In the last of his 1795 Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, Schelling describes what might be called the midlife crisis of reason. Having grown to self-consciousness in the time of the Greeks and then proved its potency as an adult by weeding out superstition in the Enlightenment, reason in Kant’s philosophy suddenly discovers its own finitude and realizes that no matter how successful it is in overcoming the gaps and traps of the understanding, it can never be its own ground (S 1: 339). Faced with the knowledge that its very self-conception forestalls any possibility of unity, ‘The weapons slipped from the hand, and the valiant reason which, by itself, had annihilated the delusions of the objective world, whined childishly at its own weakness’ (S 1: 340). The reference here is to certain unnamed successors of Kant (perhaps Jacobi, for instance), who, having accepted the inaccessibility of the thing-in-itself as a dogmatic truth, decided to take their rationality and go home, as it were, elevating faith and nonreason to a position equal to reason.
Yet we find in some works of Schelling’s Identity Philosophy an equally juvenile response, where instead of refusing to participate in a game it knows it cannot win, it remakes the rules to guarantee success, denying the existence of anything that does not conform to it. This criticism has been so frequently directed at Hegel (by Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Adorno, etc.) and Schelling so frequently presented as a counterweight to Hegel’s totalized vision of reason, that it is easy to forget that the Identity Philosophy presents its own version of such childishness.1
In his 1801 essay Presentation [Darstellung] of My System of Philosophy and unpublished 1804 manuscript ‘System of Philosophy in General and of Nature Philosophy in Particular,’ which was to complete and clarify the Darstellung, Schelling assumes from the very beginning that reason is identical with all reality, which makes any question of how it achieves unity with its other superfluous. And yet, vacuous as this response to the dilemmas raised in the System of Transcendental Idealism is, it is not a simple reversion to childhood, but part of the working-out of reason’s midlife crisis. Given that Schelling traces this crisis to reason’s self-conception as striving for identity with all reality, a simple alternative is to assume this striving always already fulfilled. Where the Difference essay takes reason’s overcoming of opposition as a historical achievement, the Identity Philosophy takes this overcoming of opposition to belong to reason’s very nature. And given that reason’s relationship to its other was most clearly problematic in the System of Transcendental Idealism’s treatments of humanity and intuition, an extreme mathematical formalism like we find in the Darstellung also poses a natural alternative. The Identity Philosophy is thus more than a simple detour on the way to Hegel and Schelling’s treatments of reason in 1807 and 1809. Its cancellation of all striving and dissolution of all opposition into the absolute stands over against the incorporative drive of speculation, hinting at a dark core of irrationality that reason can never incorporate.
Whereas the System of Transcendental Idealism dutifully continued Schelling’s reworking of the Kantian distinction between reason and the understanding, the Darstellung unapologetically begins with a renunciation of this whole network of concerns. Reason, Schelling proclaims, is identical not only with philosophy, but with everything conceivable, and hence we may use the phrases ‘in itself [an sich]’ and ‘in reason’ interchangeably (S 4: 115). But Schelling again misleadingly insists, as he had in the System of Transcendental Idealism, that his system itself has remained unchanged; he here intends merely to give a new, unitary presentation to the same insights expressed in the Nature and Transcendental Philosophies (S 4: 108). In contrast to these previous partial presentations, the Darstellung is to present nothing but the system in its totality. The relationship between reason and presentation does not need to be explored because the presentation is inseparable from reason. Schelling simply ignores the difficulties of uniting the history of self-consciousness with its original unfolding, ending his prefatory remarks on the inadequacies of his previous systems by declaring, ‘From this point on, I speak only the matter itself [die Sache selbst]’ (S 4: 114). Self-consciously using Spinoza as a model (S 4: 113), Schelling begins with a definition of reason as absolute totality and seeks to derive the entirety of his system. Whereas Spinoza begins the Ethics by identifying God with all being (substance), Schelling begins the Darstellung by identifying reason with the absolute, or with the ‘indifference of the subjective and objective’ (S 4: 114). It is thus not to be taken as the subjective principle, but as the indifference point of subject and object. As a mere point, it is indifferent to all relations of space and time and completely independent in itself. ‘It is the nature of philosophy,’ Schelling argues, ‘to cancel [aufzuheben] every succession and externality [alles Nacheinander und Auβereinander], every difference of time, and indeed everything that the imagination [Einbildungskraft] mixes into thought (S 4: 115). It is difficult to see how aufheben could have anything but a negative signification here, for reason does not maintain or elevate, but rather annihilates all differences and conditions.
