The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century
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However, this leads him to the insight associated with his second phase, the phase of the Naturphilosophie, that we need to think of things in themselves in terms of nature, that is, in terms of an anonymous and pre-subjective development that happened to become aware of itself in our awareness of it.8 In this context, Schelling formulated an interesting version of neutral monism that certainly deserves critical attention, as it steers clear of the temptations of panpsychism and metaphysical materialism respectively.
The third phase or middle period is usually defined by his new idea that the real problem of philosophy lies in our ways of thinking about freedom. The original thought laid out in this context is that there is a tension between systematic philosophy and the freedom of theory-building. Schelling does not so much ask how we can integrate our conception of ourselves as free agents into a disenchanted conception of a deterministic universe or nature, but rather wonders if we can think of the activity of philosophizing as articulating the relevant form of freedom. If the activity of philosophy is itself free, there has to be a sense in which the outcome is not determined in advance. And for Schelling this implies that we cannot think of the object of philosophy as a system already fully established independently of our way of thinking about it. That we think about the object of philosophy (whatever it ultimately is) as of something already out there (say in terms of an independent logical space of reasons laid out in advance) seems to be incompatible with our critical and dialogical attitude towards that object. For Schelling, this entails that we need to give an account of the temporality and historicity of philosophy without becoming mere historicists who give up on the idea of philosophical discoveries in the name of some sort of unbound constructivist attitude.
This eventually motivates the ideas commonly attributed to Schelling’s late philosophy, his fourth and ultimate phase.9 Here Schelling unifies his earlier ideas by actually reconstructing the coming to be of philosophy from non-philosophical (mythological and theological) thought. He argues that systematic philosophy arose from developments in the history of human self-consciousness that were not yet autonomously directed at philosophy. Philosophy itself becomes the spontaneous result of what one might nowadays refer to as “cultural evolution.” However, Schelling thinks of the history of self-consciousness not in terms of an extension of the accidental evolution of human subjectivity in general from mere natural processes, but as a radical break. What happens in that break is first and foremost a “theogony,” by which Schelling conveys the thought that humanity begins with the idea of their Gods, that is, in particular, with the idea that nature is not just a meaningless domain of extended material of some kind or other, but rather a domain of intelligibility. However, the “theogonical process,”10 as Schelling calls it, in which consciousness is involved, misplaces its own expectation of intelligibility and hypostatizes it in the form of Gods gradually becoming more human. This leads to philosophy, which according to Schelling has not yet fully emancipated itself from theogony and still wrestles with metaphors and allegories generated by pre-philosophical self-consciousness.11
To sum this up, my own view is that there are not many systems or different Schellings, but that there really is one coherent line of thought that Schelling develops from different perspectives. In this respect, there is really no difference from Hegel, who also develops his system in different ways in his various periods. Schelling is continually working on finding the most adequate expression of his basic intuition and not constantly changing his thought, as a common mythical depiction of Schelling’s allegedly “Protean” nature suggests. His basic intuition is that subjectivity has to be integrated into a domain that is not of its own making, but that nevertheless is compatible with the fact that subjectivity arises within it. This even holds if by “subjectivity” we primarily refer to self-consciousness in the sense of any form of basic awareness of the fact that some facts only obtain because we refer to them. The very difference between facts that are thoroughly reference-dependent, as they only obtain by being referred to, and facts that do not depend at all on being referred to (what late Schelling calls “unprethinkable being”) has to be conceived of as a framework within which subjectivity takes place. It is therefore precisely not the absolute, as the absolute can only fully be understood as part of a relational network involving essentially both pre- and non-subjective facts. Even though ultimately this distinction is not sufficiently clear, it might be helpful to summarize the various versions of this basic realist intuition by saying that Schelling’s objective idealism has always been fighting shy of subjective idealism. His so-called objective idealism roughly only maintains that subjectivity is ontologically objective, even if many of its defining features are subjective in the sense of existing only by being referred to by subjects.
In what follows, I will focus on what I take to be the elements of Schelling’s philosophy most suitable for a primarily de re interpretation in Robert Brandom’s sense of the term, where such an interpretation isolates arguments and ideas from a historical figure and shows their ability to make an original contribution to contemporary concerns. A de dicto interpretation, on the contrary, is often seen as an attempt to discover historical details hitherto neglected in historical scholarship.12 It is interesting to note that any such interpretation will ultimately itself be guided by some hypothesis of interpretation, resulting in there actually being no purely de dicto interpretation. A pure de re interpretation runs the risk of missing precisely the originality of the approach of the figure under discussion, as it tends to be overly selective and sometimes only projects its own presuppositions anachronistically into the past. Thus, ultimately, de re and de dicto interpretations have to cooperate if we want to learn something from the history of philosophy that we did not already know by our own reflective efforts and that is nevertheless relevant for just these efforts. Such an engagement with Schelling has only begun in the Anglophone world, and my hope is that we will soon see more systematic or rational reconstructions of Schelling’s arguments both with respect to their place and time and to ours.
