Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775–1854)

Like the other German Idealists, Schelling began his philosophical career by acknowledging the fundamental importance of Kant’s grounding of knowledge in the synthesizing activity of the subject, while questioning his establishment of a dualism between appearances and things in themselves. The other main influences on Schelling’s early work are Leibniz, Spinoza, J.G. Fichte and F.H. Jacobi. While adopting both Spinoza’s conception of an absolute ground, of which the finite world is the consequent, and Fichte’s emphasis on the role of the I in the constitution of the world, Schelling seeks both to overcome the fatalism entailed by Spinoza’s monism, and to avoid the sense in Fichte that nature only exists in order to be subordinated to the I. After adopting a position close to that of Fichte between 1794 and 1796, Schelling tried in his various versions of Naturphilosophie from 1797 onwards to find new ways of explicating the identity between thinking and the processes of nature, claiming that in this philosophy ‘Nature is to be invisible mind, mind invisible nature’. In his System des transcendentalen Idealismus (System of Transcendental Idealism) 1800) he advanced the idea that art, as the ‘organ of philosophy’, shows the identity of what he terms ‘conscious’ productivity (mind) and ‘unconscious’ productivity (nature) because it reveals more than can be understood via the conscious intentions that lead to its production. Schelling’s ‘identity philosophy’, which is another version of his Naturphilosophie, begins in 1801, and is summarized in the assertion that ‘Existence is the link of a being as One, with itself as a multiplicity’. Material nature and the mind that knows it are different aspects of the same ‘Absolute’ or ‘absolute identity’ in which they are both grounded. In 1804 Schelling becomes concerned with the transition between the Absolute and the manifest world in which necessity and freedom are in conflict. If freedom is not to become inexplicable, he maintains, Spinoza’s assumption of a logically necessary transition from God to the world cannot be accepted. Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände (Of Human Freedom) (1809) tries to explain how God could create a world involving evil, suggesting that nature relates to God somewhat as the later Freud’s ‘id’ relates to the developed autonomous ‘ego’ which transcends the drives which motivate it.

The philosophy of Die Weltalter (The Ages of the World) , on which Schelling worked during the 1810s and 1820s, interprets the intelligible world, including ourselves, as the result of an ongoing conflict between expansive and contractive forces. He becomes convinced that philosophy cannot finally give a reason for the existence of the manifest world that is the product of this conflict. This leads to his opposition, beginning in the 1820s, to Hegel’s philosophical system, and to an increasing concern with theology. Hegel’s system claims to be without presuppositions, and thus to be self-grounding. While Schelling accepts that the relations of dependence between differing aspects of knowledge can be articulated in a dynamic system, he thinks that this only provides a ‘negative’ philosophy, in which the fact of being is to be enclosed within thought. What he terms ‘positive’ philosophy tries to come to terms with the facticity of ‘being which is absolutely independent of all thinking’ (2 (3): 164). Schelling endeavours in his Philosophie der Mythologie (Philosophy of Mythology) and Philosophie der Offenbarung (Philosophy of Revelation) of the 1830s and 1840s to establish a complete philosophical system by beginning with ‘that which just exists…in order to see if I can get from it to the divinity’ (2 (3): 158 ), which leads to a historical account of mythology and Judeo-Christian revelation. This system does not, though, overcome the problem of the ‘alterity’ of being, its irreducibility to a philosophical system, which his critique of Hegel reveals. The direct and indirect influence of this critique on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rosenzweig, Levinas, Derrida and others is evident, and Schelling must be considered as the key transitional figure between Hegel and approaches to ‘post-metaphysical’ thinking.

1 Transcendental philosophy and Naturphilosophie (1795–1800)

Schelling was born in Leonberg, near Stuttgart, on 27 January 1775. He attended a Protestant seminary in Tübingen from 1790 to 1795, where he was close friends with both Hegel and Friedrich Hölderlin. He moved to Leipzig in 1797, then to Jena, where, via Goethe’s influence, he took up his first professorship from 1798 to 1803. From 1803 to 1806 he lived in Würzburg, whence he left for Munich, where he mainly lived from 1806 onwards, with an interruption from 1820 to 1827, when he lived in Erlangen. He moved to Berlin in 1841 to take up what had been Hegel’s chair of philosophy. He died on 20 August 1854 in Ragaz, Switzerland.

