Stepping back from the fissure of indifference opened in the Nature Philosophy, Schelling’s next major work brings difference and contradiction into the heart of post-Kantian philosophy. Rather than striving (as in the Wissenschaftslehre) to overcome the opposition between the I and not-I, the System of Transcendental Idealism embraces the oppositions of human being and nature, subject and object, insisting that reason comes to know itself by preserving, not overcoming its other. The concept of reason developed in the STI is a thoroughly human one, which provisionally opposes reason to intuition, only to show that intuition1 is not only compatible with, but the very life of, human reason. The STI’s motor is what Schelling calls feeling, and ‘in every feeling a contradiction is felt, and nothing whatever can be felt save an inner contradiction within ourselves’ (S 3: 560). Thus intuition is simultaneously the contradiction that pushes reason to enlarge itself and the very ability to preserve contradictions in a greater whole. Intuition is the name for the movement of difference within human reason, the heightening and suspension of contradiction that raises reason beyond the forces of organic life and beyond the limits of a systematic philosophical presentation. But by following reason beyond the limits of system, Schelling begins to dissolve the concept of humanity as the locus for the resolution of contradictions. The all-too-human ‘feelings’ that give Schelling’s text so much vitality lose their place in an absolute that exceeds all philosophical presentation.
The System of Transcendental Idealism proved to be the first in a long line of works, stretching at least until 1829, that Schelling would title ‘systems.’ We should not take this newfound titular bravado lightly, as Schelling, though never shy about the relative worth of his contributions to philosophy,2 had used such phrases as ‘ideas toward …’ and ‘first projection of…’ to indicate the provisionalness of his previous works. Seeing the incompleteness of the Nature Philosophy, Schelling announces in the first few pages of his new System that he intends to ‘enlarge Transcendental Idealism into what it really should be, namely a system of all knowledge’ (S 3: 330). There is no place for modesty in philosophy, as philosophical problems are not indifferent to our advances, but demand that we confront and solve them. Schelling is convinced that remaining silent in the face of the unknown is a symptom of slavishness and irresponsibility rather than piety. Yet he is clear that by highlighting the need for system he is not renouncing the Nature Philosophy, but showing the need to develop a parallel philosophy in which the I raises itself to consciousness (S 3: 331). Schelling likens this method to Descartes’s, when the Frenchman boasted that from only matter and motion he could fashion the universe.3 Analogously, Schelling promises: ‘give me a nature made up of opposed activities, of which one reaches out into the infinite, while the other tries to intuit itself in this infinitude, and from that I will make the intelligence, with the whole system of its presentations, arise before you’ (S 3: 427). But the difference between Transcendental Idealism and Descartes’s physics is that the latter assumes a pregiven intelligence while the former strives to produce its own conditions of intelligibility (S 3: 427). Like Hegel’s ‘spirit,’ Schelling’s ‘intelligence’ is to be a self-developing and self-defining subject-object that comes to know itself in knowing the world. This radical methodological presumption entails, according to Schelling, that a system of Transcendental Idealism must deduce not only the physical world, but the very possibility of understanding and deducing it.
