While he was 13 years younger and is often thought of as Fichte’s disciple and successor,1 Schelling began publishing at roughly the same time as his mentor. His first work, On the Possibility of a Form of Philosophy in General, appeared in 1794, the same year that Fichte’s first version of the Wissenschaftslehre began circulating. Indeed, the timing of their works showed that they were less teacher and student than collaborators or even competitors. Several times over the next decade Schelling would accelerate his own work, including his 1796 New Deduction of Natural Right and 1797 ‘Treatises Explicatory of the Idealism in the Wissenschaftslehre,’ to publish before Fichte could present similar projects. In all of these cases, Schelling need not have worried about Fichte presenting the same conclusions first. Though he was only 18 when he first encountered Fichte during the latter’s visit in 1793 to the seminary at Tübingen, Schelling soon began developing a position that, while indebted to Fichte, showed important differences from the rudimentary version of the Wissenschaftslehre to which he had been exposed. Schelling did not begin working regularly with Fichte until he accepted a post in Jena in 1798. In the time preceding this move, he published several works, including the 1795 Of the I as Principle of Philosophy, or On the Unconditioned in Human Knowledge, that more or less recounted the works of Fichte enthusiastically.2 Of the I does, however, mark Schelling’s first indication (other than in his unpublished 1794 essay on the Timaeus) that the unity of self-consciousness cannot exist in a subject or concrete act, but must precede self-positing (S 1: 166). Schelling calls the Fichtean project into question by declaring that ‘the I is no longer the pure, absolute I once it occurs in consciousness’ (S 1: 180). Indeed, basing our epistemological inquiries on the presumption of a conscious subject, which Schelling dubs ‘transcendental reflection,’ is for him the failing of all modern metaphysics.3
As its subtitle suggests, the goal of Of the I as Principle of Philosophy is to find the unconditioned origin of all conditioned knowledge. Unlike Fichte in the (First) Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre, for instance, Schelling does not begin with self-positing, but instead with the claim that knowledge can only be adequate if it is grounded in itself and nothing else. Any knowledge that is reached only through other knowledge is conditioned by that knowledge, and thus unstable unless tied to firm, self-certain knowledge. In order for the ground of all knowledge to be absolutely stable, it must not only be unconditioned, but unconditionable (S 1: 164). But this could only be the case if unconditioned knowledge created itself in its very thought, if it were being itself (S 1: 163). Largely repeating Fichte’s argument from the 1794 Wissenschaftslehre (and playing on the etymology of unbedingt), Schelling argues that such self-creating thought can only belong to an I, and never to a thing (Ding). But Schelling makes the point (one that was at best undeveloped in Fichte’s work to that point) that this I is not only distinct from (self-)consciousness, but disappears as soon as it enters consciousness, for consciousness must be conditioned by the absolute spontaneity that makes it possible (S 1: 180). ‘Attend to yourself’ (F 1: 422) is thus an inadequate suggestion for those seeking to think the unconditioned. The founding thought of all philosophy must be the freedom that makes such attentiveness possible.
But it is not enough simply to think the unconditioned as the condition of possibility of consciousness, for such thinking attempts to condition the unconditioned through the experience of thinking. Because Kant makes our epistemological access to the unconditioned a philosophical object, Schelling argues that this focus on conditions of possibility prevents him from thinking the absolute. Whereas Kant strives to formulate concepts for that which makes conceptualization possible, the unconditioned cannot be reached by mediation of concepts, but only by intellectual intuition. Kant’s denial of the possibility of any nonsensual intuition (KrV B307) allows him only to presuppose the absolute in his analyses of freedom and prevents him from seeing what the I is in its essence. Since thinking is for Kant always a sort of determining, that which is undetermined—namely, freedom or the absolute—cannot be thought. That which makes all determination possible is only a limit concept. And limit concepts, though useful in preventing thought from assuming its merely speculative knowledge is universally valid, are ultimately unsatisfying, since all knowledge demands not just to regulate, but to become actual through a firm, verifiable relationship to experience (S 1: 162).
