative nature,
_natura naturans_. Schelling's aim is to show how from the object a subject
arises, from the existent something represented, from the representable a
representer, from nature an ego. He could only hope to solve this problem
if he conceived natural objects--in the highest of which, man, he makes
conscious spirit break forth or nature intuit itself--as themselves the
products of an original subject, of a creative ground striving toward
consciousness. For him also doing is more original than being. It would not
be exact, therefore, to define the difference between Fichte and Schelling
by saying that, with the former, nature proceeds from the ego, and with the
latter the ego, from nature. It is rather true that with them both nature
and spirit are alike the products of a third and higher term, which seeks
to become spirit, and can accomplish this only by positing nature. In the
Science of Knowledge, it is true, this higher ground is conceived as an
ethical, in the Philosophy of Nature as a physical, power, although one
framed for intelligence; in the former, moreover, the _natura naturata_
appears as the position once for all of a non-spiritual, in the latter as
a progressive articulated construction, with gradually increasing
intelligence. In the unconscious products of nature, nature's aim to
reflect upon itself, to become intelligence, fails, in man it succeeds.
Nature is the embryonic life of spirit. Nature and spirit are essentially
identical: "That which is posited _out of_ consciousness is in its essence
the same as that which is posited _in_ consciousness also." Therefore
"the knowable must itself bear the impress of the knower." Nature the
preliminary stage, not the antithesis, of spirit; history, a continuation
of physical becoming; the parallelism between the ideal and the real
development-series--these are ideas from Herder which Schelling introduces
into the transcendental philosophy. The Kantio-Fichtean moralism, with
its sharp contraposition of nature and spirit, is limited in the
_Naturphilosophie_ by Herder's physicism.
"Nature _is a priori_" (everything individual in it is pre-determined by
the whole, by the Idea of a nature in general); hence the forms of nature
can be deduced from the concept of nature. The philosopher creates nature
anew, he constructs it. Speculative physics considers nature as _subject_,
becoming, productivity (not, like empirical science, as object, being,
product), and for this purpose it needs, instead of individualizing
reflection, an intuition directed to the whole. To this productive nature,
as to the absolute ego of Fichte, are ascribed two opposite activities,
one expansive or repulsive, and one attractive, and on these is based the
universal law of _polarity_. The absolute productivity strives toward an
infinite product, which it never attains, because apart from arrest no
product exists. At definite points a check must be given it in order that
something knowable may arise. Thus every product in nature is the result
of a positive, centrifugal, accelerating, universalizing force, and a
negative, limiting, retarding, individualizing one. The endlessness of the
creative activity manifests itself in various ways: in the striving for
development on the part of every product, in the preservation of the genus
amid the disappearance of individuals, in the endlessness of the series of
products. Nature's creative impulse is inexhaustible, it transcends every
product. Qualities are points of arrest in the one universal force of
nature; all nature is a connected development. Because of the opposition in
the nature-ground between the stimulating and the retarding activity, the
law of duality everywhere rules. To these two forces, however, still a
third factor must be added as their copula, which determines the relation
or measure of their connection. This is the source of the threefold
division of the Philosophy of Nature. The magnet with its union of opposite
polar forces is the type of all configuration in nature.
With Fichte's synthetic method and Herder's naturalistic principles
Schelling combines Kantian ideas, especially Kant's dynamism (matter is
a force-product),[1] and his view of the organic (organisms are
self-productive beings, and are regarded by us as ends in themselves,
because of the interaction between their members and the whole). The three
organic functions sensibility, irritability, and reproduction, on the other
hand, Schelling took from Kielmeyer, whose address _On the Relations of
the Organic Forces_, 1793, excited great attention. The concept of life is
dominant in Schelling's theory of nature. The organic is more original than
the inorganic; the latter must be explained from the former; that which is
dead must be considered as a product of departing life. No less erroneous
than the theory of a magic vital force is the mechanical interpretation,
which looks on life merely as a chemical phenomenon. The dead, mechanical
and chemical, forces are merely the negative conditions of life; to them
there must be added as a positive force a vital stimulus external to the
individual, which continually rekindles the conflict between the opposing
activities on which the vital process depends. Life consists, that is, in
the perpetual prevention of the equilibrium which is the object of the
chemical process. This constant disturbance proceeds from "universal
nature," which, as the common principle of organic and inorganic nature, as
that which determines them for each other, which founds a pre-established
harmony between them, deserves the name of the world-soul. Schelling
thus recognizes a threefold nature: organized, inorganic, and universal
organizing (according to Harms, cosmical) nature, of which the two former
arise from the third and are brought by it into connection and harmony. (As
Schelling here takes an independent middle course between the mechanical
explanation of life and the assumption of a specific vital force, so in
all the burning physical questions of the time he seeks to rise above the
contending parties by means of mediating solutions. Thus, in the question
of "single or double electricity," he ranges himself neither on the side of
Franklin nor on that of his opponents; in regard to the problem of light,
endeavors to overcome the antithesis between Newton's emanation theory and
the undulation theory of Euler; and, in his chapter on combustion, attacks
the defenders of phlogiston as well as those who deny it).