Schelling’s early philosophy was inspired by the French Revolution and by the revolution in philosophy inaugurated by Kant, particularly as interpreted in the work of J.G. Fichte. The tensions in Schelling’s philosophy of this period, which set the agenda for most of his subsequent work, derive from a series of related sources. In the view of the early Schelling, Kant failed to explain the nature of the subject’s knowledge of itself: in Kantian terms knowledge could only result from judgments, the synthesis by the subject of intuitions which were given to it from the external world. Although the subject was the condition of possibility or ground of knowledge, it seemed unable to ground itself. Kant regards the condition of possibility of the syntheses of knowledge as a ‘spontaneity’, as cause of itself rather than as the result of other natural causes, but does not succeed in explicating this spontaneity. Along with Kant’s approach to the question of grounding knowledge, the most significant other approaches to the issue for Schelling were those of F.H. Jacobi and Fichte.

In 1783 Jacobi became involved in the ‘Pantheism controversy’, an influential dispute with the Berlin Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn over the claim that G.E. Lessing had admitted to being a Spinozist, an admission which at that time was regarded as tantamount to an admission of atheism. In his Über die Lehre von Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn (On the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn) (1785; 2nd, revised edition 1789), which was influenced by his reading of Kant’s first Critique, Jacobi revealed a problem which recurs in differing ways throughout Schelling’s work. Jacobi’s interpretation of Spinozism was concerned with the relationship between what he termed the ‘unconditioned’ and the ‘conditioned’, between God as the ground of which the laws of nature are the consequent, and the chain of the deterministic laws of nature. Cognitive explanation relies, as Kant suggested, upon finding a thing’s ‘condition’. Jacobi’s question is how this can ultimately ground the explanation, in that the explanation leads to a regress in which each condition depends upon another condition ad infinitum. Any philosophical system thus ‘necessarily ends by having to discover conditions of the unconditioned’. For Jacobi this led to the need for a theological leap of faith if philosophy were to be grounded. In the 1787 Introduction to the first Critique Kant maintains that this problem can be overcome by acknowledging that, while reason must postulate the ‘unconditioned…in all things in themselves for everything conditioned, so that the series of conditions should thus become complete’, by restricting knowledge to appearances, rather than ‘things in themselves’, the contradiction of seeking conditions of the unconditioned can be avoided.

The condition of the knowledge of appearances for Kant was the ‘transcendental subject’, but what sort of ‘condition’ was the transcendental subject? This problem initially united Schelling and Fichte. Fichte insisted in Wissenschaftslehre that the establishing of the unconditioned status of the I was required for Kant’s system to legitimate itself. He asserts that ‘It is…the ground of explanation of all facts of empirical consciousness that before all positing in the I, the I itself must previously be posited’, thereby giving the I the founding role which he thought Kant had failed adequately to explicate. Fichte does so by suggesting that the cognitive activity of the I, via which it can reflect upon itself, cannot therefore be understood as part of the causal world of appearance and must therefore be part of the noumenal realm, where Kant had located the ‘unconditioned’.

Schelling takes up the problems posed by Jacobi and Fichte in two texts of 1795: Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie oder über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen (Of the I as Principle of Philosophy or on the Unconditional in Human Knowledge) , and Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kriticismus (Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism) . He reinterprets Kant’s question as to the condition of possibility of synthetic judgments a priori as a question about why there is a realm of judgments, a manifest world requiring syntheses by the subject, at all. In Of the I Schelling puts Kant’s question in Fichtean terms: ‘How is it that the absolute I goes out of itself and opposes a Not-I to itself?’. He maintains that the condition of knowledge, the ‘positing’ by the I of that which is opposed to it, must have a different status from what it posits: ‘nothing can be posited by itself as a thing, that is, an absolute/unconditioned thing (unbedingtes Ding) is a contradiction’. However, his worry about Fichte’s position already becomes apparent in the Philosophical Letters, where he drops the Fichtean terminology: ‘How is it that I step at all out of the Absolute and move towards something opposed [auf ein Entgegengesetztes]?’. The problem Schelling confronted was identified by his friend J.C.F. Hölderlin , in the light of Jacobi’s formulation of the problem of the ‘unconditioned’. Fichte wished to understand the Absolute as an I. For something to be an I, though, it must be conscious of an other, and thus in a relationship to that other. The overall structure of the relationship could not, therefore, be described from only one side of that relationship. Hölderlin argued that one has to understand the structure of the relationship of subject to object in consciousness as grounded in ‘a whole of which subject and object are the parts’, which he termed ‘being’.