Moreover, although the I is not determined by my conscious experience or anything else, there must be some reason for calling it the I rather than simply the absolute. As Descartes had shown, the I is that which produces itself unconditionally, that whose very thought includes its own being. It is not divisible (for then its oneness or multiplicity would be conditioned) or able to stand alongside another I, but is identity, A = A, pure and simple (S 1: 178). Even Kant’s moral law, since it is mediated by concepts, is too heteronomous for the I. In order to will the morally good, I have to align myself with limitations determined by something other than myself. Willing the morally good is not identical with willing oneself, for the good appears either as a concept or as a mere temporal moment of oneself. If in willing the good I will a universal(izable) maxim, then my self-willing derives from an external necessity of consistency in maxims. If, on the other hand, one advanced a more controversial interpretation of Kant according to which each instance of willing the moral law were nothing but willing one’s own willing, then this willing would still be conditioned by the temporal act of willing. In willing my own willing, I am not willing myself absolutely, but willing determinate instances of willing (S 1: 196–7). Because of this inability to identify willing the morally good with willing oneself, Kant is forced to distinguish between morality and happiness. The only way to overcome this separation is to postulate their ultimate identity, which, in turn, is to be insured by the ‘supreme reason that governs according to moral laws laid down as the cause and ground of nature’ (KrV A810/B838). And of course, no postulate can be an adequate expression of the absolute, since the very act of postulating assumes its own finitude.
Thus Schelling concludes that Spinoza, who made no distinction between happiness and the good, or even between being and willing (conatus), advanced a far more tenable ethics than many give him credit for. Those who claim that Spinoza’s system ‘eliminates all notions of a free though law-determined wisdom’ are fixated on a lower plane of ethical thought at which individual wills stand opposed to one another, and they thus fail to realize that the pure identification of nature and power is the ultimate expression of freedom (S 1: 196).4 Freedom limited by individuality is not freedom in its essence, but only the expression of inhibited freedom. True freedom strives to overcome all inhibitions, including that of individuality.5 Since happiness is always the goal of an individual as individual, ‘Therefore we must strive infinitely not to become happy, but no longer to need happiness, indeed to become incapable of needing it, and to elevate our very being to a form that renounces the form of happiness as well as that of its opposite’ (S 1: 198). While this may seem like a form of self-denial, it is only a denial of the self as limitation. Viewed positively, it is an expression of the I’s absolute freedom and power to be. Though a renunciation of all self-denial, Schelling’s ethical ideal is nothing so little as egoism. Thinking the I’s absolute freedom and power entails gratitude rather than arrogance. For
Only when we think about such a harmony [between striving and its objects] in its relation to our entire activity (which, from its lowest to its highest degree, aims at nothing else but the harmony of the not-I with the I) can we regard a contingent harmony as a favor [Begünstigung] (not a reward [Belohnung]), as a voluntary accommodation [Entgegenkommen] on the part of nature, as an unexpected assistance which nature bestows on the whole of our activity (not merely our moral acts). (S 1: 198n)
If we are properly attuned to this gift of nature, we see that what the finite I conceives of as moral law is in reality the natural law of the infinite I (S 1: 198). But since the moral law is a finite expression of the infinite natural law, it aims at turning its own laws (which Kant called laws of freedom) into laws of nature.
But if all moral striving occurs internal to the I rather than as freedom’s striving to externalize itself in nature, then Kant’s distinction between theoretical and practical reason must be reconceived. There can be no such thing as a practical reason by which freedom produces determinations in external nature, nor can there be a theoretical apprehension of a nature wholly external to the I. If the use of reason presupposes the identity of I and nature, then any attempt to unite the two through reason is a nonstarter. Nevertheless, there is an immanent sense in which reason strives for unity, by which the finite I strives to make itself identical with the infinite. We can thus preserve some of the sense of Kant’s practical reason by replacing freedom in the subject place with a finite I: it is not freedom that strives to externalize itself in nature, but the finite I that strives to unify itself with infinite nature. It is more difficult, however, to make sense of theoretical reason, for the first principle of philosophy (the I as unconditioned) rules out the possibility of any real knowledge of externality. If the I posits itself theoretically as identical to all reality, then there is nothing opposed to the I, which makes the very proposition of such identity meaningless. Idealism is thus possible only ‘as a practical regulative’ (S 1: 210), as the commitment to identifying oneself with all reality.