[Footnote 1: Schelling terms his philosophy of nature dynamic atomism,
since it posits pure intensities as the simple (atoms), from which
qualities are to be explained.]
Schelling's philosophy of nature[1] proposes to itself three chief
problems: the construction of general, indeterminate, homogeneous
matter, with differences in density alone, of determinate, qualitatively
differentiated matter and its phenomena of motion or the dynamical process,
and of the organic process. For each of these departments of nature an
original force in universal nature is assumed--gravity, light, and their
copula, universal life. Gravity--this does not mean that which as the force
of attraction falls within the view of sensation, for it is the union of
attraction and repulsion--is the principle of corporeality, and produces
in the visible world the different conditions of aggregation in solids,
fluids, and gases. Light--this, too, is not to be confounded with actual
light, of which it is the cause--is the principle of the soul (from it
proceeds all intelligence, it is a spiritual potency, the "first subject"
in nature), and produces in the visible world the dynamical processes
magnetism, electricity, and chemism. The higher unity of gravity and
light is the copula or life, the principle of the organic, of animated
corporeality or the processes of growth and reproduction, irritability,
and sensibility.
[Footnote 1: This is contained in the following treatises: _Ideas for a
Philosophy of Nature, 1797; On the World-soul, 1798; First Sketch of a
System of the Philosophy of Nature, 1799; Universal Deduction of the
Dynamical Process or the Categories of Physics_ (in the _Zeitschrift für
spekulative Physik_) 1800. In the above exposition, however, the modified
philosophy of nature of the second period has also been taken into
account.]
General _matter_ or the filling of space, arises from the co-operation of
three forces: the centrifugal, which manifests itself as repulsion (first
dimension), the centripetal, manifested as attraction (second dimension),
and the synthesis of the two, manifested as gravity (third dimension).
These forces are raised by light to a higher potency, and then make their
appearance as the causes of the _dynamical_ process or of the specific
differences of matter. The linear function of magnetism is the condition
of coherence; the surface force of electricity, the basis of the qualities
perceivable by sense; the tri-dimensional force of the chemical process, in
which the two former are united, produces the chemical qualities. Galvanism
forms the transition to living nature, in which through the operation of
the "copula" these three dynamical categories are raised to _organic_
categories. To magnetism as the most general, and hence the lowest force,
corresponds reproduction (the formative impulse, as nutrition, growth, and
production, including the artistic impulse); electricity develops into
irritability or excitability; the higher analogue to the chemical process
as the most individual and highest stage is sensibility or the capacity
of feeling. (Such at least is Schelling's doctrine after Steffens had
convinced him of the higher dignity of that which is individual, whereas
at first he had made sensibility parallel with magnetism, and reproduction
with chemism, because the former two appear most seldom, and the latter
most frequently. Electricity and irritability always maintained their
intermediate position.) With the awakening of feeling nature has attained
its goal--intelligence. As inorganic substances are distinguished only by
relative degrees of repulsion and attraction, so the differentiation of
organisms is conditioned by the relation of the three vital functions: in
the lower forms reproduction predominates, then irritability gradually
increases, while in the highest forms both of these are subordinated to
sensibility. All species, however, are connected by a common life, all the
stages are but arrests of the same fundamental force. This accentuation
of the unity of nature, which establishes a certain kinship between
Schelling's philosophy of nature and Darwinism, was a great idea, which
deserves the thanks of posterity in spite of such defects as its often
sportive, often heedlessly bold reasoning in details.