Schelling sought a philosophical way to come to terms with the ‘ground’ of the subject’s relationship to the object world, which avoided the fatalist consequences of Spinoza’s system by taking on key aspects of Kant’s and Fichte’s transcendental philosophy and yet which did not fall into the trap Hölderlin identified in Fichte’s conception of an absolute I. In his Naturphilosophie (Philosophy of Nature), which emerges in 1797 and develops in the succeeding years, and in the System des transcendentalen Idealismus (System of Transcendental Idealism) (1800) Schelling wavers between a Spinozist and a Fichtean approach to the problem of the ‘unconditioned’ (see Naturphilosophie; Spinoza, B. §§2–4). In the Naturphilosophie the Kantian division between the appearing world of nature and nature in itself results from the fact that the nature theorized in cognitive judgments is wholly objectified in opposition to the knowing subject. This fails to account for the living dynamic forces in nature, including those in our own organism, with which Kant himself became concerned in the third Critique and other late work, and which had played a role in Leibniz’s account of nature. Schelling thinks of nature in itself as a ‘productivity’: ‘As the object [qua conditioned condition] is never absolute/unconditioned (unbedingt) then something per se non-objective must be posited in nature; this absolutely non-objective postulate is precisely the original productivity of nature’. The Kantian dualism between things in themselves and appearances is a result of the fact that the productivity can never appear as itself and can only appear in the form of ‘products’, which are the productivity ‘inhibiting’ itself. The products are never complete in themselves: they are like the eddies in a stream, which temporarily keep their shape, despite the changing material flowing through them.

Schelling then tries to use the insights of transcendental philosophy, while still avoiding Kant’s dualism, to explain our knowledge of nature. Given the fact of knowledge, things in themselves and ‘representations’ cannot be absolutely different:

One can push as many transitory materials as one wants, which become finer and finer, between mind and matter, but some time the point must come where mind and matter are One, or where the great leap that we so long wished to avoid becomes inevitable.

(1797, 1 (2): 53)

The Naturphilosophie includes ourselves within nature, as part of a necessarily interrelated whole, which is structured in an ascending series of ‘potentials’ that entail a polar opposition within themselves. The model is a magnet, whose opposing poles are inseparable from each other, even though they are opposites. As productivity, nature cannot be conceived of as an object, since it is the subject of all possible real ‘predicates’, but its ‘inhibiting’ itself means that the ‘principle of all explanation of nature’ is ‘universal duality’, an inherent difference of subject and object which prevents nature from ever reaching stasis. The sense of nature as an absolute subject links it to the spontaneity of the thinking subject, which is the condition of the syntheses required for the constitution of objectivity. The problem for Schelling lies in explicating how these two subjects relate to each other.

In the System of Transcendental Idealism Schelling returns to Fichtean terminology, though he soon finally abandons it. He endeavours to explain the emergence of the thinking subject from nature. This emergence is thought of in terms of an absolute I coming retrospectively to know itself in a ‘history of self-consciousness’. The System recounts the history of which the transcendental subject is the result. A version of the model Schelling establishes was to be adopted by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Mind . Schelling conceives of the whole process in terms of the initially undivided I splitting itself in order to articulate itself in the syntheses, the ‘products’, which constitute the world of knowable nature. The founding stages of this process, which bring the world of material nature into being, are ‘unconscious’. These stages then lead to organic nature, and thence to consciousness and self-consciousness. Schelling claims that the resistance of the noumenal realm to theoretical knowledge results from the fact that ‘the [practical] act [of the absolute I] via which all limitation is posited, as condition of all consciousness, does not itself come to consciousness’. He prophetically attempts to articulate a theory which comes to terms with the awareness that thought is driven by forces which are not finally transparent to it, of the kind later to become familiar in psychoanalysis. How, though, does one gain access by thought to what cannot be an object of consciousness?