If we give the name reason to this striving for identity, reason has the robust practical task of bringing finite thought to the unconditioned and at best an only trivial theoretical responsibility of affirming the law of identity, A = A (S 1: 230). But in seeking to derive all philosophical thought from the I, Schelling cannot yet find a place for a meaningful distinction between reason and the other faculties. In a complete philosophical science ‘all the different faculties and actions that philosophy has ever named become one faculty only, one action (Handlung) of the same identical I’ (S 1: 238n). Thought is the practical activity of positing finitude only so that this finitude can be overcome in a final thought of the whole. Theoretical philosophy may be useful in ‘surveying the boundaries’ that these self-imposed limits present, but this surveying is nothing in itself, but a mere moment of the I’s pure practical self-discovery (S 1: 238n).
Yet Schelling clearly was not satisfied with the complete dissolution of the faculties that Of the I foresaw and would continue to refer to distinct faculties of thought for the rest of his career. In his 1797 ‘Treatises Explicatory of the Idealism in the Wissenschaftslehre’ Schelling works to resuscitate Kant’s more articulated account of the faculties without compromising Fichte’s vigorous defense of freedom. Though Schelling maintains the position that the faculties are not ontologically distinct, he abandons the effort to reduce them all to reason, marking reason, the understanding, the imagination, and intuition as distinct modes of thinking, each with its own proper place.
After a characteristically contemptuous denunciation of the intellectual limitations of his contemporaries, Schelling begins the work with a Fichtean revision of the Kantian doctrine of the faculties, arguing that the ground of all thought (and hence of all reality) lies not in consciousness, but in a preconscious intuition (S 1: 442). Schelling acknowledges that intuition must in some sense be the first element of cognition, but he disagrees with the Kantian conclusion that it is therefore the lowest form of cognition. Rather, it ‘is the highest in the human spirit, that from which all further cognition derives its validity and reality [Realität]’ (S 1: 355). While some followers of Kant (whom Schelling leaves unnamed) hold that the inaccessibility of the thing in itself6 implies that the contents of cognition are merely epiphenomenal to true reality, Schelling argues that the very idea of such a precognitive reality is unintelligible. Before the activity of the imagination, there can be nothing either bounded or unbounded. These followers seem to have ignored Kant’s admonition that the thing-in-itself is nothing but a limit concept. Tying Kant’s transcendental aesthetic to the Platonic notions of peiras and the apeiron, Schelling recounts how space provides an object with its extension, an extension that is entirely unlimited until time imposes the limitation of having to occupy one place at a time (S 1: 356). Thus it is only through time that space acquires the determinacy of the three dimensions, just as it is only through space that time is extended beyond a single point. Prior to these determinations, an object could not be finite or infinite, and thus could not be at all. But what Schelling is most interested in is not a delimited space or extended time as products of an intuitive faculty, but intuition in its activity (Tätigkeit). The simultaneous expansion of spatiality and determining of temporality comprise the unceasing activity of consciousness, which Schelling describes as ‘the constant striving of the spirit to become finite for itself; that is, to become conscious of itself’ (S 1: 382). An intellectualistic obsession with the structure of sensible reality obscures the fact that at its ground is something more than a merely mechanically productive power. In order for organic life to be possible, a form of self-organization must lie in its ground. At this point in the essay Schelling declines to give a name for this ground, but he will later call it the reason that makes all self-reflection possible.
