The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  In this passage I would like to highlight the phrase “the freedom of investigation,” which is textual evidence for the transcendental reading defended in this section of the chapter. The investigation into the essence of human freedom presupposes the freedom of that very investigation. In addition to this, Schelling explicitly claims here that there is a threshold where making it explicit no longer leaves room for the recipient’s freedom of investigation and freedom of understanding. Schelling’s method is dialogical in that he is writing in full awareness of the fallibility of his claims and the impossibility of making a philosophical point utterly immune to error or misunderstanding.

  Of course, this might cause problems for his position: if the argument that the determinist cannot make sense of a central condition of theory-building (namely theoretical freedom) could itself prove to be wrong, then determinism could after all be right. This seems to undermine the force of transcendental arguments whose modality usually is a priori necessity. Unfortunately, there is not enough space here to assess the argumentation of the Freedom Essay in detail, but only to lay out the rational structure behind the appearance of a romantic fragment. One way of reconstructing the further development of the middle period would precisely be to see Schelling as responding to the objection just formulated. In any event, Schelling participates as much in the project of giving a unified theory of rationality as Fichte, Hegel, and other first-generation Post-Kantians.

  5.4 NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY

  Schelling’s so-called late philosophy is mostly discussed in terms of its distinction between negative and positive philosophy, although the rationale behind this distinction can actually be traced through all phases of his thinking. Nevertheless, the distinction assumes center stage in his later philosophy, which is roughly his work after The Ages of the World. There is a long controversy over the nature of this distinction and its historical origins; however, the traditional interpretations can largely be divided into two camps. One sees Schelling as breaking with the Kantian and Post-Kantian consensus that reason should be understood as a universal form of self-determining or autonomous capacity and argues that Schelling is moving beyond idealism in a direction close to something like a Heideggerian historicity of being or to some version of existentialism.43 The other camp sees Schelling as still engaging in the project of completing the Post-Kantian project of a full-fledged unification of reason, an idea epitomized by the title of Walter Schulz’ book Schelling’s Late Philosophy as the Completion of German Idealism.44 In my The Man in Myth I have argued that Schelling’s late philosophy is a peculiar and irreducible project that combines some of the elements traditional interpreters wanted to isolate from it.45

  In order to grasp what is at stake in this debate, it is illuminating to take a closer look at the concept of negative philosophy and then reconstruct where Schelling locates its shortcomings. Famously, Schelling associates negative philosophy with Hegel, but also with Kant’s critical philosophy. Negative philosophy is first and foremost the attempt to achieve an insight into the most universal structure of how things appear to pure thought or reason alone. Traditionally, from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel, this aim is supposed to be realizable by inspecting the fundamental structure of what it is for objects to be determined as this rather than that. Schelling himself is working in this tradition with his ontology of predication, which is a contribution to the idea that there is a “blueprint of being”46 or a “figure of being”47 that serves as a kind of transcendental, that is, universal and necessary matrix. Logic and ontology work together tracing the minimal conditions for something being a certain way and for it being disclosed to thinking that it is this way.

  Schelling’s later version of negative philosophy comes in the form of his theory of potencies.48 The basic idea behind the theory of potencies can be reconstructed as follows. If something is some way or other, we first need to assume that there is something rather than nothing. Whatever there is, it first has to exist and that assumption of existence prior to any determination of that existence is what Schelling calls the first potency. The first potency is “pure could without any being (reines Können ohne alles Seyn).”49 What Schelling has in mind here is the notion that the starting point of any ontology is the idea that there is something rather than nothing, an idea independent from the nature of this very something. All we know is that there is something in the first place and that it could be anything—it is pure possibility in the sense that it could be anything.

  The second potency, on the contrary, is the idea of a fixed nature, it is “pure being without any could.”50 This again is surprisingly simple to understand. It just means that we will ascribe some overall property to whatever exists and that that property determines it as being some way or other. As Schelling also writes, the first potency is the logical subject of the ontological matrix of truth-apt judgment, whereas the second potency is its predicate.

  Finally, the third potency consists in bringing the first and second potencies together. It corresponds to the full-fledged judgment that what really exists is this way rather than another way. However, and this is one aspect of the shortcoming of any negative philosophy, the truth-value of the judgment is not identical with its projection of truth conditions. In other words, Schelling insists that there are truth-makers we can only know about by advancing defeasible claims. For him this point is so general that it also applies to transcendental thinking.

  In order to illustrate this abstract scheme, let us go back to Solon the Sage. The atomic judgment that asserts that Solon is wise presupposes that there is something rather than nothing. Like Frege, Schelling here thinks of existence as “the most natural presupposition (selbstverständlichste Voraussetzung)”51 of any judgment. That there is something that could be both Solon and wise is a presupposition of the judgment. In its utmost generality, the view that there is something rather than nothing ultimately only commits one to there being something which could be anything, be it Solon, wise, or what have you. If Solon is indeed wise then this tells us something about how things really are. Things are determined as being a certain way, including Solon being wise.