The parallelism of the potencies of nature, as we have developed it by
leaving out of account the numerous differences between the various
expositions of the _Naturphilosophie_, may be shown by a table:
I. UNIVERSAL NATURE. II. INORGANIC NATURE III. ORGANIC NATURE.
(ORGANIZING)
3. Copula 3. Organization
or Life. |
___^___ /Chemical \ G | /Sensi- Man.
/ \ |Process (3d| a | |bility. __^__
2. Light 2._Dynamical_|Dimen- | l | | / \
(Soul). _Process_. < sion) | v | |Irritabi- Male
b. At- \ (Determi- |Electri- | a |_|lity. (=Light)
traction.| nate |city (2d Di->n |Animal.
>1. Gra- matter.) | mension.) | i |
| vity 1. Indeter- |Magnetism | s |Repro- Female
a. Re- | (Body) minate |(1st Di- | m |duction (-Gravity)
pulsion / _matter_. \ mension.) / \ Plant.
%1b. Transcendental Philosophy.%
The philosophy of nature explained the products of nature teleologically,
deduced them from the concept or the mission of nature, by ignoring the
mechanical origin of physical phenomena and inquiring into the significance
of each stage in nature in view of this ideal meaning of the whole. It asks
what is the outcome of the chemical process for the whole of nature, what
is given by electricity, by magnetism, etc.--what part of the general aim
of nature is attained, is realized through this or that group of phenomena.
The philosophy of spirit given in the _System of Transcendental Idealism_,
1800, finds itself confronted by corresponding questions concerning the
phenomena of intelligence, of morals, and of art. Here again Schelling does
not trace out the mechanics of the soul-life, but is interested only in the
meaning, in the teleological significance of the psychical functions.
His aim is a constructive psychology in the Fichtean sense, a history of
consciousness, and the execution of his design as well closely follows the
example of the _Wissenschaftslehre_.
Since truth is the agreement of thought and its object, every cognition
necessarily implies the coming together of a subjective and an objective
factor. The problem of this coming together may be treated in two ways.
With the philosophy of nature we may start from the object and observe how
intelligence is added to nature. The transcendental philosophy takes the
opposite course, it takes its position with the subject, and asks, How
is there added to intelligence an object corresponding to it? The
transcendental philosopher has need of intellectual intuition in order to
recognize the original object-positing actions of the ego, which remain
concealed from common consciousness, sunk in the outcome of these acts. The
_theoretical_ part of the system explains the representation of objective
reality (the feeling connected with certain representations that we are
compelled to have them), from pure self-consciousness, whose opposing
moments, a real and an ideal force, limit each other by degrees,--and
follows the development of spirit in three periods ("epochs"). The first
of these extends from sensation, in which the ego finds itself limited, to
productive intuition, in which a thing in itself is posited over against
the ego and the phenomenon between the two; the second, from this point to
reflection (feeling of self, outer and inner intuition together with space
and time, the categories of relation as the original categories); the
third, finally, through judgment, wherein intuition and concept are
separated as well as united, up to the absolute act of will. Willing is
the continuation and completion of intuition;[1] intuition was unconscious
production, willing is conscious production. It is only through action that
the world becomes objective for us, only through interaction with other
active intelligences that the ego attains to the consciousness of a real
external world, and to the consciousness of its freedom. The _practical_
part follows the will from impulse (the feeling of contradiction between
the ideal and the object) through the division into moral law and resistant
natural impulse up to arbitrary will. Observations on legal order, on the
state, and on history are added as "supplements." The law of right, by
which unlawful action is directed against itself, is not a moral, but a
natural order, which operates with blind necessity. The state, like law, is
a product of the genus, and not of individuals. The ideal of a cosmopolitan
legal condition is the goal of _history_, in which caprice and conformity
to law are one, in so far as the conscious free action of individuals
subserves an unconscious end prescribed by the world-spirit. History is the
never completed revelation of the absolute (of the unity of the conscious
and the unconscious) through human freedom. We are co-authors in the
historical world-drama, and invent our own parts. Not until the third (the
religious) period, in which he reveals himself as "providence," will God
_be_; in the past (the tragical) period, in which the divine power was felt
as "fate," and in the present (the mechanical) period, in which he appears
as the "plan of nature," God is not, but is only _becoming_.