The dominant traditions of contemporary philosophy, however, which Schelling collectively calls ‘the sound understanding [der gesunde Verstand],’ are inadequate for cognizing the organic. Instead of humanity’s essential activity, they seize upon products of nature and are unable to distinguish activity from productivity. With the language of activity and productivity, Schelling is relying less on the ancient praxis/poiesis distinction than on a Fichtean revision of Spinoza’s distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata (Pfau 1994: 30). For Spinoza in the Ethics,7 these are but two sides of substance: God (or nature) is at once the self-knowing ground and what is grounded and known in this ground, and it is only through abstraction that the intellect can distinguish the two. As Schelling conceives the distinction, natura naturans is nature as acting and natura naturata is nature as produced. While the latter may be organic (in the same way that lumber or detritus is organic), only the former is truly alive. Whereas in Euclidian geometry it is relatively simple to show the identity of activity and product (for the form of a circle is just the figure produced by tracing all the points equidistant from a common central point), the philosophical task of finding the identity of active spirit and the self as product is much more difficult. In particular, the understanding’s efforts to find such an identity inevitably fail, as it always seeks to reduce phenomena to finite concepts. Concepts cannot capture the infinitude of activity, for they do not subsist independently, but always refer to other concepts. In the present essay Schelling suggests (without elaborating) that reason is the key to overcoming the understanding’s reliance on dead concepts. In contrast to those guided by the sound understanding, those guided by reason feel quite at home in the organic activity of human freedom, for ‘no one who is not completely deprived of reason has ever claimed anything about speculative matters for which we could not find some foundation in human nature itself’ (S 1: 363). Reason is thus a kind of corrective, drawing speculative thought back to human nature, never letting it lose its ground in freedom.
To demonstrate the indispensability of thinking activity in addition to productivity, Schelling appeals to that other great post-Cartesian rationalist, Leibniz. If only contemporary philosophers had read Leibniz more carefully, Schelling argues, they would see that things in themselves could not be dead, selfless (selbstloses) objects, but instead are capable of knowing and representing: ‘Or is the belief in a real (wirkliche) world—the element of our life and activity [Handlung]—supposed to have originated not from immediate certainty but from (I do not know what kind of) shadow plays of real objects that are accessible not to the imagination [Einbildungskraft] but to a deadened and unimaginative [phantasielosen] speculation?’ (S 1: 358). Schelling fears that Kant may have intended precisely this morbid possibility in emphasizing the role of the understanding in the construction of objects. If the understanding enters on the scene only after the imagination has synthesized its pure intuitions, then it can ‘only repeat that original act of intuition wherein the object first existed’ (S 1: 359). Thus Schelling criticizes not only those who rely on the understanding in formulating their accounts of consciousness, but also those who give the understanding a central role in cognition. The problem with contemporary philosophy, as Schelling sees it, is not just that the weak of spirit have fallen into mechanical thought, but that they seek to enforce this mechanism on everyone by denying any freedom in thought. Even the imagination, supposed by faculty psychologists to be the most spontaneous of all the faculties, is for them a machine operating by some opaque schematic process to convert intuitions into images.
In order to give an account of the structure of thought while still taking it as the absolute beginning of all reality, Schelling seeks to explain how concepts and schemata assist intuitions in cognition without reducing cognition to (merely) productive faculties (S 1: 359). Just as sensible objects need the finitude of time to appear as objects in three-dimensional space, intuitions in general need the finitude of schemata and concepts to appear as concrete things. But the separation of the understanding, imagination, and intuition is only a problem when seized upon by those who, lacking the synthetic power necessary to philosophize, give ontological weight only to the divisions in spirit they themselves create. Truly synthetic minds will recognize that in the wake of the modern separation of subject and object, the only way to reunite them is in a being that is itself both subject and object, both representer and represented. While Leibniz had already recognized this in his theory of the monad, Schelling contends that Fichte more clearly expounded on the necessity of a being that is both subject and object, which he located in the I. More explicitly than Leibniz or Kant, he showed that the activity at the ground of all reality is nothing other than free spirit.