  On Schelling’s view, then, any true judgment is a partial insight into how things really are, and every fact corresponding to such an insight is a further determination of the fact that there is something rather than nothing. There is Solon the Sage, Zion the mountain, Aristotle the writer, and the red square in front of me. In all these cases there is something that is some way.

  Schelling takes from this the idea of an ultimate truth-maker, which is also the false-maker of all false judgments. This ultimate truth-maker is what he calls “unprethinkable being.” Unprethinkable being in this context is just the generic name for everything which is the case anyway and which makes it the case that there is something rather than nothing. In a true judgment, we refer to unprethinkable being under some description, such as Solon the wise or the red square; for Schelling, these descriptions can always be framed in terms of the structure of a categorical judgment: S is P. Judgments are descriptions of how things really are. Yet, they can be either right or wrong, and this is possible because they are capable of missing their ultimate truth-condition, unprethinkable being. Unprethinkable being is unprethinkable in the sense that it is not produced by propositional thought, but is a condition for propositional thought being what it is, namely true or false. All that Schelling is claiming here is that not all truth-conditions for judgments are produced by these very judgments. There is always a potential gap between how things really are and how we present them as being.

  Contrary to a widespread opinion, unprethinkable being is not the essence of positive philosophy. The concept is introduced in negative philosophy, that is, in the context of the ontology of predication. What is crucial is that from the standpoint of the ontology of predication, there has to be a uniform treatment of all objects insofar as they can become the content of truth-apt thought. For negative philosophy, an actio
n is as much an object as a cat, a mountain or a number.

  In contrast to this standard interpretation of positive philosophy, Schelling defends a positive philosophy where the domain of human action can be regarded as the historical transformation of unprethinkable being into a different domain, a domain of facts that only obtain because we have produced them. Human action (which includes human theory-building) “elevates”52 unprethinkable being by making it increasingly transparent as we produce true assertions about what used to go unnoticed. In order to defend the view that the history of human awareness of how things are is progressive, that it is a constant acquisition of knowledge as to how things really are and in this sense transforms unprethinkable being into being thought, it is not sufficient to grasp the concept of truth-conditions in general. Rather, it is necessary to actually inspect the history of human awareness of how things are, what Schelling calls a “history of self-consciousness.” This history of self-consciousness seems to be the history of unprethinkable being becoming more and more transparent to thought.

  Yet, given the fallibility of judgment, we cannot claim a priori, from the standpoint of ontology, that there is such a progress. For this reason, it is mandatory to write a philosophy of history that conceives of philosophy itself as a historical activity, an activity progressing with the broadest shape of human awareness, with our world-pictures.

  Schelling sets out to write this history in his positive philosophy, which has two parts, the Philosophy of Mythology and the Philosophy of Revelation. The first part deals with the past, with the development of human awareness up to the point of the epoch of the Roman Empire, whereas the second is concerned with the hope that this development indeed follows the path of a constant recovery of unprethinkable being up to modernity. However, any reconstruction of the details of positive philosophy goes beyond the scope of this article.

  What is crucial about the very distinction between negative and positive philosophy is that Schelling extends the notion of realism and argues that the way things turn out to be really or actually can change our conception of how to think about them. Positive philosophy is a form of historicism guided by the idea of an overall transcendental matrix, which, however, is still subject to possible change. This feature of Schelling’s project was attractive to the very early Habermas and the later Heidegger, among other people, because it suggests a philosophy of history breaking free from the presupposition that the conditions of predication define the limits of the thinkable or even of the actual.

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  * * *

  1 Cf. Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Frederick Neuhouser, Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

  2 Cf. Wolfram Hogrebe, Prädikation und Genesis. Metaphysik als Fundamentalheuristik im Ausgang von Schellings “Die Weltalter” (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989); Manfred Frank, Der unendliche Mangel an Sein. Schellings Hegelkritik und die Anfänge der Marxschen Dialektik (München: Fink, 1992); Manfred Frank, Auswege aus dem Deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007).

  3 For an overview of this debate see Lore Hühn, Fichte und Schelling oder: Über die Grenze menschlichen Wissens (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1994).

  4 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: The Lectures of 1825–26, Volume III: Medieval and Modern Philosophy, tr. R. F. Brown and J. M. Stewart (Berkeley/Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1990).

  5 For a discussion of this see Axel Hutter, Geschichtliche Vernunft. Die Weiterführung der Kantischen Vernunftkritik in der Spätphilosophie Schellings (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996).

  6 Xavier Tilliette, Schelling. Biographie (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1999).