Schelling adopts the idea from the early Romantic thinkers Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, whom he knew in Jena at this time, that art is central to understanding what cannot appear as an object of knowledge. Philosophy cannot represent nature in itself because access to the sphere of the unconscious must be via what appears to consciousness in the realm of theoretical knowledge. The work of art is an empirical object, but if it is not more than what it is qua determinable object it cannot be a work of art, which requires the free judgment of the subject. Although the System depends upon the transition from theoretical to practical philosophy, which involves breaking Jacobi’s chain of ‘conditions’, Schelling is concerned to understand how the highest insight must yet be into reality as a product of the interrelation of both the ‘conscious’ and the ‘unconscious’. It is not, therefore, a re-presentation of the latter by the former. Whereas in the System nature begins unconsciously and ends in consciousness, in the work of art: ‘the I is conscious according to the production, unconscious with regard to the product’. The product cannot be understood via the intentions of its producer, as this would mean that it became a ‘conditioned’ object, which would lack that which makes mere craft into art. Art is ‘the only true and eternal organ and document of philosophy, which always and continuously documents what philosophy cannot represent externally’. The particular sciences can only follow the chain of conditions, via the principle of sufficient reason, and must determine the object via its place in that infinite chain. The art object, on the other hand, manifests what cannot be understood in terms of its knowable conditions, in that an account of the materials of which it is made does not constitute it as art. It shows what cannot be said. Philosophy, therefore, cannot positively represent the Absolute, because ‘conscious’ thinking operates from the position where ‘absolute identity’ has always already been lost in the emergence of consciousness.

2 Identity philosophy (1801–c.1808)

Although the period of Schelling’s ‘identity philosophy’ is usually dated from the 1801 Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie (Presentation of My System of Philosophy) until some time before the 1809 Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände (Of Human Freedom ), the project of that philosophy is carried on in differing ways throughout his work. The identity philosophy derives from Schelling’s conviction that the self-conscious I must be seen as a result, rather than as the originating act as it is in Fichte, and thus that the I cannot be seen as the generative matrix of the whole system. Again, the problem is to articulate the relationship between the I and the world of material nature, without either reverting to Kantian dualism or falling into the traps of idealism and materialism.

Schelling’s mature identity philosophy, which is contained in System der gesammten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere (System of the Whole of Philosophy and of the Philosophy of Nature in Particular) , written in Würzburg in 1804, and in other texts between 1804 and 1807, breaks with the model of truth as correspondence:

It is clear that in every explanation of the truth as a correspondence [Übereinstimmung] of subjectivity and objectivity in knowledge, both, subject and object, are already presupposed as separate, for only what is different can agree, what is not different is in itself one.

(1804a, 1 (6): 138)

The crucial problem is explaining the link of the subject and object world, which is what makes judgments possible. For there to be synthetic judgments at all, what is split must, Schelling contends, in some way already be the same (see Truth, correspondence theory of). This has often been understood as leading Schelling to a philosophy in which, as Hegel puts it in the Phenomenology , the Absolute is the ‘night in which all cows are black’, because it swallows all differentiated knowledge in the assertion that everything is ultimately the same. This is not a valid interpretation of Schelling’s argument.

In order to get over the problem in monism, of how the One is also the many, Schelling introduces the notion of ‘transitive’ being, which links mind and matter as predicates of itself. Schelling explains this ‘transitivity’ via the metaphor of the earth:

You recognize its [the earth’s] true essence only in the link by which it eternally posits its unity as the multiplicity of its things and again posits this multiplicity as its unity. You also do not imagine that, apart from this infinity of things which are in it, there is another earth which is the unity of these things, rather the same which is the multiplicity is also unity, and what the unity is, is also the multiplicity, and this necessary and indissoluble One of unity and multiplicity in it is what you call its existence… Existence is the link of a being [Wesen] as One, with itself as a multiplicity.

