The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  However, if the intellectual intuition of the “I” is to have any content, it must come from something other than its own spontaneous activity. Rather than beginning with a duality of sorts (between, say, concept and object as Frege and others were later to argue), Fichte maintained that full systematicity required us to begin with a single principle, the “deed-action” and see how that presuppositionless activity required of itself that it be related to something other than itself.11 How the “I” is supposed to generate the “not-I” from out of itself was a matter to which Fichte devoted much effort and for which he made a number of revisions in the Wissenschaftslehre as he worked his views out. The basic idea, however, remained Kantian in spirit: Concepts without intuitions are empty, and intuitions without concepts are blind. Put into the Kantian-Fichtean idiom, that would mean that self-consciousness (as a deed-action, a Tathandlung) is empty unless it brings in its train the element of receptivity. The reality of the “I” established in intellectual intuition requires it to think of itself as determined by a “not-I.” This was not taken to be merely a statement of common sense by Fichte, as if he rhetorically asked himself whether there was a world independent of human thought. It was supposed to follow from the intellectual intuition of the “I” (an activity of thought that creates its object) that self-consciousness requires consciousness of something independent of itself if it is to make true judgments about anything. The “I” is thus said to “posit” itself; it authorizes itself to make judgments, which take their authority from what is not the “I.” The authority of a perceptual judgment that states a true fact, for example, comes from the independent object being perceived. However, that means in effect that the “I” authorizes the object to exercise an authority that is not dependent on the “I’s” authorizing it. This contradiction and the demand to resolve the contradiction, for Fichte, clearly forms the basis for the further development of the Wissenschaftslehre, which proceeds as an infinite task of the “I” authorizing itself to authorize states of affairs other than itself to authorize judgments about themselves, and in doing so, continually reaffirming its, the subject’s, basis as the sole source of authority. For Fichte, the underlying dynamic of the Wissenschaftslehre was the tension produced by the competing claims that the “Not-I” had to lie outside of the limits of the intellectually intuited “I” and at the same time had to lie within those limits, since receptivity lies within spontaneity. It was this “inside–outside” tension which formed the basic contradiction whose resolution remained an “infinite task.”

  The series of steps in this new form of “transcendental idealism” thus form a kind of double series, in which the “real” impacts on the ideal (with the idea of the object causing our perception of it) and in which the “ideal” grounds the real (as a “posit” of the “I”). In this way, Fichte took himself to have corrected the original Kantian version to make “transcendental idealism” more streamlined and systematic. Objects do indeed cause our perceptions of them (in the real series), but their authority as truth-makers of perceptual judgment comes from us (in the ideal series). Moreover, the ideal (as expressed at first in the principle of self-consciousness) becomes progressively more determinate as it is embodied in various ways in the real (for example, in sensibility). This takes on, moreover, a new shape when the subject encounters not an object but another subject (another “Not-I” but who is also an “I”), who is not merely determined as such-and-such (as are objects) but determines himself and the original subject. Put into less rigorous terminology than Fichte himself insisted upon: The ideal (the set of principles and norms necessary for self-consciousness) is progressively realized in practice as the subject confronts a recalcitrant natural world and the irreducible reality of other self-conscious agents and then reshapes his principles accordingly. We are constrained to think of objects in a certain way by the development of the “ideal–real” series, and we are constrained to think of other agents as possessing a freedom and an intrinsic dignity by virtue of the standing they have to demand recognition of their freedom and dignity.

  Fichte’s philosophy remains an idealism because its various foundational principles are determined as those which are required for there to be self-consciousness in the first place. However, it sees the transcendental principles as being derived from the way more abstract and simple principles are worked out in their embodiments in reality (in sensibility and in practice) and not from the table of judgments (as Kant had done). (Fichte’s own system and jargon about the “I” and the “Not-I” also immediately called forth its own satires, which always started with the idea that somehow Fichte had concluded that the pure “I” was he, Fichte, who had posited the entire world.12)

  Whereas when Kant had said that “the synthetic unity of apperception is therefore that highest point, to which we must ascribe all employment of the understanding, even the whole of logic, and conformably therewith, transcendental philosophy,” he almost certainly did not intend it to be taken that this implied that if we investigated the conditions under which an agent could become self-conscious, we would have solved all the traditional issues in metaphysics, Fichte took it that way.13 Since Fichte claimed the title “transcendental idealism” for his philosophy while rejecting the doctrine of unknowable things in themselves, that suggested to any number of people in his own time and in our own that he therefore had to mean that the world of objects in space and time (the world simpliciter, as we might think) was somehow only something “posited” by the I, or that Fichte’s idealism was only some other version of phenomenalism, namely, that the world, or objects in it, are only constructions justified by their success in explaining our subjective experience. That was never Fichte’s point or aim, even if it is true that Fichte’s real aim remains difficult to express.