Thus Schelling calls for a new mode of presenting philosophical insights, one that mirrors the development of the intellect in its very form. Crucial to his early understanding of system is that the presentation of the system stands outside the movement of consciousness and is thus a form of memory (S 3: 331). The presentation of the System is the narration of the history of self-consciousness, in which every reference to concrete experience ‘serves as a memorial and a document’ for the preconscious systematic movement that makes all thought possible (S 3: 331). Indeed, Schelling’s Transcendental Philosophy begins with the ‘free imitation [Nachahmung]’ of the original act of self-consciousness and at every stage of its presentation merely reproduces the freedom of this original act (S 3: 396). Yet Schelling is uneasy with this structure of remembrance, for it seems at odds with his ideal of system according to which form and content are not only inseparable but identical. In a true system, philosophical presentation should not only mirror the structure of reality, but be one with it.4 In 1806 Schelling will for this reason declare the dialogue, which presents philosophical insights as they emerge, the only adequate form of philosophical presentation (S 6: 13).5 Yet the works to which Schelling most frequently refers (in his Lectures on the History of Recent Philosophy and elsewhere) are the Ideas, the System of Transcendental Idealism, the Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie, and the Freiheitsschrift—none of them dialogues. So we should not dismiss the forms of Schelling’s nondialogues, particularly in light of the fact that Schelling claims it is in form, not content, that the System of Transcendental Idealism represents an improvement over his previous writings. He assures his readers that the STI presents no new content; it merely presents the principles of the Wissenschaftslehre and the Naturphilosophie in a form more adequate to this content (S 3: 330-1). Both Fichte and the earlier Schelling had argued, albeit somewhat opaquely, that ‘nature’s highest goal, to become wholly an object to itself, is achieved only through the highest and last reflection, which is none other than man; or, more generally, it is what we call reason, in which nature first completely returns to itself, and by which it becomes apparent that nature is identical from the first with what we recognize in ourselves as the intelligent and the conscious’ (S 3: 341). And yet, by divorcing the reason guiding nature from the reason guiding the philosopher, the Nature Philosophy was forced to give a one-sided portrayal of nature’s development, showing only how nature embodies reason, not how reason progressively comprehends the natural world. Fichte’s system likewise lacked completion because it failed to show the development of its own reason, merely positing a finite I without proving the possibility of such. Like the mercurial figure of Fichte himself, Fichte’s reason takes itself to have arrived on the scene fully formed, refusing to acknowledge any role that nature may have played in its development.
Thus the task of the System (and of system in general) is to present the very freedom that all philosophy presupposes. In this respect, Schelling fails to complete his task, for while the philosopher can replicate the original freedom of self-consciousness, she cannot absolve herself of all of the dependencies that this freedom precedes. Although all philosophical activity occurs within time and thus must be accounted for in nature’s sequence of necessary events, free beings still have the capacity to interrupt their sequence of presentations and freely reflect on their own freedom. This act of reflection replaces a necessary sequence of presentations with a free imitation of this sequence (S 3: 397). Philosophical reflection is thus, in a sense that Schelling fails to develop, outside of time.6 Thus the System of Transcendental Idealism distinguishes itself from all previous systems by making freedom, not being, primary (S 3: 376). According to Schelling, any system that begins with being rather than freedom will have to make freedom merely illusory, since freedom always exceeds any ground in being. So long as we begin with being, God, or nature, we are left with a Spinozism that will seek to show how apparently free acts are grounded in, and thus determined by, some prior being.7 In contrast, ‘Being in [the STI] is merely freedom suspended [die aufgehobene Freiheit]’ (S 3: 376). That is, Transcendental Philosophy never loses sight of its origin in the intuitive act of an atemporal self-consciousness. It takes no object of consciousness as absolute, but recognizes each as dependent on the positing of a free self. Being is thus the eternally changing product of a free and active self-consciousness (S 3: 376). Schelling takes recognition of this fact as a precondition of a true system: a presentation of the ground of all knowledge, including itself.