[Footnote 1: With this transformation of the antithesis between knowledge
and volition into a mere difference in degree, Schelling sinks back to the
standpoint of Leibnitz. In all the idealistic thinkers who start from Kant
we find the endeavor to overcome the Critical dualism of understanding and
will, as also that between intellect and sensibility. Schiller brings the
contrary impulses of the ego into ultimate harmonious union in artistic
activity. Fichte traces them back to a common ground; Schelling combines
both these methods by extolling art as a restoration of the original
identity. Hegel reduces volition to thought, Schopenhauer makes intellect
proceed from will.]
An interesting supplement to the Fichtean philosophy is furnished by the
third, the _aesthetic_, part of the transcendental idealism, which makes
use of Kant's theory of the beautiful in a way similar to that in which the
philosophy of nature had availed itself of his theory of the organic.
Art is the higher third in which the opposition between theoretical and
practical action, the antithesis of subject and object, is removed; in
which cognition and action, conscious and unconscious activity, freedom and
necessity, the impulse of genius and reflective deliberation are united.
The beautiful, as the manifestation of the infinite in the finite, shows
the problem of philosophy, the identity of the real and the ideal, solved
in sensuous appearance. Art is the true organon and warrant of philosophy;
she opens up to philosophy the holy of holies, is for philosophy the
supreme thing, the revelation of all mysteries. Poesy and philosophy (the
aesthetic intuition of the artist and the intellectual intuition of
the thinker) are most intimately related; they were united in the old
mythology--why should not this repeat itself in the future?
%2. System of Identity.%
The assertion which had already been made in the first period that "nature
and spirit are fundamentally the same," is intensified in the second into
the proposition, "The ground of nature and spirit, the absolute, is the
identity of the real and the ideal," and in this form is elevated into
a principle. As the absolute is no longer employed as a mere ground of
explanation, but is itself made the object of philosophy, the doctrine of
identity is added to the two co-ordinate disciplines, the philosophy of
nature and the philosophy of spirit, as a higher third, which serves as a
basis for them, and in Schelling's exposition of which several phases must
be distinguished.[1]
[Footnote 1: The philosophy of identity is given in the following
treatises: _Exposition of my System of Philosophy, 1801; Further
Expositions of the System of Philosophy, 1802; Bruno, or on the Divine and
Natural Principle of Things, 1803; Lectures on the Method of Academical
Study, 1803; Aphorisms by way of Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature,
Aphorisms on the Philosophy of Nature_ (both in the _Jahrbücher für
Medizin), 1806_. Besides these the following also bear on this doctrine:
the additions to the second edition of the _Ideas_, 1803, and the
_Exposition_, against Fichte, 1806.]
Following Spinoza, whom he at first imitated even in the geometrical method
of proof, Schelling teaches that there are two kinds of knowledge, the
philosophical knowledge of the reason and the confused knowledge of
the imagination, and, as objects of these, two forms of existence, the
infinite, undivided existence of the absolute, and the finite existence of
individual things, split up into multiplicity and becoming. The manifold
and self-developing things of the phenomenal world owe their existence
to isolating thought alone; they possess as such no true reality, and
speculation proves them void. While things appear particular to inadequate
representation, the philosopher views them _sub specie aeterni_, in their
_per se_, in their totality, in the identity, as Ideas. To construe things
is to present them as they are in God. But in God all things are one;
in the absolute all is absolute, eternal, infinitude itself. (Accord-to
Hegel's parody, the absolute is the night, in which all cows are black.)
The world-ground appears as nature and spirit; yet in itself it is neither
the one nor the other, but the unity of both which is raised above all
contrariety, the indifference of objective and subjective. Although amid
the finitude of the things of the world the self-identity of the absolute
breaks up into a plurality of self-developing individual existences, yet
even in the phenomenal world of individuals the unity of the ground is not
entirely lost: each particular existence is a definite expression of the
absolute, and to it as such the character of identity belongs, though in
a diminished degree and mingled with difference (Bruno's "monads"). The
world-ground is absolute, the individual thing is relative, identity and
totality; nothing exists which is merely objective or merely subjective;
everything is both, only that one or other of these two factors always
predominates. This Schelling terms quantitative difference: the phenomena
of nature, like the phenomena of spirit, are a unity of the real and the
ideal, only that in the former there is a preponderance of the real, in the
latter a preponderance of the ideal.