(1806a, 1 (7): 56)

‘Absolute identity’ is the link of the two aspects of being, which, on the one hand, is the universe, and, on the other, is the changing multiplicity which the knowable universe also is. Schelling insists now that ‘The I think, I am, is, since Descartes, the basic mistake of all knowledge; thinking is not my thinking, and being is not my being, for everything is only of God or the totality’: the I is ‘affirmed’ as a predicate of the being by which it is preceded.

Schelling is led to this view by his understanding of the changing and relative status of theoretical knowledge. It is the inherent incompleteness of all finite determinations which reveals the nature of the Absolute, as is evident in his description of time: ‘time is itself nothing but the totality appearing in opposition to the particular life of things’, so that the totality ‘posits or intuits itself, by not positing, not intuiting the particular’. The particular is determined in judgments, but the truth of claims about the totality cannot be proved because judgments are necessarily conditioned, whereas the totality is not. Given the relative status of the particular, though, there must be a ground which enables us to be aware of that relativity: this ground must have a different status from the knowable world of finite particulars. At the same time, if the ground were wholly different from the world of relative particulars the old problems of dualism would recur. As such the Absolute is the finite, but we do not know this in the manner in which we know the finite. Without the presupposition of ‘absolute identity’, therefore, the evident relativity of particular knowledge becomes inexplicable, since there would be no reason to claim that a revised judgment is predicated of the same as the preceding – now false – judgment.

Schelling summarizes the theory of identity as follows:

For being, actual, real being is precisely self-disclosure/revelation (Selbstoffenbarung). If it is to be as One then it must disclose/reveal itself in itself; but it does not disclose/reveal itself in itself if it is not an other in itself, and is in this other the One for itself, thus if it is not absolutely the living link of itself and an other.

(1806a, 1 (7): 54)

The link between the ‘real’ and the ‘ideal’, the physical and the mental, cannot, Schelling maintains, be seen as a causal link. Although there cannot be mental events without physical events, the former cannot be causally reduced to the latter: ‘For real and ideal are only different views of one and the same substance’. Schelling wavers at this time between a position of the kind which Hegel soon tried to articulate, in which, in Schelling’s terms, ‘the sameness of the subjective and the objective is made the same as itself, knows itself, and is the subject and object of itself’, in the ‘identity of identity and difference’, and the sense that this position cannot finally circumscribe the structure of the Absolute. The structure of reflection, where each aspect mirrors itself and then is mirrored in the other, upon which this account of the identity of subject and object relies, must be grounded in a being which carries it:

Reflection…only knows the universal and the particular as two relative negations, the universal as relative negation of the particular, which is, as such, without reality, the particular, on the other hand, as a relative negation of the universal… something independent of the concept must be added to posit the substance as such.

(1804a, 1 (6): 185)

Without this independent basis, subject and object would merely be, as Schelling thinks they are in Fichte, relative negations of each other, leading to a circle ‘inside which a nothing gains reality by the relation to another nothing’. Schelling prophetically distinguishes between the cognitive – reflexive – ground of finite knowledge, and the real – non-reflexive – ground that sustains the movement of negation from one finite determination to another. As a two-sided relationship, reflection alone always entails the problem that the subject and the object in a case of reflection can only be known to be the same via that which cannot appear in the reflection: if I am to recognize myself in a mirror, rather than a random object in the world, I must already be familiar with myself before the reflection. This means a complete system based on reflection is impossible, because, in order to ground the system, it must presuppose as external to the system what it claims is part of it. From the 1820s onwards, Schelling raises this objection against Hegel’s system of ‘absolute reflection’.