And yet, from the very beginning Schelling tells us that the System of Transcendental Idealism cannot be a system in this sense, for Transcendental Philosophy must be supplemented with the Nature Philosophy Schelling has already developed (S 3: 342). The task of philosophy is inevitably dual: to show the development of reason both through nature and through subjectivity. Schelling thus revises Fichte’s basic division of philosophy into its practical and theoretical sides. Recall that for Fichte, theoretical reason is reason that seeks to explain the freedom of the I on the basis of the not-I and practical reason the willful establishment of freedom as prior to objectivity. Thus while theoretical reason must precede practical reason in philosophical presentation, practical reason has ontological priority, since theoretical reason can only be exercised by an intelligence free to posit what it chooses. In Of the I, we saw Schelling reject Fichte’s prioritization of practical reason for its refusal to question the grounds of the finite I. An I that imposes its will on nature without coming to terms with its indebtedness thereto is despotic, merely the enforcer of arbitrary commands. But, as we saw in the ‘Treatises Explicatory of the Idealism in the Wissenschaftslehre,’ Schelling also rejects Fichte’s claims about the task of theoretical philosophy. Having assumed reason to be identical with all reality, Schelling can no longer pretend that reason must search for its ground in something other than itself. Thus the task of philosophy is bidirectional, just as Fichte claimed, but now reason is not just a twofold technique by which the individual arrives at knowledge, but the source of knowledge itself. In Nature Philosophy, absolute reason inhibits its own infinite activity until it comes to know itself, and in Transcendental Philosophy, finite reason expands its self-intuition until it knows itself to be identical with the absolute. Since both sides of philosophical science show the possibility of absolute self-knowledge, ‘it is therefore indifferent, from a purely theoretical standpoint, whether the objective or the subjective be made primary, since this is a matter that practical philosophy (though it has no voice in this connection) is alone able to decide’ (S 3: 332). With this subjugation of the theoretical to the practical, Schelling throws the System into disarray before he has even begun laying out the history of self-consciousness. A system of Transcendental Idealism, which is to bring the insights of Kant and Fichte to completion, is to be but one half of philosophical science, whose other half is Nature Philosophy. Yet the two halves do not make the whole of philosophy, for each must be preceded by a practical philosophy, which nevertheless has no voice in their respective development.
The book’s exoskeleton gives little help in clearing up the structure of Schelling’s philosophy as a whole, as its organization into six parts seems almost arbitrary. Following a Foreword and Introduction, Part One is a restatement of Schelling’s earlier arguments for making the I the principle of all knowledge, and Part Two is a restatement of the Fichtean derivation of the same principle. Frustratingly, Schelling ends Part Two by reaffirming the same Fichtean division of philosophy into mutually necessary practical and theoretical sides that he criticizes in the Foreword (S 3: 387). Part Three comprises roughly half of the System and lays out the movement from the first act of self-consciousness to the absolute act of the will. Though Schelling titles this part the ‘System of Theoretical Philosophy according to the Principles of Transcendental Idealism,’ the last few sections on the will and postulation are already elements of a practical philosophy. Part Four, in which Schelling claims to develop a ‘System of Practical Philosophy according to the Principles of Transcendental Idealism,’ gives little indication of its own relation to the theoretical side of philosophy, but its title (along with that of Part Three) seems to indicate that Transcendental Idealism consists of two systems, leaving the reader to wonder whether these should be set in opposition to Nature Philosophy or somehow include it. Part Five, which shows the necessity of a teleological account of nature for the completion of practical philosophy, is a mere four pages long, but it sets up the book’s final part, which seeks to give a philosophical account of the artwork, which, Schelling argues, stands outside of the system of philosophy entirely. Thus the book is hardly a system in Schelling’s desired sense of providing a unitary ground to all knowledge (including its own presentation), as it fails even to show what such a unitary ground would look like and concedes, at any rate, that it would be extraphilosophical. But it would be too quick to infer that Schelling’s Transcendental Philosophy is therefore a failure. By structuring itself around the I’s coming to know itself through increasing determination, the System legitimizes its own place as a transitional work in the development toward absolute knowledge, rather than the systematic culmination of idealistic thought.
This legitimization of asystematic thought appears at the very beginning of Schelling’s discussion of theoretical philosophy. To maintain his distance from Fichte, Schelling carefully distinguishes the I with which his Transcendental Idealism begins from the I of the Wissenschaftslehre. Philosophy does not begin with an act of will, whereby a conscious subject raises itself above its empirical conditions, but with what Schelling calls self-consciousness, ‘an act [Akt] lying outside time, and by which all time is first constituted’ (S 3: 375). Whereas in ordinary consciousness I am aware of a variety of presentations or objects, I am not simultaneously aware of myself as the origin of these presentations (S 3: 366-7). In contrast, self-consciousness (or pure consciousness, as Schelling sometimes calls it) contains no empirical content, but consists solely in the intellectual intuition that I am (S 3: 367). Contrary to the later complaints of Hegel8 and others, the hypothesis of an intellectual intuition is not Schelling’s way of asserting the truth of idealism without proof, but the name for a logically complex account of what self-positing involves. Before the I can recognize itself as existing, it must already have made itself into an object for itself. But something is only an object to the extent that it, unlike free subjectivity, is limited. But this means that self-consciousness is unlimited self-limiting: self-consciousness is characterized by an oscillating activity (schwebende Thätigkeit) between limiting and being limited (S 3: 391).