At first Schelling, in Neoplatonic fashion, maintained the existence of
another intermediate region between the spheres of the infinite and the
finite: absolute knowing or the self-knowledge of the identity. In this,
as the "form" of the absolute, the objective and the subjective are not
absolutely one, as they are in the being or "essence" of the absolute, but
ideally (potentially) opposed, though one _realiter_. Later he does away
with this distinction also, as existing for reflection alone, not for
rational intuition, and outbids his earlier determinations concerning the
simplicity of the absolute with the principle, that it is not only the
unity of opposites, but also the unity of the unity and the opposition or
the identity of the identity, in which fanciful description the dialogue
_Bruno_ pours itself forth. A further alteration is brought in by
characterizing the absolute as the identity of the finite and the infinite,
and by equating the finite with the real or being, the infinite with the
ideal or knowing. With this there is joined a philosophical interpretation
of the Trinity akin to Lessing's. In the absolute or eternal the finite
and the infinite are alike absolute. God the Father is the eternal, or the
unity of the finite and the infinite; the Son is the finite in God (before
the falling away); the Spirit is the infinite or the return of the finite
into the eternal.
In the construction of the real series Schelling proceeds still more
schematically and analogically than in the _Naturphilosophie_ of the first
period, the contents of which are here essentially reproduced. With this is
closely connected his endeavor, in correspondence with the principles of
the theory of identity, to show in every phenomenon the operation of
all three moments of the absolute. In each natural product all three
"potencies" or stages, gravity A(^1), light A(^2), and organization A(^3),
are present, only in subordination to one of their number. Since the third
potency is never lacking, all is organic; that which appears to us as
inorganic matter is only the residuum left over from organization,
that which could become neither plant nor animal. New here is the
cohesion-series of Steffens (the phenomenon of magnetism), in which
nitrogen forms the south pole, carbon the north pole, and iron the point of
indifference, while oxygen, hydrogen, and water represent the east pole,
west pole, and indifference point in electrical polarity. In the organic
world plants represent the carbon pole, animals the nitrogen pole; the
former is the north pole, the latter the south. Moreover, the points of
indifference reappear: the plant corresponds to water, the animal to iron.
Schelling was far outdone in fantastic analogies of this kind by his
pupils, especially by Oken, who in his _Sketch of the Philosophy of
Nature_, 1805, compares the sense of hearing, for example, to the parabola,
to a metal, to a bone, to the bird, to the mouse, and to the horse. As
nature was the imaging of the infinite (unity or essence) into the finite
(plurality or form), so spirit is the taking up of the finite into the
infinite. In the spiritual realm also all three divine original potencies
are every, where active, though in such a way that one is dominant. In
intuition (sensation, consciousness, intuition, each in turn thrice
divided) the infinite and the eternal are subordinated to the finite; in
thought or understanding (concept, judgment, inference, each in three
kinds) the finite and the eternal are subordinated to the infinite; in
reason (which comprehends all under the form of the absolute) the finite
and the infinite are subordinated to the eternal. Intuition is finite
cognition, thought infinite cognition, reason eternal cognition. The forms
of the understanding do not suffice for the knowledge of reason; common
logic with its law of contradiction has no binding authority for
speculation, which starts with the equalization of opposites. In the
_Aphorisms by way of Introduction_ science, religion, and art figure as
stages of the ideal all, in correspondence with the potencies of the real
all--matter, motion, and organization. Nature culminates in man, history
in the state. Reason, philosophy, is the re-establishment of identity, the
return of the absolute to itself.
Unconditioned knowledge, as Schelling maintains in his encyclopedia,
_i.e._, his _Lectures on the Method of Academical Study_, is the
presupposition of all particular knowledge. The function of universities is
to maintain intact the connection between particular knowledge and absolute
knowledge. The three higher faculties correspond to the three potencies in
the absolute: Natural Science and Medicine to the real or finite; History
and Law to the ideal or infinite; Theology to the eternal or the copula.
There is further a faculty of arts, the so-called Philosophical Faculty,
which imparts whatever in philosophy is teachable. The two lectures on
theology (viii. and ix.) are especially important. There are two forms of
religion, one of which discovers God in nature, while the other finds him
in history; the former culminates in the Greek religion, the latter in the
Christian, and with the founding of this the third period of history (which
Schelling had previously postponed into the future), the period of
providence begins. In Christianity mythology is based on religion, not
religion on mythology, as was the case in heathenism. The speculative
kernel of Christianity is the incarnation of God, already taught by the
Indian sages; this, however, is not to be understood as a single event in
time, but as eternal. It has been a hindrance to the development of
Christianity that the Bible, whose value is far below that of the sacred
books of India, has been more highly prized than that which the patristic
thinking succeeded in making out of its meager contents.