  12.5 SCHELLINGIAN IDEALISM

  Reinhold had moved on from Jena in part because of the obvious failure of key elements of his program. Fichte left Jena not because of any intellectual failure but because of personal failures to respond to spurious trumped-up charges of atheism brought by his opponents. Fichte’s own successor at Jena in 1798 was F. W. J. Schelling, all of 23 years old at the time, the boy wonder of German philosophy. Whereas Fichte was constantly reworking his views to get it exactly right, Schelling changed his views sometimes in matters of months, and over the course of his career took up several different positions. Any statement about Schelling’s idealism thus is a statement about a particular time-slice of Schelling’s philosophical career. The time-slices in question here are Schelling’s views circa 1795–1803.

  Early on, Schelling became a Fichtean but also became quickly dissatisfied with Fichte’s approach, which he thought was too “subjective.” Fichte had been misled, Schelling thought, by thinking there were only two alternatives before him: idealism or dogmatism. In Fichte’s terms, the dogmatist thinks that a subject (or “agent” as we tend to call them nowadays) is simply one more natural thing among others, and that there is nothing ideal (or “normative”) about her. For the dogmatist, the difference between subjects and objects is only a difference between kinds of objects. However, the idealist thinks that subjects occupy a special status and are ideal in their nature. Subjects are more like statuses in a normative space than they are like objects in space and time, but they are not merely statuses. (Embodied agents are also indeed objects in time and space, but that is another matter.) Subjects are also entities that exist in their own intellectual intuition of themselves, and they possess certain powers on their own (in specific, the powers of authorization). Now, even Fichte himself thought that neither dogmatism nor idealism can be demonstrated to be superior to the other without begging all the basic questions. Thus, for Fichte, everything is either an object or a subject, and your metaphysics depends on which side you choose on the basis of your character.

  However, so Schelling suggested, what if there was a third alternative? Perhaps not everything is either a subject or an object—perhaps there is somethin
g that is neither subject nor object, and perhaps subjects and objects are both manifestations or appearances or modes of that third thing. Entertaining this possibility was reinforced by two factors in the intellectual climate of the 1780s and 1790s. First, the figure of Spinoza had been reinserted into German philosophy in the 1780s by F. H. Jacobi; even though Jacobi’s own concern with Spinoza by and large had to do with his worries about the direction of the Enlightenment.14 The Spinozistic idea—that the world was one substance that manifested itself in two different ways (mental and physical)—was growing in appeal to those people, themselves growing in number, who were dissatisfied with the ossified bureaucratic structure of German churches and were increasingly filled with a yearning for a more spiritual connection with nature. Second, and more importantly, Kant himself rather tantalizingly suggested something that itself suggested a Spinozistic reading of Kantianism itself. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant said that in the experiential judgment of natural beauty we have before us the “indeterminate concept of the supersensible substrate of appearances,” which is “neither nature nor freedom and yet is linked with the basis of freedom.”15 Now, Kant almost certainly did not mean that this substance might be the one substance of which Spinoza spoke, since that would be making a statement about things-in-themselves which Kant’s own “transcendental idealism” ruled out. Nonetheless, it suggested to Schelling that something indeed very much like Spinoza’s substance, modified in light of Kant and Fichte’s views, might very well be that which is “neither nature nor freedom and yet is linked with the basis of freedom.” This suggested that one might retool Spinoza’s monism (his idea that there was only one substance with different attributes) to see if it could be modified so that it might plausibly serve as something that could be deemed to be a substrate for freedom and nature.

  This was given a further impetus by Schelling’s idea that Kant had not satisfactorily resolved the opposition between (deterministic) nature and freedom in his ethics. If we are to achieve the “highest good” (as Kant calls it) as the union of virtue and happiness, then it must be the case that the makeup of the empirical world is such that happiness and virtue really can coincide, and Kant held that this compels us to postulate an “author” of the world who arranges things this way. Since Fichte had, for Schelling, already shown that we do have knowledge of the thing-in-itself when it comes to the intellectual intuition of the “I,” Kant’s own solution—that of a mere “postulate” of the purposiveness of the world—seemed unsatisfactory. Nonetheless, Fichte’s solution appeared too subjective (too much focused on everything as a “posit” made by the “I”) and not exhaustive of all the alternatives.

  Finally, as Schelling began to work out his own ideas for how to bring Fichte’s idealism into line with Spinoza’s monism, he became more and more convinced that Fichte’s own rather subjective idealism required being put into the context of a more thoroughgoing naturalism of a very specific sort.16 However, for that to work, we needed a conception of nature that was expansive enough both to serve as the nature that the natural sciences were exploring with more and more success—the tempo of natural scientific investigation was beginning to pick up markedly during this period—and still have a place for free agency within itself. This came to be Schelling’s own idealist naturalism, and it led directly to the creation of his Naturphilosophie. The term itself, Naturphilosophie, is best left in its original spelling. It does not mean a “philosophy of nature” but is supposed instead to single out a new way of doing philosophy—a “nature philosophy,” as it were, with intellectual intuition at its core and which understood itself to be an “absolute” idealism. In its initial formulation by Schelling, it was supposed to be the “absolute” idealist counterpart to the more relative “transcendental idealism.”17