If the I were nothing but such oscillation, no determinate consciousness could arise. A sensuous, reflective being is something far more determined than an interplay of freedom and unfreedom. In order to advance from pure, infinite limitation to consciousness of an external world, the I must (prereflectively) seize upon this oscillation as itself something determinate. Thus the first stage of the I’s becoming conscious of its absoluteness is realizing its own limitation. By doing so, the I posits its activity as arising in part from beyond itself (i.e., from what limits it), which is to say that it senses an external world (S 3: 404). As we transcendental philosophers reflect on this development, we perform an analogous activity, recognizing the impossibility of our own thought without a necessity independent of ourselves. We philosophers realize that ‘the truth of all cognition undoubtedly rests on the feeling of compulsion which accompanies it’ (S 3: 408). In seeking to make sense of this external compulsion, we are forced to admit that we cannot recount all the unconscious activity that precedes consciousness and makes it possible, and thus we fixate on certain recognizable epochs in the history of consciousness (S 3: 390). Just as we can in the Nature Philosophy discern eddies and whirlpools in nature’s flow, in recalling the history of self-consciousness, we are able to find analogous continually renewing unconscious constructs.
But at this stage, consciousness only intuits its limitation without being able to explain it. Because it recognizes a distinction between its intuitions and the limitations that compel them, it assumes that they arise in part from outside consciousness. This shows the inevitable failure of any ‘dogmatic transcendent9 idealism’ that ignores the real limits of the self and presumes that it can deduce intuitions from mere concepts. Though consciousness will ultimately realize that it shares a ground with its intuitions and is thus originally identical with them, it can only do so by first recognizing an absolute and external necessity in intuition. Dogmatic transcendent idealism mistakes the necessity of consciousness’s determination in general (which Schelling calls its first limitation) for the contingent particular determinations that individual self-consciousnesses face (which he calls the second limitation). While it is absolutely necessary that thought contain limitations, the central problem of theoretical philosophy is to show why it contains the precise limitations it does (S 3: 410). The particular limitations faced by any self-consciousness are contingent on its location in absolute space, its relations to other subjects, and so on. Yet the inexplicability of the second limitation is a flaw of our knowledge, not of the system. If we knew the precise condition of every part of our solar system, for instance, we could deduce all the limitations on any given intelligence (S 3: 410). The System of Transcendental Idealism is thus deterministic, but not in such a way that denies freedom. For while the determination of the intellect is prior to any conscious willing, it is not necessarily prior to all the self’s activity. Schelling leaves open the possibility (though he will not explore it systematically until the 1809 Freedom essay) that the first limitation is an entirely free act of an unconscious and impersonal I, from which all determination follows necessarily.
Following its first and second limitations, the consciousness of the sensuous I consists of a variety of presentations, some of which arise by its own free activity and some by sensation. In order to overcome the oscillation between the two, it posits a self which is capable of intuiting both sensuous externality and itself. The I thus becomes a perceiving being, capable of sensing and being sensed. It soon realizes that in order to be capable of both sensing and being sensed, it must in some way be in control of the act of sensing. Consciousness thus sees itself as productive of intuitions, as able to overstep external limitation (über die Grenze hinausgehen) and determine whether the self or something external is to be limited (S 3: 419). Once again, consciousness fixes on an oscillation between spontaneity and limitation and becomes aware of the determination underlying it.10 The theoretical side of Transcendental Idealism thus consists of three major acts of self-realization:
In the first, the still unconscious act of self-awareness, the I was a subject-object, without being so for itself. In the second, the act of sensation, only its objective activity became an object to it. In the third, that of productive intuition, it became an object to itself as sensing, that is, as a subject. (S 3: 534)
Under the heading of productive intuition, Schelling rushes through a great deal of territory, including the highlights of his Nature Philosophy. In order to make sense of its own sensing, the I posits forces, then matter, then organic matter. In retracing this ground, Schelling undermines his sharp division in the Preface between Transcendental and Nature Philosophy. If we can account for the whole of nature through the unconscious I’s self-revelation, it is unclear why there must be a separate science for the unfolding of the absolute into various natural products. If Transcendental Idealism is really as powerful as Schelling implies, then it would seem that the Naturphilosophie’s critique of Fichte was misguided: one need not show the development of nature through inhibition of the absolute, but merely through expansion of the I. Thus the sole problem with Fichte’s system would be that he fails to account for the externality of the I’s second limitation, and thus does not fully appreciate the finitude of the I.