If, finally, we compare Schelling's system of identity with its model, the
system of Spinoza, two essential differences become apparent. Although both
thinkers start from a principiant equal valuation of the two phenomenal
manifestations of the absolute, nature and spirit, Spinoza tends to posit
thought in dependence on extension (the soul represents what the body is),
while in Schelling, conversely, the Fichtean preference of spirit is still
potent (the state and art stand nearer to the absolute identity
than the organism, although, principiantly considered, the greatest
possible approximation to the equilibrium of the real and the ideal is as
much attained in the one as in the other). The second difference lies in
the fact that the idea of development is entirely lacking in Spinoza, while
in Schelling it is everywhere dominant. It reminds one of Lessing and
Herder, who also attempted to combine Spinozistic and Leibnitzian elements.
%3a. Doctrine of Freedom.%
The system of identity had, with Spinoza, distinguished two worlds, the
real world of absolute identity and the imagined world of differentiated
and changeable individual things; it had traced back the latter to the
former as its ground, but had not deduced it from the former. Whence, then,
the imagination which, instead of the unchangeable unity, shows us the
changing manifold? Whence the imperfections of the finite, whence evil?
The pantheism of Spinoza is inseparably connected with determinism, which
denies evil without explaining it. Evil and finitude demand explanation,
not denial, and this without the abandonment of pantheism. But explanation
by what? By the absolute, for besides the absolute there is naught. How,
then, must the pantheistic doctrine of the absolute be transformed in order
that the fact of evil and the separate existence of the finite may become
comprehensible? To this task are devoted the _Inquiries into the Nature of
Human Freedom (Philosophical Works_, vol. i., 1809, with which should be
compared the _Memorial of Jacobi_, 1812, and the _Answer to Eschenmayer_,
1813).
As early as in the _Bruno_, the problem occasionally emerges why matters do
not rest with the original infinite unity of the absolute, why the finite
breaks away from the identical primal ground. The possibility of the
separation, it is answered, lies in the fact that the finite is like the
infinite _realiter_, and yet, ideally, is different from it; the actuality
of the coming forth, however, lies in the non-deducible self-will of
the finite. Then after Eschenmayer[1] _(Philosophy in its Transition to
Not-philosophy_, 1803) had characterized the procession of the Ideas out of
the Godhead as an impenetrable mystery for thought, before which philosophy
must yield to faith, Schelling, in the essay _Religion and Philosophy_,
1804, goes more deeply into the problem. The origin of the sense-world is
conceivable only as a breaking away, a spring, a _falling away_,
which consists in the soul's grasping itself in its selfhood, in its
subordination of the infinite in itself to the finite, and in its thus
ceasing to be in God. The procession of the world from the infinite is a
free act, a fact which can only be described, not deduced as necessary. The
counterpart of this attainment of independence on the part of things or
creation is history as the return of the world to its source. They are
related to each other as the fall to redemption. Both the dismission of the
world and its reception back, together with the intervening development,
are, however, events needed by God himself in order to become actual God:
He develops through the world. (A similar thought was not unknown in the
Middle Ages: if God is to give a complete revelation of himself he must
make known his grace; and this presupposes sin. As the occasion of divine
grace, the fall is a happy, saving fault; without it God could not have
revealed himself as gracious, as forgiving, hence not completely.)
Schelling's study of Jacob Böhme, to which he was led by Baader,
essentially contributed to the concentration of his thought on this point.
_The Exposition of the True Relation_, etc., already distinctly betrays the
influence of this mystic. In correspondence with Böhme's doctrine that God
is living God only through his inclusion of negation in himself, it is here
maintained: A being can manifest itself only when it is not merely one, but
has another, an opposition (the many), in itself, whereby it is revealed to
itself as unity. With the addition of certain Kantian ideas, in particular
the idea of transcendental freedom and the intelligible character,
Schelling's theosophy now assumes the following form:
The only way to guard against the determinism and the lifeless God of
Spinoza is to assume something in God which is not God himself, to
distinguish between God as existent and that which is merely the ground of
his existence or "nature in God." In God also the perfect proceeds from the
imperfect, he too develops and realizes himself. The actual, perfect God,
who is intelligence, wisdom, goodness, is preceded by something which is
merely the possibility of all this, an obscure, unconscious impulse toward
self-representation. For in the last analysis there is no being but
willing; to willing alone belong the predicates of the primal being,
groundlessness, eternity, independence of time, self-affirmation. This
"ground of existence" is an obscure "longing" to give birth to self, an
unconscious impulse to become conscious; the goal of this longing is the
"understanding," the Logos, the Word, wherein God becomes revealed to self.