Such a unification of opposites is only possible in something that is alive, for no dead force could hold itself together with its opposite without overcoming its aversion to this opposite. Yet that which is alive is precisely what we call spirit. Therefore, spirit lies at the base of the unification of subject and object. And since objects can only exist in relation to subjects, everything that exists originates in the spirit’s act of intuiting itself (S 1: 370). Pure intuition, however, cannot mark the distinction between subject and object, which entails a move beyond intuition. Since recognizing something opposed to the I entails the ability to distinguish between the I and not-I, a knowing subject can grasp objects as objects only through ‘the duplicity of its inward and outward tendency’ (S 1: 380). Following Fichte, Schelling asserts that intuition begins in the interiority of the self. The self begins to limit itself by calling itself into question. It continually seeks its boundaries, but since it has not yet grasped how anything can be exterior to it, it works only to reproduce itself to infinity (S 1: 380). This, Schelling notes, is the process which gives the knowing subject a sense of continuity (S 1: 381). Through the experience of the nonabsoluteness of boundaries, the knowing subject takes both itself and its environment (between which, of course, it cannot make a sharp distinction) as a realm of constant and conflicting activities. Its only way to seize upon this realm is to take (posit) it as the product of distinct forces which have no principle of individuality, but which are merely reactive to other forces. This production of static forces out of flowing activity is the first move out of the realm of continuity, and thus ‘Only in the act of production does the spirit become aware of its finitude’ (S 1: 381). Production and self-consciousness of finitude arise simultaneously. Or rather, since time is itself the original production of finitude (just as space is the original production of infinity), temporal reflection on time, finitude, and production reveal that the three are united in bringing about the self-differentiation of spirit. Production, then, is the concretization, or as Hegel will later say, the externalization8 of spirit, and hence its self-division. History is thus comprised of this self-division, and ‘All acts of the spirit thus aim at presenting [darzustellen] the infinite within the finite. The goal of all these acts is self-consciousness, and their history is none other than the history of self-consciousness’ (S 1: 382). History’s stages (Zustände) are its progressively sophisticated measures for overcoming the finitude inherent in all presentation. The sequential representation of time (similar to what Heidegger in Being and Time calls the ‘ordinary conception of time’) arises from the spirit’s attempts to present the infinite. Since the infinite cannot be presented in a single moment, the spirit posits everything to exist in a succession of time (S 1: 384).
Yet Schelling is critical of the Fichtean assumption that this union of activity and product can be located in consciousness. Since it is a subjectivity that has already made itself into an object, consciousness arrives on the scene too late. The origin of consciousness must be in a still undetermined unity of activity and product. Consciousness arises from ‘the constant striving of the spirit to become finite for itself; that is, to become conscious of itself’ (S 1: 382). Since this striving for finitude precedes consciousness, it must pervade not only consciousness itself, but also what it takes to be external to itself. The absolute’s striving for finitude is prior to consciousness’s separation of subject and object.
The name Schelling gives to this preconscious striving is ‘productive force [produktive Kraft].’ Unlike the blind, dead forces of Newtonian mechanics, these forces are self-organizing and evolving. Alternately breaking through static patterns of forces and forming new limitations, nature’s productive force ‘gradually configures raw matter to itself’ (S 1: 387). Productive force remakes matter, as it were, in its own image, matter which is then expressive of this force and able to propagate it. Yet this force is not a static template only able to reproduce a pregiven form. Because there is nothing but its own drive tying it to a particular form, productive force modifies itself in response to external resistance. Since such an evolutionary force is not tied to any particular concept, the understanding will fail to grasp its self-organizing nature, and thus it calls for a higher form of thinking—namely, reason, which alone can cognize purposiveness and freedom. Yet even given this reconceiving of force as evolutionary and self-organizing, not even a productive force can define the human being: ‘Everything about the human being carries the character of freedom. Fundamentally, he is a being that dead nature has released from its guardianship and thereby entrusted to the fortunes of his own (internally conflicting) forces’ (S 1: 388–9). While an expanded conception of the place of forces in nature is necessary to think human freedom, it is not sufficient.