But Schelling’s instincts in separating Transcendental from Nature Philosophy may be correct, even if he fails to carry this separation through the whole of the STI. For Schelling admits that the nature posited by the productive intuition is actually a ‘second nature’ reconstructed by consciousness, but not necessarily identical with its unconscious sources (S 3: 537). In expanding its self-conception to include matter, forces, and organisms, the I is telling its own history, but it is not thereby becoming that history. Expansion on the merely theoretical level is a mere prelude to the conscious intuition of oneself as free subject-object. Schelling calls this process of expansion the ‘synthetic method,’ though in his Lectures on Recent Philosophy he will identify it with the Hegelian dialectic to ensure that his listeners would not falsely attribute its discovery to Hegel (S 10: 96-7).11 Whatever its name, Schelling makes clear that synthetic expansion is always an act and is thus from its very beginning practical: ‘Two opposites a and b (subject and object) are united by the act x, but x contains a new opposition, c and d (sensing and sensed) and so the act x itself again becomes an object; it is itself explicable only through a new act = z, which perhaps again contains an opposition, and so on’ (S 3: 412). As in the dialectic Hegel describes in the Science of Logic, the I expands its self-conception to overcome a conflict in its previous conception, only to see a new conflict emerge. One crucial difference between the synthetic method and the Hegelian dialectic, however, is that Schelling denies that at its ground (self-)knowledge is mediated by concepts. As in his previous works, Schelling remains insistent that concepts, as mere products of the understanding, must be grounded in prior intuitions (S 3: 427). In every act of intuition, concept and object are one. A concept is ‘what arises for us, when we separate the acting (Handeln) as such from the outcome’ (S 3: 506). Since this separation can only occur in consciousness, any philosophy that begins with consciousness will be unable to explain the conformity of concepts and objects, for it would attempt to explain an eternally preconscious identity from the standpoint of consciousness (S 3: 506). But if the concept is always already derivative, then every advancement from one stage of consciousness to the next is only partially conceptual; a free act of intellectual intuition must also be included. Any system that does not recognize the vital role of intuition would be an ‘inauthentic idealism, i.e., a system that turns all knowledge into illusion [Schein]’ (S 3: 427). A philosophy that begins with consciousness never leaves it and thus fails to approach the unprethinkable striving from which consciousness arises.
This means that self-forgetting is an indispensable component in the advancement of consciousness. In coming to know itself through overcoming oscillations, consciousness is also always forgetting that it is the source of its self-knowledge. Just as the artist loses herself in her work, consciousness loses itself in its products (S 3: 430). That is, the product of intelligence seems for consciousness to have more reality than the intellectual intuition that produced it. This forgetting (which explains the need for philosophy as remembrance) testifies to the ‘perpetual contradiction’ of intellectual intuition: ‘the intelligence, which has no other urge but to revert into its identity, is thereby placed under a constant compulsion to identity and is no less bound and fettered in the manner of its producing than nature in its productions [Hervorbringungen] appears to be’ (S 3: 430). While all reason is essentially free (for all the reasons Schelling laid out in Of the I and the ‘Treatises’), theoretical reason is compelled to produce concepts adequate to intuitions over which it lacks complete control. As in nature, this is merely an apparent lack of freedom, for the productive intellect arises from the self-inhibiting freedom of the absolute just as much as nature does. Still, theoretical philosophy presents no way to overcome this apparent lack of freedom. Because the highest act theoretical philosophy can recognize is productive intuition (the positing of forces, organisms, etc., in nature), it cannot fully explain how constrained acts of consciousness are nevertheless free, for all conscious productions rely on previous products of the intelligence (S 3: 486). Without the assurance of a preexisting harmony between its intuitions and its will, an intelligence has no reason to believe that the products of its intellect are anything but arbitrary impositions on nature.