Schelling’s own dissatisfaction with his early versions of identity theory derives from his rejection of Spinozism. Spinoza saw the move from God to the world of ‘conditions’ as a logical consequence of the nature of God. Schelling becomes convinced that such a theory gives no reason why the Absolute or the ‘unconditioned’ should manifest itself in a world of negative ‘conditions’ at all. Schelling is confronted with the task of explaining the transition from the Absolute to the finite world. In Philosophie und Religion (Philosophy and Religion) (1804), he claims, like Jacobi, that there is no way of mediating between conditioned and unconditioned, and already makes the distinction between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ philosophy, which will form the heart of his late work. Explicating the structure of the finite world leads to ‘negative philosophy, but much has already been gained by the fact that the negative, the realm of nothingness, has been separated by a sharp limit from the realm of reality and of what alone is positive’. The next stage of his philosophy will become concerned with the transition between infinite and finite.

3 The Ages of the World (1809–c.1827)

Schelling’s work from his middle period is usually referred to as the philosophy of Die Weltalter ( Ages of the World). It begins with Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände (Of Human Freedom) (1809), written in Stuttgart, and lasts until the late 1820s. The Weltalter philosophy is an attempt to explain the emergence of an intelligible world at the same time as coming to terms with the inextricable relation of mind to matter. The initial concern is to avoid Spinoza’s fatalism, which renders the human freedom to do good and evil incomprehensible. Schelling’s crucial objection is to the idea that evil should be understood as merely another form of negativity, which can therefore be understood by insight into a necessitated totality, rather than as a fact relating to the nature of human freedom. He now sees the fundamental contradictions of the Naturphilosophie in terms of the relationship of the intelligibility of nature and ourselves to a ground without which there could be no intelligibility, but to which intelligibility cannot be reduced. In Of Human Freedom he introduces, against both Spinoza and Fichte, a conception of ‘willing’, which was later influential for Schopenhauer’s conception of the ‘Will’: ‘In the last and highest instance there is no other being but willing. Willing is primal being, and all the predicates of primal being only fit willing: groundlessness, eternity, being independent of time, self-affirmation’ (1809, 1 (7): 350 ). Schelling establishes a more antagonistic version of the structure of the identity philosophy. The ‘ground’ is now in one sense ‘groundless’, that is, uncaused: it must be understood in terms of freedom, if Spinozism is to be avoided. At the same time there must be that against which freedom can be manifest for it to be freedom at all. The theory is based on the antagonisms between opposing forces which constitute the ‘ages of the world’. He argues, though, that the world whose origins the Weltalter wishes to understand must entail the same conflicting forces which still act, though not necessarily in the same form, in this world, of which the mind is an aspect: ‘Poured from the source of things and the same as the source, the human soul has a co-knowledge/con-science (Mitwissenschaft) of creation’. Schelling suggests that there are two principles in us: ‘an unconscious, dark principle and a conscious principle’, which must yet in some way be identical. The same structure applies to what Schelling means by ‘God’. As that which makes the world intelligible, God relates to the ground so that the ‘real’, which takes the form of material nature, is ‘in God’ but ‘is not God seen absolutely, that is, in so far as He exists; for it is only the ground of His existence, it is "nature" in God; an essence which is inseparable from God, but different from Him’. The point is that God would be meaningless if there were not that which God transcends: without opposition there is no life and no sense of development.

Wolfram Hogrebe has convincingly claimed that the Weltalter philosophy is a theory of predication (1989 ). In it, being is initially One, is not manifest and has no reason to be manifest: Hogrebe terms this ‘pronominal being’. The same being, given that there is now a manifest world, must also be ‘predicative being’ (ibid.), which ‘flows out, spreads, gives itself’. The contradiction is only apparent. Schelling maintains in line with the identity philosophy that the ‘properly understood law of contradiction really only says that the same cannot be as the same something and also the opposite thereof, but this does not prevent the same, which is A, being able, as an other, to be not A’. One aspect of being, the dark force, which he sometimes terms ‘gravity’, is contractive, the other expansive, which he terms ‘light’. Dynamic processes are the result of the interchange between these ultimately identical forces. If something is to be as something, it must both be, in the positive sense in which everything else is, which makes it indeterminately positive, and it must have a relationship to what it is not, in order to be determinate. In the Weltalter the One comes into contradiction with itself and the two forces constantly vie with each other. Differences must be grounded in unity, however, as otherwise they could not be manifest at all as differences. The ground is, though, increasingly regarded as the source of the transitory nature of everything particular, and less and less as the source of tranquil insight into how we can be reconciled to finite existence.