Thus it is completely senseless to speak of anything outside of reason, just as it is to speak of any internal differences within reason: ‘Reason is simply one and simply equal to itself’ (S 4: 116).2 Its absolute self-identity can never be cancelled (aufgehoben), as being pertains to its very essence (S 4: 119). The only thing we can know of this reason, the only unconditioned cognition, is absolute identity, which is expressed as A = A in the formalized nomenclature Schelling prefers in the Darstellung (S 4: 117). In this absolute cognition, all thoughts of particulars vanish, and even subjectivity and objectivity are so in balance (Gleichgewicht) that no difference between them is discernible in the absolute identity (S 4: 127). Reason is at once subject and object, cognition and being, with no difference between them. This absolute identity can never cease to be one with itself, and thus it is just as absurd to say that it strives for self-unity as it is to seek a condition for it: ‘The basic error of all philosophy is assuming that identity emerges from itself and striving [Bestreben] to conceptualize this emergence, in whatever way it occurs’ (S 4: 120). Though Spinoza had understood the absolute identity by making subject (mind) equal to object (matter), he failed to see, Schelling claims, that the A = A is not the positing of an identity between a previously existing subject and object, but instead divides itself into subjective and objective sides. Thus there is an A = A conceived subjectively and an A = A objectively, neither one of which assumes subject = object (S 4: 134n). Rather, this and all other expressions of identity are only intelligible on the basis of a fundamental identity that always already unites subject and object.
And yet, in order for the absolute identity to become actual3 there must be at least a quantitative4 difference between its subjective and objective poles or potencies (S 4: 124-5). The form of the absolute identity only emerges when either subjectivity or objectivity begins to predominate, when a distinction between cognition and being begins to emerge. Actuality thus depends on the disruption of the absolute indifference of reason or the transition from infinite reason to finite subjectivity and objectivity. This transition is the same one that frustrated Schelling throughout his career, and his aim in the Identity Philosophy is to formalize rather than explain it. In the System of Philosophy in General, Schelling even suggests that the need to explain the emergence of finitude from the infinite is a sign of our decadent age’s entanglement in the understanding. Once we extricate ourselves from ‘the ultimate question posed by the vertiginous intellect, hovering at the abyss of infinity, “Why something rather than nothing?”, this question will be swept aside forever by the necessity of being, that is, by the absolute affirmation of being in knowledge’ (S 6: 155). The Identity Philosophy’s certainty in reason forecloses all questioning of the being of reason or individual entities and instead simply assumes that there must be finitude within reason.
But even though this account of the transition from infinity to finitude is purely formal, it does lay the groundwork for Schelling’s later, more meaningful treatments of this problem, especially the one found in the Freedom essay. The ground of all finitude, Schelling maintains, is the separation of subject and object, which can be expressed as A = B (S 4: 131). This expression, Schelling insists, does not present any different truth than A = A, but it does reflect a different power or potency (Potenz) of absolute identity. Whereas in the Nature Philosophy Schelling traced nature’s development through various stages or potencies, in the Darstellung he attempts to do the same without appealing to natural inhibitions. Just as Spinoza’s one substance remains self-same despite being knowable by different attributes, Schelling’s self-same absolute is articulated according to different exponents or powers (Potenzen).5 Schelling’s mathematical metaphor is somewhat of a stretch (since it is unclear what it would mean to multiply the absolute identity by itself a determinate number of times),6 but it does at minimum show the way in which he intends difference to appear within indifference. Mathematically, any number is raised to the zero power is equal to one, so A0 = B would indicate that B is an undivided unity, no matter what the value of A happens to be. When A is raised to the first power, however, A = B could represent an infinity of possible values. Thus A = B expresses the first differentiation in absolute identity, the first stage at which it matters what the value of A is.