Practical reason can only partially provide this assurance. In his transition to practical philosophy, Schelling retraces Fichte’s steps from the third part of the 1794 Wissenschaftslehre. After first giving an explanation of how the I theoretically incorporates alterity into itself, he lays out the structure of willing that makes such incorporation possible. Yet though theoretical activity cannot occur without willing, willing resides in a later and therefore higher stage of the intelligence’s development. Whereas productive intuition inevitably focuses the intelligence on something external to itself (namely, its product), willing makes the I as a whole into its object (S 3: 534). Now when I will something, I do project or produce an ideal, just as a theoretical intuition produces a concept, but unlike the concept, the ideal that willing produces is identical with myself (S 3: 536). Whereas a concept always refers to an independent object, an ideal is nothing but an act of self-determination. Thus realizing (Realisieren) this ideal is a conscious affirmation of myself, whereas the theoretical act of identifying a correspondence of concept and object is only indirectly and unconsciously an affirmation of myself, insofar as my intelligence is originally identical with its objects. Willing is thus able to create a ‘second nature’12 over which the consciousness has complete control (S 3: 537). While the first nature arises out of the original limitations of the absolute intelligence and is thus something wholly unconscious and necessary, this second nature is a product of consciousness and therefore fully accessible to the will. Acts within the second nature are entirely independent of the first nature and thus can lay claim to spontaneity.
Yet this is clearly an artificial resolution to Kant’s third antinomy. For any act of willing will inevitably take place within a sequence of events and thus be conditioned by previous acts of will. The only thing gained by positing a second nature is to remove the will from the realm of natural causality. Schelling still must deal with the manifold ways that the intelligence predetermines its own acts of willing. Specifically, insofar as the intelligence is able to posit an ideal to realize and thus unify with itself, this ideal must stem from outside of the intelligence. For if it were merely part of the intelligence, then there would be nothing to prevent it from already being realized. And since it cannot come from the first nature, but only from the source of the second nature, that is, an intelligence, it must arise from an intelligence separate from the willing intelligence (S 3: 539-40). Put another way, if willing is the free determination of oneself as a subject-object, then there must already be a subject-object making such determination possible. That is, there must be willing prior to my willing (S 3: 541). Such a willing that comes from me and yet is external to my act of willing is what we call a demand (Forderung). A demand is a self-imposed prewilling that motivates my free willing without necessitating it. In taking a demand as my ideal, I place a condition upon my will, but a condition that it can choose to ignore and suspend.
Although only I can make a demand my ideal, the demand must be external to the act of willing by which I constitute myself, and thus it is only meaningful if it arises from an external intelligence. But since the first limitation of Transcendental Idealism separates a particular intelligence from the absolute, we have no way of conceiving how one intelligence can influence another. Demands must therefore come from within me, but in such a way that they refer me not to myself, but to an external intelligence. In order to make sense of this intelligence that can have no effect on me and yet produces a demand in me, we must postulate a preexisting harmony between intelligences (S 3: 543). That is, the external intelligence that makes demands of me must share common thoughts and structures of intuition with me, for otherwise there would be no reason to assume that the demands I experience are at all similar to those the other places on me.
Even through his obscure and ontologized jargon, it is clear that Schelling is speaking here of what a more recent tradition of obscure and ontologized jargon would call the ethical relation to the other. While my being is never dependent on the other nor hers on mine, it is precisely for this reason that the demand she places on me is absolute (S 3: 554-5). Because the other intelligence must stand outside of the willing by which I constitute myself, she, unlike the second nature, is completely inaccessible to my willing. Since the other’s demand comes from beyond me, I cannot eliminate or controvert it, though of course I am free to ignore it. Yet the content of this demand is wholly abstract and thus extends to regions not typically thought of as ethical. It is only because other intelligences can affect objects and produce artifacts (Kunstprodukte) that these can be absolute objects for me. Without the ‘invisible ideal resistance’ that suggests to me the existence of other willing intelligences, I could conceive all objects as only relatively so. Though they stand opposed to me, they do so only at my bidding; in that they can be shaped in and by my consciousness, they are infinitely plastic (S 3: 554). The artifact, on the other hand, points to an intelligence independent of my willing and thus forever beyond it.