This chapter will first focus (section 5.2) on the basic idea of a philosophy of nature. I will then consider (section 5.3) the Freedom Essay and Schelling’s arguments for the inevitability of a critical form of metaphysics. Lastly, I will discuss (section 5.4) his famous distinction between “negative” and “positive philosophy.”
My overall interpretative assumption is that Schelling’s work is a genuine part of the Post-Kantian tradition in that his fundamental question is how the minimal logical form of propositional thinking is capable of grasping a structured reality always potentially independent from the way we represent it in propositional thinking. Schelling’s original methodological emphasis is on the fallibility of philosophy itself. He thinks of philosophy as a systematic production of concepts introduced to make sense of our way of grasping how things really are. He believes that this requirement of fallibility necessitates adherence to an enhanced version of a Kantian thing in itself.13 Contrary to the most popular readings of Fichte and Hegel, Schelling thus always remains an ontological realist insofar as he defends a position in which reality itself might largely be utterly different from the way we represent it. He constantly entertains the possibility that our systems of thinking, our theories (whatever their object or domain of objects) could be illusory distortions of how things are in themselves. Contrary to Kant, though, he does not believe that we are necessarily closed off from cognition of things in themselves.
5.2 THE BASIC IDEA OF A PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE
One prominent way of looking at Schelling’s philosophy of nature, developed around the turn of the century, rightly sees it as being concerned with a unification of Kant and Spinoza. As a matter of fact, Schelling was keen to close the gap between “criticism” and “dogmatism,” as he labeled the two positions respectively in his Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism.14 In order to understand Schelling’s approach to the difference between t
he two positions, it is sufficient to understand “things in themselves” first as the way the world would have been had no creature ever existed capable of referring to how things were. The term “things in themselves” in this use denotes what Quentin Meillassoux has called the “ancestral”; that is, the world prior to the emergence of its thinking inhabitants.15 Against this background Schelling developed the wider concept of a “transcendental past”16—the way the world and our first-order reference to it (what he calls “the Ego”) would have been had no one ever referred to it. For Schelling, intentionality has structures it would have had anyway, had no one ever become aware of them and in this sense he is a more global realist than Kant or the Kantian variations contemporary Hegelians make out in Hegel. The world unobserved or not referred to is traditionally called “nature” and one can already see where dogmatism is heading: Dogmatism understands things in themselves as nature, and identifies ultimate reality with the (as of today still) counterfactual situation of the universe without any observers in it.
“Criticism,” on the contrary, argues that things in themselves are not really things “out there,” or “ancestral nature,” but rather theoretical constructions, “limit concepts” in Kant’s sense. According to criticism, the very concept of a thing in itself belongs to higher-order philosophical theorizing and ought not to be regarded as an ontological commitment of epistemology, the theory of perception, or even our most general theory of truth-apt thought. Things in themselves are not contents to be referred to, they are not the objects of singular thoughts, but rather theoretical entities introduced in order to explain the potential difference between the way we generally represent things as being and how they are independently of our conditions of representing them.
According to Schelling, both Spinoza and Kant ultimately oscillate between dogmatism and criticism. His interpretation of this oscillation as related to ancient Greek tragedy indicates that he regards both extremes as perennial.17 In particular, Kant has often been seen as oscillating between the view that things in themselves are full-fledged things with causal powers and the view that they are theoretical constructions (limit concepts) and therefore, concepts which do not genuinely refer to anything. Kant is indeed operating on two levels, given that he sometimes introduces things in themselves as posits in Quine’s sense18 and sometimes as first-order ontological commitments of his theory.19
Schelling’s philosophy of nature is a response to this conundrum. Instead of regarding dogmatism and criticism as eternally fixed positions, he changes the question. Whereas Kant argued that our conditions of referring to objects with truth-apt thoughts (what he calls “cognition (Erkenntnis)”) are in principle incompatible with cognition of things in themselves, Schelling tries to develop a theory of the transition of the unobserved world of nature into a world inhabited by creatures capable of referring to nature. In other words, he thinks of the things in themselves as a process of “phenomenalization.”20 This is intended by his famous allegory of nature opening its eyes in our cognition of nature, an idea recurring in Thomas Nagel’s heavily disputed Mind and Cosmos, which explicitly considers objective idealism in the sense of Schelling and Hegel as an option.21 Nagel’s metaphor of a “universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself”22 is the fundamental idea of Schelling’s philosophy of nature.