  As Schelling developed the idea of a Naturphilosophie, he also began an intensive study of the natural sciences. Two things struck him. First, there were vast gaps in the sciences with regard to their domains. Schelling had already accepted Kant’s view that there was a vast gap between the kinds of judgments made in mechanics (Newtonian physics) and those made about organisms. The latter were teleological in that identifying anything as an organ at all (an eye, a liver, etc.) involved understanding it in terms of its purposes (i.e. in terms of the functions it fulfilled). As Schelling looked over the landscape of the natural sciences at the end of the nineteenth century, it seemed that there were great leaps between various domains. From the model of billiard balls colliding in mechanics, there did not seem to be any way to get to magnetism and electricity, nor from there to the elective affinities of chemistry and from there to the sciences of life in all its forms. That suggested that there might be something like deeper metaphysical forces binding the different regions together that were not susceptible to empirical investigation. (Here his inspiration was no doubt Kant’s own idea that empirical physics presupposed more basic forces of attraction and repulsion.)

  Second, Schelling’s emerging Platonism played a key role. These metaphysical forces could be conceived as idealities, analogous to Plato’s forms, and it would be the interaction of these metaphysical idealities with each other that generates the natural world as we find it in experience and scientific study. That would effectively transform Spinoza’s conception of the one substance (as the “one and all,” the shorthand by which German philosophers of the time referred to it) into a kind of spiritual entity and would transform the Spinozistic idea that nature is God into, more or less, the idea that God is nature. The cosmos as a whole is fundamentally an ideal, spiritual entity that embodies itself in matter, which it itself generates out of its own ideal structure. (This is Schelling’s transformation of Spinoza’s idea of nature as naturata and naturans, as product and activity of producing.)

  This effectively transformed Fichte’s conception of the series of the ideal becoming entangled in the real into a much less subjective conception. Schelling’s architecture for the way in which the ideal embodies itself in the real is that of showing how certain idealities (which initially appear as forces of a sort) push themselves into a balance (what he called an “indifference point”) that then results in a new ideality which in turn divides itself anew.18 The impetus for the push to new idealities comes from the way in which the “indifference point” fails (as a finite result) to reestablish the original (“infinite”) identity. The world begins in a form of identity (or, to put it slightly anachronistically, as an identity of energy and matter), and out of the simple forces of combustion (“heat” and “light”), matter emerges in its initial states, and with that, a dynamic process is set into motion. This dynamic pushes onward to magnetism (with its positive and negative poles), electricity (with positive and negative electricity) and on to chemical combinations and finally on to life itself (which divides itself into sexual difference). Life itself then pushes on to the formation of self-conscious creatures, who are the point in this evolution of the cosmos at which nature turns around and reflects on itself. The “absolute” is the point at which the original identity (as it were, of energy and matter) fully reestablishes itself. This final indifference point would be God (or more generally, “the divine”) thinking about its own creation. Not for nothing did Schelling refer to this as his “identity” philosophy.19

  Almost all of the details of this developmental process are by now of concern mostly only to intellectual historians, even though in their own day they exercised a good deal of influence on some scientists. (It has even been argued that Schelling’s views were influential in setting the stage for Darwin’s conception of evolution.20) Schelling’s overall view is a fusion of Fichte, Plato, and Spinoza. The “absolute” posits itself in an intellectual intuition of itself, and what it intuits is itself as having generated itself out of these processes and their indifference points. Moreover, the “absolute” can intuit itself only if the process produces self-conscious creatures who intellectually intuit themselves and thereby establish their own existence as
selves. Whereas Fichte thought that each individual agent intellectually intuited himself, Schelling thinks that each individual agent’s intellectual intuition of himself can itself only be a fragment of the “absolute’s” self-intuition. How exactly that is supposed to go has never been entirely clear, except perhaps to Schelling. In any event, what is clear is that this self-intuition of the “absolute” in and through human reflective activity cannot be a discursive matter. The scope for discursive thought rests on the capacity for individual intellectual intuition of oneself, which cannot itself be put into discursive form. (It at least cannot be demonstrated from any more fundamental proposition.) What one ultimately is intuiting in intellectually intuiting oneself is oneself as a fragment of the absolute’s self-intuition, and since this is a matter of the “infinite” limiting itself—of the cosmos as an original, boundless identity of energy and matter breaking itself up into energy and discrete bits of matter—one is intuiting the “infinite” making itself “finite” and then seeking to reestablish its infinity. The intuition of this is a form of philosophy—Naturphilosophie, to be exact—and is not itself an empirical science, even though it is supposed to have consequences for empirical science (such as “when investigating nature, look for symmetrical oppositions between positive and negative, polarized and unpolarized, etc.”). The same process can be recast for Fichtean “transcendental idealism”: one can begin with the idea of human experience itself, seek its conditions, arrive at an intellectual intuition of oneself (as Fichte had supposedly shown), and intellectually intuit that one’s own status as a “self,” a self-conscious agent, is itself a fragment of the “absolute.”21 As he worked that out, Schelling also came to assert that art, not philosophy, was the vehicle for expressing such an intellectual intuition in sensuously embodied human consciousness.