The abandonment of his residual Spinozism leads Schelling to a growing concern with the tensions which result from contradictions which we also embody. The ages of the world are constituted by the development of forms and structures in the material and the mental world. The development depends upon the expanding force’s interaction with the contracting force’s slowing of any expansion, which allows transient but determinate forms to develop. This process gives rise most notably to language, which Schelling sees as the model for the development of the whole world:

It seems universal that every creature which cannot contain itself or draw itself together in its own fullness, draws itself together outside itself, whence, for example, the elevated miracle of the formation of the word in the mouth belongs, which is a true creation of the full inside when it can no longer remain in itself.

(1946: 56–7 )

Language as ‘contracted’ material signifier, and ‘expanding’ ideal meaning repeats the basic structure of the Weltalter philosophy. This interaction between what is contained in itself and what draws something beyond itself is also what gives rise to consciousness, and thus to an inherent tension within consciousness, which can only be itself by its relation to an other. Hegel uses a related model of subjectivity, particularly in the Phenomenology , but Schelling later rejects this model. Schelling’s later philosophy will present a subject whose origin in nature prevents it from ever achieving the ‘self-presence’ Hegel thinks he can explicate via the completed structure of ‘self-reflection’ in the other. Schelling’s Weltalter philosophy is never completed: its Idealist aim of systematically unifying subject and object by comprehending the real development of history from the very origins of being founders on problems concerning the relationship between philosophical system and historical contingency which do not admit of solutions.

4 Positive and negative philosophy, and the critique of Hegel (c.1827–54)

Schelling has usually been understood to provide the transitional ‘objective idealist’ link between Fichte and Hegel. By regarding Hegel’s system as the culmination of German Idealism this interpretation fails to do justice to Schelling’s real philosophical insights. Many of these insights, particularly in the later philosophy, directly and indirectly influenced the ideas of thinkers, such as Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger, who were critical of Hegel’s attempt at a complete philosophical system (see Hegelianism §2 ).

The differences between Hegel and Schelling derive from their respective approaches to understanding the Absolute. For Hegel the Absolute is the result of the self- cancellation of the finite. It can therefore be presented in the form of the successive overcoming of finite determinations, the ‘negation of the negation’, in a system whose end comprehends its beginning. For Hegel the result becomes known when the beginning moves from being ‘in itself’ to being ‘for itself’ at the end of the system. Schelling became publicly critical of Hegel while working on a later version of the Weltalter philosophy in Erlangen in the 1820s, but made his criticisms fully public in lectures given in Munich in the 1830s, and in the 1840s and 1850s as professor in Berlin. The aim of the Idealist systems was for thought to reflect what it is not – being – as really itself, even as it appears not to be itself, thereby avoiding Kant’s dualism. The issue between Schelling and Hegel is whether the grounding of reason by itself is not in fact a sort of philosophical narcissism, in which reason admires its reflection in being without being able to articulate its relationship to that reflection. Schelling’s essential point is that it is not the particular manifestation of knowledge which tells me the truth about the world, but rather the necessity of movement from one piece of knowledge to the next. This much can be construed in Hegelian terms. However, a logical reconstruction of the process of knowledge can, for Schelling, only be a reflection of thought by itself: the real process cannot be described in philosophy, because the cognitive ground of knowledge and the real ground, though inseparable from each other, cannot be shown to reflect each other.

Dieter Henrich characterizes Hegel’s Absolute as follows: ‘The Absolute is the finite to the extent to which the finite is nothing at all but negative relation to itself’ (1982). Hegel’s system depends upon showing how each limited way of conceiving of the world cannot grasp the whole, because it has an internal contradiction. This necessarily leads thought to more comprehensive ways of grasping the world, until the point is reached where there can be no more comprehensive way, because there is no longer any contradiction to give rise to it. The very fact of the limitations of empirical thought therefore becomes what gives rise to the infinite, which, in Hegel’s terms, is thought that is bounded by itself and by nothing else.