By the self-subordination of this longing to the understanding as its
matter and instrument, God becomes actual God, becomes spirit and love. The
operation of the light understanding on the dark nature-will consists in a
separation of forces, whence the visible world proceeds. Whatever in the
latter is perfect, rational, harmonious, and purposive is the work of the
understanding; the irrational remainder, on the other hand, conflict and
lawlessness, abortion, sickness and death, originates in the dark ground.
Each thing has two principles in it: its self-will it receives from nature
in God, yet, at the same time, as coming from the divine understanding,
it is the instrument of the universal will. In God the light and dark
principles stand in indissoluble unity, in man they are separable. The
freedom of man's will makes him independent of both principles; going over
from truth to falsehood, he may strive to make his selfhood supreme and
to reduce the spiritual in him to the level of a means, or--with divine
assistance--continuing in the center, he may endeavor to subordinate
the particular will to the will of love. Good consists in overcoming
resistance, for in every case a thing can be revealed only through its
opposite. If man yields to temptation it is his own guilty choice. Evil is
not merely defect, privation, but something positive, selfhood breaking
away, the reversal of the rightful order between the particular and the
universal will. The possibility of a separation of the two wills lies in
the divine ground (it is "permitted" in order that by overmastering the
self-will the will of love may approve itself), the actuality of evil is
the free act of the creature. Freedom is to be conceived, in the Kantian
sense, as equally far removed from chance or caprice and from compulsion:
Man chooses his own non-temporal, intelligible nature; he predestinates
himself in the first creation, _i.e._, from eternity, and is responsible
for his actions in the sense-world, which are the necessary results of that
free primal act.
[Footnote 1: K. Ad. Eschenmayer was originally a physician, then, 1811-36,
professor of philosophy in Tübingen, and died in 1852 at Kirchheim unter
Teck.]
As in nature and in the individual, so also in the history of mankind, the
two original grounds of things do battle with one another. The golden age
of innocence, of happy indecision and unconsciousness concerning sin, when
neither good nor evil yet was, was followed by a period of the omnipotence
of nature, in which the dark ground of existence ruled alone, although
it did not make itself felt as actual evil until, in Christianity, the
spiritual light was born in personal form. The subsequent conflict of good
against evil, in which God reveals himself as spirit, leads toward a state
wherein evil will be reduced to the position of a potency and everything
subordinated to spirit, and thus the complete identity of the ground of
existence and the existing God be brought about.
Besides this after-reconciliation of the two divine moments, Schelling
recognizes another, original unity of the two. The not yet unfolded unity
of the beginning (God as Alpha) he terms _indifference_ or groundlessness;
the more valuable unity of the end, attained by unfolding (God as Omega)
is called _identity_ or spirit. In the former the contraries are not yet
present; in the latter they are present no longer. The groundless divides
into two equally eternal beginnings, nature and light, or longing and
understanding, in order that the two may become one in love, and thereby
the absolute develop into the personal God. In this way Schelling endeavors
to overcome the antithesis between naturalism and theism, between dualism
and pantheism, and to remove the difficulties which arise for pantheism
from the fact of evil, as well as from the concepts of personality and of
freedom.
In the two moments of the absolute (nature in God--personal spirit) we
recognize at once the antithesis of the real and ideal which was given
in the philosophy of identity. The chief difference between the mystical
period and the preceding one consists in the fact that the absolute itself
is now made to develop (from indifference to identity, from the neither-nor
to the as-well-as of the antithesis), and that there is conceded to the
sense-world a reality which is more than apparent, more than merely present
for imagination. That which facilitated this rapid, almost unceasing change
of position for Schelling, and which at the same time concealed the fact
from him, was, above all, the ambiguous and variable meaning of his leading
concepts. The "objective," for example, now signifies unconscious being,
becoming, and production, now represented reality, now the real, in so far
as it is not represented, but only _is_. "God" sometimes means the whole
absolute, sometimes only the infinite, spiritual moment in the absolute.