It is only through consciousness of this restrictedness of artifacts that I can become conscious of my freedom. In every act of willing, I produce an opposition between an object and an ideal (S 3: 559). In willing to raise my arm, for instance, I oppose its objective hanging state with its ideal raised state. This opposition engenders what Schelling calls a drive (Trieb), a free activity that nevertheless ‘springs from a feeling immediately and without any reflection’ (S 3: 559-60). A feeling, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, is a contradiction in consciousness. A drive is thus a free but nonreflective response to the contradiction between an ideal and an object of willing. In response to this disequilibrium a drive seeks to restore wholeness to consciousness (S 3: 560). The experience of freedom consists in reflecting on this drive to eliminate feelings (i.e., contradictions of consciousness) by sustaining and restoring the continuity of consciousness; ‘That freedom is at every moment limited and yet at every moment again becomes infinite, in respect of its striving, is what alone makes possible the consciousness of freedom, that is, the continuance of self-consciousness13 itself’ (S 3: 561). Though it emerges in the original intuition, self-consciousness, which is constantly in danger of falling into contradiction, is sustained by a demand—that is, by something outside of itself. According to Schelling, this most general demand is nothing other than what Kant had called the categorical imperative: ‘thou shalt only will what all intelligences are able to will’ (S 3: 574). But this means that external intelligences are necessary for the presentation of self-consciousness itself. Only insofar as I am constantly encountering other intelligences (through artifacts or objects over which I lack complete control) is the demand for me to be one with myself reinforced (S 3: 582). Though it is, in the end, always my choice whether or not to respond to demands placed upon me, I would not be free in their absence.
Despite its equivocations in terminology and structure, the System of Transcendental Idealism does manage to develop a method for considering freedom systematically. Rather than beginning with a presentation of freedom in its very enactment (as in Fichte’s 1794 Wissenschaftslehre) or of its apparent impossibility in light of natural causality (Kant’s second Critique), the System’s ‘synthetic method’ allows freedom to reassert itself at every level of the development of consciousness. In the theoretical stage, the intelligence learns that what it supposes to be an external necessity governing its intuitions arises from its own power of intuition. As it moves into practical considerations, it learns that it is free to produce another nature in which its willing is independent of natural necessity. And when it encounters objects produced by intelligences other than itself, it recognizes that the existence of these other intelligences is essential to its own freedom. In the end, freedom is only intelligible within an empirical world that resists the intelligence. The absolute willing that precedes this world precedes all demands and is thus beyond freedom (S 3: 577).
Yet ultimately, Schelling deems this method a failure, and devotes the book’s last part to showing that art, and not philosophy, completes the system of freedom. For we have seen that freedom of willing is dependent on a community of mutually demanding intelligences. Though we must postulate a limited preexisting harmony in the thoughts and demands of these individuals, a community in which each can exercise his freedom through responding to the categorical imperative cannot be left to chance (S 3: 584). Rather, we must take it as ‘an eternal article of faith’ that humanity is progressing to a point where the categorical imperative can be universally upheld (S 3: 593).