Schelling accepts such a conception, to which he substantially contributed in his early philosophy, as the way to construct a ‘negative’ system of philosophy: it explains the logic of change, once there is a world to be explained. It does not, though, explain why there is a developing world at all, but merely reconstructs in thought the necessary structure of development. Schelling’s own attempt at explaining the world’s facticity led him to a ‘philosophical theology’ which traces the development of mythology and then of Christian revelation in his Philosophie der Mythologie (Philosophy of Mythology) and Philosophie der Offenbarung (Philosophy of Revelation) , which like all his substantial works after 1811, were not published in his lifetime. The failure of his philosophical theology does not, though, invalidate his philosophical arguments against Hegel. The alternative to the ‘common mistake of every philosophy that has existed up to now’ – the ‘merely logical relationship of God to the world’ – Schelling terms ‘positive philosophy’. The ‘merely logical relationship’ entails reflexivity, in which the world necessarily follows from the nature of God, and God and the world are therefore the ‘other of themselves’. Hegel’s system removes the facticity of the world by understanding reason as the world’s immanent self- articulation. Schelling insists that human reason cannot explain its own existence, and therefore cannot encompass itself and its other within a system of philosophy. We cannot, he maintains, make sense of the manifest world by beginning with reason, but must begin with the contingency of being and try to make sense of it with the reason which is only one aspect of it.

Schelling contends that the identity of thought and being cannot be articulated within thought, because this must presuppose that they are identical in a way which thought, as one side of a relation, cannot comprehend. By redefining the ‘concept’ such that it is always already both subject and object, Hegel’s aim is to avoid any presuppositions on either the subject or the object side, allowing the system to complete itself as the ‘self-determination of the concept’. Schelling presents the basic alternative as follows:

For either the concept would have to go first, and being would have to be the consequence of the concept, which would mean it was no longer absolute being; or the concept is the consequence of being, then we must begin with being without the concept.

(1842–3, 2 (3): 164)

Hegel attempts to merge concept and being by making being part of a structure of self-reflection, rather than the ground of the interrelation of subject and object. He invalidly assumes that ‘essence’, which is one side of the relationship between being and essence, can articulate its identity with the other side in the ‘concept’, because the other side is revealed as being nothing until it has entered into a relation which makes it determinate as a moment of the whole process.

The problem that Hegel does not overcome is that this identity cannot be known, because, as Schelling argues of his concept of being, ‘existing is not here the consequence of the concept or of essence, but rather existence is here itself the concept and itself the essence’. The problem of reflection cannot be overcome in Hegel’s manner: identifying one’s reflection in a mirror as oneself (understood now as a metaphor for essence) entails, as we saw above, a prior non-reflexive moment if one is to know that the reflection is oneself, rather than a random reflected object. How far Schelling moves from any reflexive version of identity philosophy is evident in the following from the Einleitung in die Philosophie der Offenbarung oder Begründung der positiven Philosophie (Introduction to the Philosophy of Revelation or Foundation of the Positive Philosophy) :

Our self-consciousness is not at all the consciousness of that nature which has passed through everything, it is precisely just our consciousness…for the consciousness of man is not = the consciousness of nature… Far from man and his activity making the world comprehensible, man himself is that which is most incomprehensible.

(1842–3, 2 (3): 6–7)

Schelling refuses to allow that reason can confirm itself via its reflection in being:

what we call the world, which is so completely contingent both as a whole and in its parts, cannot possibly be the impression of something which has arisen by the necessity of reason…it contains a preponderant mass of unreason.

(1832–3: 99)

Schelling is, then, one of the first philosophers seriously to begin the destruction of the model of metaphysics based on the idea of representation, a destruction which can be seen as one of the key aspects of modern philosophy from Heidegger to the later Wittgenstein and beyond. At the same time, he is committed, unlike some of his successors, to an account of human reason which does not assume that reason’s incapacity to ground itself should lead to the abandonment of the question of truth.