Scarcely a single term is sharply defined, much less consistently used in a
single meaning.
%3b. Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation.%
Once again Schelling is ready with a new statement of the problem.
Philosophy is the science of the existent. In this, however, a distinction
is to be made between the _what (quid sit)_ and the _that (quod sit)_, or
between essence and existence. The apprehension of the essence, of the
concept, is the work of reason, but this does not go as far as actual
being. Rational philosophy cognizes only the universal, the possible,
the necessary truths (whose contradictory is unthinkable), but not the
particular and factual. This philosophy can only assert: If anything exists
it must conform to these laws; existence is not given with the _what_.
Hegel has ignored this distinction between the logical and the actual, has
confused the rational and the real. Even the system of identity was merely
rational, _i.e., negative_, philosophy, to which there must be added, as a
second part, a positive or existential philosophy, which does not, like the
former, rise to the highest principle, to God, but starts from this supreme
Idea and shows its actuality.
The content of this phase of Schelling's thought[1] was so unfruitful, and
its influence so small, that brief hints concerning it must here suffice.
First of all, the doctrine of the divine potencies and of creation is
repeated in altered form, and then there is given a philosophy of the
history of religion as a reflection of the theogonic process in human
consciousness.
[Footnote 1: On Schelling's negative and positive philosophy, published in
the four volumes of the second division of the _Works_, cf. Karl Groos,
_Die reine Vernunftwissenschaft, systematische Darstellung von Schellings
negativer Philosophie_, 1889; Konstantin Frantz, _Schellings positive
Philosophie_, in three parts, 1879-80; Ed. von Hartmann, _Gesammelte
Studien und Aufsätze_, 1876, p. 650 _seq_.; Ad. Planck, _Schellings
nachgelassene Werke_, 1858; also the essay by Heyder, referred to above].
The potencies are now called the infinite ability to be (inactive will,
subject), pure being (being without potentiality, object), and spirit,
which is free from the one-sidednesses of mere potentiality and of
mere being, and master of itself (subject-object); to these is added,
further--not as a fourth, but as that which has the three predicates and
is wholly in each--the absolute proper, as the cause and support of these
attributes. The original unity of the three forms is dissolved, as the
first raises itself out of the condition of a mere potency and withdraws
itself from pure being in order to exist for itself; the tension extends
itself to the two others--the second now comes out from its selflessness,
subdues the first, and so leads the third back to unity. In creation
the three potencies stand related as the unlimited Can-be, the limiting
Must-be, and the Ought-to-be, or operate as material, formal, and final
causes, all held in undivided combination by the soul. It was not until the
end of creation that they became personalities. Man, in whom the potencies
come to rest, can divide their unity again; his fall calls forth a new
tension, and thereby the world becomes a world outside of God. History, the
process o progressive reconciliation between the God-estranged world and
God, passes through two periods--heathenism, in which the second person
works as a natural potency, and Christianity, in which it works with
freedom. In the discussion of these positive philosophy becomes a
_philosophy of mythology and revelation_. The irresistible force of
mythological ideas is explained by the fact that the gods are not creations
of the fancy, but real powers, namely, these potencies, which form the
substance of human conciousness.
The history of religion has for its starting-point the relative monotheism
of humanity in its original unity, and for its goal the absolute monotheism
of Christianity. With the separation into nations polytheism arises. This
is partly simultaneous polytheism (a plurality of gods under a chief god),
partly successive polytheism (an actual plurality of divinities, changing
dynasties of several chief gods), and develops from star worship or Sabeism
up to the religion of the Greeks. The Greek mysteries form the transition
from mythology to revelation. While in the mythological process one or
other of the divine potencies (Ground, Son, Spirit) was always predominant,
in Christianity they return into unity. The true monotheism of revelation
shows God as an articulated unity, in which the opposites are contained,
as being overcome. The person of Christ constitutes the content of
Christianity, who, in his incarnation and sacrificial death, yields up the
independence out of God which had come to him through the fall of man.
The three periods in the development of the Church (real, substantial
unity--ideality or freedom--the reconciliation of the two) were
foreshadowed in the chief apostles: Peter, with his leaning toward the
past, represents the Papal Church; Paul the thinker the Protestant Church;
and the gentle John the Church of the future.