The task of the philosophy of history is to show how there can be a providence (Vorsehung) or fate (Schicksal) such that through free events a moral order emerges by necessity (S 3: 596). Such a providence can be neither a completely objective (Leibnizian) God who predetermines the totality of human actions from without (for this would deny freedom) nor a principle of arbitrary subjectivity (for this would deny necessity), but must yield a harmony of freedom and intelligence. Between these extremes of fatalism and atheism is what Schelling calls religion, which is best exemplified by the figure of the dramatic poet:
If we think of history as a play in which everyone involved performs his part quite freely and as he pleases, a rational development of this muddled drama is conceivable only if there be a single spirit who speaks in everyone, and if the poet [Dichter], whose mere fragments (disjecta membra poetae) are the individual actors, has already so harmonized beforehand the objective outcome of the whole with the free play of every participant, that something rational must indeed emerge at the end of it. (S 3: 602)
However, Schelling goes on to insist, we should not see this poet as existing independently of the play, for then he would merely be the fatalistic God by another name. In contrast, ‘If he is not independently of us, but reveals and discloses himself successively only through the very play of our own freedom, so that without this freedom even he would not be, then we are collaborators [Mitdichter] of the whole and inventors of the particular roles we play’ (S 3: 602). Were we to postulate an external poet, or even to identify particular moments in which his influence is apparent, we would thereby deny the possibility of human freedom.
Since we cannot make this poet or his works an object of philosophy, we must look elsewhere for an adequate presentation of him. We need, that is, evidence that human activity is at once conscious and unconscious, purposive and purposeless (S 3: 612-13). In contrast to nature, which moves from the completely objective and unconscious to the subjective and conscious, we are looking for a product that begins as conscious and subjective and becomes unconscious, one that shows that in even the most capricious acts of subjectivity an objective order is operative. Although adherence to the categorical imperative can also be a conscious production of an unconscious product, insofar as the agent realizes a demand that comes from beyond his subjectivity, the product is not totally objective, since willing the categorical imperative is tantamount to willing oneself. In order to present the unity of freedom and providence, we need an activity that goes beyond willing, an activity that instead of returning to itself expands over the whole universe. Unlike willing, whose completion yields a feeling of excitement or fulfillment, this activity will yield a feeling of ‘infinite tranquility [Befriedigung]’ (S 3: 615). This feeling is none other than that of the artist, who ‘attributes that total resolution of his conflict which he finds achieved in his work of art, not to himself, but to a bounty [Gunst] freely granted by his own nature, which, however unrelentingly it set him in conflict with himself, is no less gracious in relieving him of the pain of this contradiction’ (S 3: 617). In the artwork the separation between the ideal and the object of willing vanishes, and thus we encounter no demand, no drive, no freedom. Whereas the willing intelligence finds himself united with his freedom in the second nature, the artist finds himself united with the indifference at the ground of all freedom and thus completes the unification of freedom and providence.
In locating this union in the artwork, Schelling appeals to two common phenomena. First, in the common figure of the inarticulate genius, the testimony of artists reveals that while they are quite clear in their intentions with regard to any particular artwork, they often cannot say why they have these intentions. There is an unconscious urge compelling them to create art, which only finds satisfaction in the beautiful object’s resolution of all contradiction (S 3: 616). Second, in the observation of the artwork we find an infinite meaning that could not possibly have been intended by the artist, for not only is it impossible for a finite being to actualize an infinity of purposes, but the infinite gap between the conscious and the unconscious outstrips any conceptualization. The artist, like the willing intelligence, is thus ruled by destiny, but in such a way that ‘separates him from all other human beings, and compels him to say or depict things which he does not fully understand himself, and whose meaning is infinite’ (S 3: 617). While all production is intended to resolve a contradiction, only the artistic product resolves the highest contradiction and thus finds sufficiency in itself without any external purpose.
Art repairs the first separation with which philosophy begins. In this limited sense the System of Transcendental Idealism is a complete system, since it ends where it begins. Yet not every homecoming is an odyssey, and in returning to its beginning the System does not thereby conclude its wandering.14 For there is no reason to believe that the art product, regardless of whether it unifies freedom and necessity, is able to present the whole movement of Transcendental Philosophy. It seems, rather, that it stands outside of this movement as a moment absolved of the contradictions and reconciliations of human intuition. The System’s elegant and inspiring vision of a distinctly human reason guided by intuition is thus suspended in its conclusion, leaving the reader without a sense of the proper place of reason and intuition in philosophy. We thus see a resignation similar to that found in the Nature Philosophy. If the System is the retelling of the Nature Philosophy from the perspective of reason’s encounter with exteriority, then what holds of nature also applies to reason: just as life is the bridge to its own death, reason is the bridge to its own dissolution.