At this point, Schelling still conceives of the understanding as a faculty, and more specifically as ‘a secondary, derivative, and ideal faculty’ (S 1: 422). While he had earlier criticized those who seek to understand the spirit’s activity in terms of such an abstract and formal concept as that of the ‘faculty’ (S 1: 392–3), he apparently does not believe anything is lost by using such an abstraction to characterize the functioning of the understanding. The understanding is merely parasitic on the intuition, abstracting dead concepts from the intuition’s living (i.e., self-possessed and self-organizing) unity of subjectivity and objectivity. It adds no content to cognition, for its categories ‘do not actually express anything but the most primordial and necessary mode of activity, the primordial synthesis whereby alone any object becomes and originates’ (S 1: 422). The products of the understanding thus are reproductions of the vitality of original synthesis.9
This mechanistic account of the understanding as a discrete and parasitic faculty helps to highlight the extent to which Schelling now considers reason something far greater than a faculty, and in some ways as identical with human thought itself. Yet here Schelling qualifies this identification of reason and thinking in general to a greater extent than he had in Of the I. He seeks to maintain distinctions between theoretical and practical reason, imagination and activity, at the same time that he dissolves them. While Kant’s distinction between theoretical and practical reason is useful for showing that cognition is always both real and ideal, both necessitated by something preceding subjectivity and a free act of the subject, we would be wrong to infer from this that theoretical and practical reason are two different employments of a unitary faculty. An act of reason that is only practical or only theoretical is unintelligible, for practical activity presupposes the imagination’s10 theoretical capacity to conceive of possibilities, while theoretical activity always presupposes goal-directed activity (S 1: 431). Whereas the understanding and its dead products can be separated from the living activity of the spirit, theoretical and practical reason are inseparable.
This denial of a primordial difference between theoretical and practical reason is an implicit attack on Fichte (an attack that Fichte tried again and again to answer by refining his concept of Anstoss). While Schelling directs his comments at Reinhold and Beck, his language clearly implicates Fichte as well. The I’s act of positing a not-I, Schelling argues, must be grounded in something prior to the I, for otherwise such positing only takes place within the idea (in der Idee), not in any real encounter of the I with the not-I (S 1: 410). Any cognition that takes place only on the conceptual11 level is never a necessary act, but always a free, ideal one (S 1: 419). This objection would resurface three decades later in Schelling’s Munich Lectures on the History of Recent Philosophy, where he accuses Hegel’s system of never leaving the certainty of the realm of thought to deal with reality and exhorts philosophers to supplement such ‘negative philosophy’ with a ‘positive philosophy’ that actively pursues external reality. ‘Actual [Wirkliches] thinking,’ he argues, ‘is where something opposed to thinking is overcome. Where one has only thinking, and indeed abstract thinking, as content, thinking has nothing to overcome’ (S 10: 141). The core of this critique, which in its reformulations in Schelling’s lectures on the philosophies of Mythology and Revelation would inspire the most important mid-nineteenth-century critiques of Hegel (including those of Engels and Kierkegaard), is already present in the 1797 ‘Treatises.’ Schelling reasons that the positing of the not-I must be grounded in something other than the I, ‘for that act of opposing is a free act, accompanied by consciousness, not a primordial and hence not a necessary act’ (S 1: 410-11). The implied opposition between a free act and one grounded in something ontologically prior to the self will dissolve in the Freedom essay, but otherwise this passage reflects Schelling’s consistent rejection of an idealism grounded merely in subjectivity. Any systematic philosophy will have to ground self- and other-positing in an impulse (to attempt to translate Fichte’s Anstoss), or, as Schelling will increasingly describe it, in a striving (Streben) of representations to appear in consciousness. Such striving precedes all subjectivity, and hence all positing or consciousness. This primordial striving is at once theoretical and practical, for it precedes the original practical activity of self-positing.
Thus the task of idealistic philosophy, Schelling puts forth, is to analyze the vast and obscure prehistory of this striving. It is not enough merely to accept that the I posits itself, for self-positing is built upon an extraordinarily complex network of preconscious activity. Schelling has identified this activity as organic, but this is more of a paradigm for future studies than a scientific conclusion. In his Nature Philosophy, Schelling will need to show in what way reason’s striving is organic, how its organism works, and what it needs to stay alive. Reason, he has begun to suspect, is both as exploitative and as vulnerable as any living being.