It is important to note that in 1989 Hogrebe already convincingly argued that Schelling here only makes use of a weak anthropic principle, whereas Nagel seems to have a stronger reading that is ultimately much less convincing, as the immediate dismissal of Nagel’s Naturphilosophie has shown.23 The weak anthropic principle Schelling draws on only claims that nature (the domain of things in themselves prior to the existence of any creature capable of referring) is compatible with creatures referring to it, at least, to the extent to which such creatures arise in it (as they did). As Nagel rightly emphasizes, any scientific inquiry presupposes that nature is at least minimally intelligible, that the phenomena we observe are not completely and utterly random. According to Schelling, this minimal requirement of intelligibility is obviously met by nature. Otherwise, we could not have emerged as fairly successful referrers. However, this should not give us any reason to believe that this emergence is somehow necessitated by nature; it could well have been that nature had not met any standards of intelligibility. Here Schelling is in full agreement with contemporary metaphysical speculation in theoretical physics and in clear opposition to both Kant and Hegel: Whereas Kant believes that we cannot say anything with full-fledged content about nature in Schelling’s sense, Hegel believes that we have to say that nature would have had an intelligible structure even had no one ever been around to become aware of this structure. Notice that I explicitly reject the view that Schelling or Hegel ever defended a strong anthropic principle. There is no evidence that they take the existence of expressed rationality as a necessary outcome of the existence of anything worthy of being called “nature.” Contrary to many readings of German Idealism, it is far more plausible to read it as a quite modest project. On closer inspection, the label “idealism” does not even fit Schelling’s philosophy, unless one is willing to call the view that the observed universe has to be compatible with the existence of observers “objective idealism,” which is Schelling’s intended sense of this term.
Schelling’s philosophy of nature is part of a twofold system. It is complemented by “transcendental idealism,” in his sense, where this term refers to the investigation of the necessary and universal structures of our reference to how things really are under the condition that creatures capable of reference exist. The philosophy of nature has a developmental structure: it begins with things in themselves, then develops the conditions for creatures that refer to them. If it were to be rewritten under contemporary conditions, it would contain a history of the universe from the Big Bang to merely geological times, to the emergence of complicated chemistry and the emergence of life, to the evolution of creatures sufficiently sophisticated to be aware of how their awareness fits into nature. There are good reasons why Haeckel considered Schelling (alongside Goethe) as an important forerunner of evolutionary theory in a letter to Darwin.24 Even though Schelling did not consider and would probably not have accepted the idea that the evolution of life forms is purely mechanical and proceeds by chance and mere probabilistic laws, his own thought about the overall evolution of thought within an epistemically “blind” universe can be made sense of in contemporary terms.
However, Schelling is not a full-fledged naturalist or “dogmatist,” as he would say, for he accepts some version of transcendental idealism for our conditions of reference. He agrees that we have to be able to accommodate the different regions of nature into our way of referring to how things are. In principle, our ways of distinguishing between inanimate matter and fully teleological processes (such as human goal-directed action) must be compatible without deflating that distinction into the Kantian difference between knowing full well and merely believing in the possibility of objectively existing organisms in the mode of the “as if.”25 In other words, Schelling’s transcendental idealism consists in the fairly modest claim that we only have reasons to believe that some fundamental differences in types of natural kinds (chemical reactions as opposed to goal-directed organic processes or geological processes) actually match the way things are in themselves. This is his version of the view that our conditions of accessing how things are are ontologically met by how things are. This is why Schelling did not believe that his philosophy of nature would be a radical revision of his attempts in transcendental philosophy, but rather thought of both projects as complementary.
5.3 THE FREEDOM ESSAY
As I have argued extensively in Das Absolute und die Welt in Schellings Freiheitsschrift, any reading of the Freedom Essay should first note the structure of the text and determine its topic according to its official statements.26 This is not trivial given that even the custom of abbreviating the title and referring to the text as
the Freedom Essay obscures an important point: the book is not primarily about freedom, or human freedom, but about the essence of human freedom. It is most literally translated a set of Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and the Objects Related to It. Schelling explicitly claims that the “highest point of the investigation” is what he calls the “Ungrund,” which should be rendered in English as unground. In order to understand the function of this concept in the architecture of the theory espoused in the book, it is crucial to highlight a second, often neglected, fact. Schelling does not speak about “ground” and “existence” as of two metaphysical principles. Rather, he talks about “essence, insofar as it is the ground of existence” and “essence, insofar as it exists.”27 He presents this distinction as a central element of the subject he discusses and it has rightly been focused on by much of the literature. However, it has gone widely unnoticed that the essence here is the unground. The unground is the essence with two aspects, the unground as ground of existence and the unground as what exists.
Given that the introduction of the Freedom Essay deals with the relation between predication and identity, what Schelling is really up to with his famous distinction and his concept of the unground can be translated into a theory of predication. If one takes the historical context into account, it becomes plausible that Schelling is responding to the question of how identity statements can be both non-contradictory and informative, a question posed by Leibniz and some Leibnizian theorists of predication (in particular Ploucquet) and debated in Tübingen during Schelling’s studies there.28 As Schelling repeatedly writes, to assert that A = B is to assert that there is some X which is both A and B. He thinks of A and B as aspects under which we can refer to X.29 Contrary to contemporary theoretical decisions, Schelling believes that there is a uniform basic theory of predication that assimilates atomic propositions to identity statements in the following sense. For Schelling, to assert that Solon is wise means to assert that there is some X that is both Solon and wise. To assert that Solon is identical with one of the Seven Sages or that Solon the Statesman is Solon the Sage is also to assert that there is some X that is both Solon and one of the Seven Sages or that there is some X that is both Solon the Statesman and Solon the Sage. The identity theory of predication, thus, does not hold that the copula means “is identical with.” Of course, Schelling did not believe that the assertion that the street is wet means “the street is identical with wet.” But he would argue that the assertion that the street is wet can be analyzed as “there is an X which is both the street and wet.”