But we need to be careful, Schelling notes, to avoid placing this potency first in a temporal succession. Since absolute identity is necessarily eternal, its potencies also can have no beginning or end. ‘The mistake of all idealism,’ presumably including Schelling’s earlier undertakings, is to seek to explain the development of the universe through a succession of potencies (S 4: 135n). If either material necessity or free rationality is assumed to be primary, then the original indifference of the absolute has been cancelled and the real or ideal side judged absolute. In the Identity Philosophy, there is no movement or conditionality, only differences within indifference. A = B differs from A = A only in that the former expresses a disequilibrium among the opposites.7 While subject is always the same as object, it is possible for either A or B to be predominant (überwiegend), raising reason out of its simple indifference and to its first power. To explain the possibility of this predominance, Schelling revises his concept of force (Kraft). Instead of being the plural, necessarily abyssal product of nature that Schelling described in the Naturphilosophie, force is now the ‘immanent ground of reality’ (S 4: 145). As a pure relation of predominance irrespective of internality or externality, force is the most basic sort of quantitative difference and thus stands at the base of all differences appearing within the absolute.
The next potency, symbolized as A2, is light, which marks a distinction between that which can be identical with it (the transparent) and that which cannot (the opaque). By thus dividing the inner from the outer, the A2 raises the potency of the absolute identity’s differentiation, hardening the first potency’s play of forces into an eternal duality (S 4: 151). With light, subject and object differ not only through the relative preponderance of one or the other, but through the object’s exclusion from the subject. Light contrasts itself with gravity, which constantly resists light’s drive toward appearing. Where there had previously been only an oscillation between preponderant subjectivity and preponderant objectivity, there now arises an immeasurable gulf between shining ideality and dark reality. Moreover, this separation allows the A2 to differentiate itself from the mere continuity of the first potency. What in the Ideas Schelling had described as a contrast between the understanding and reason he now takes as an internal development from the first potency of reason to the second. Rather than responding to a need or failure in the striving of the first potency (as reason responds to the needfulness of the understanding in the Ideas), the second potency develops out of the first through a wholly undetermined (atemporal) act of separation. Reason freely introduces a division, a gap into the being of the absolute to permanently disrupt the continuity of the first potency.
Finally, with the A3, whose only natural correlate is reason itself, the absolute reaffirms its indifference to this gap. By incorporating the first two potencies into an indifferent totality (Totalität), the third potency suspends the quantitative difference introduced by the first two potencies as well as their difference from each other (S 4: 200). At its highest level, the self-identical whole is the same as it is at its lowest: an absolute indifference of and to every opposition. At both the beginning and the end of reason, all distinctions are nothing. Since this potency is the restoration of equilibrium in reason, there can be no more potencies beyond it, and the system is thus closed. The only tasks left for philosophy to perform are describing the natural history of forces and carrying out the analysis of the objective world into infinity—tasks that, viewed absolutely, have no intrinsic value.
The 1804 System of Philosophy in General covers the same territory as the Darstellung, but since Schelling originally intended it to reach a wider audience—(but then again, there were few audiences narrower than the expected readership of the Zeitschrift für Spekulative Physik)—he makes a greater effort to contrast the Identity Philosophy with previous idealistic systems. The SPG consequently emerges as Schelling’s most thoroughgoing repudiation of idealistic accounts of reason, in which all the negative content that reason had acquired through Kantian criticism, Fichtean striving, and the synthetic method is expunged in favor of a vision of reason as God’s pure self-affirmation. The SPG begins by announcing that ‘the first presupposition of all knowledge is that knower and known are the same’ (S 6: 137). Yet (as we saw in the Darstellung) this presupposition cannot itself presuppose a division between the knowing subject and the known object, for this creates irresolvable difficulties. Either the object determines the subject, in which case the subject can only know the object through its effects; or the subject determines the object, in which case the object drops out entirely as object; or the subject and object reciprocally determine each other, which presents both difficulties. Thus if knowledge is possible, thought must be able to grasp the original unity of knower and known without assuming a division of subject and object. As in the Darstellung, Schelling names such thinking reason, a name which he attempts as far as possible to cleanse of its previous idealistic and human connotations. To distance the Identity Philosophy from Nature and Transcendental Philosophy, Schelling takes pains to note, ‘By reason, incidentally, I do not merely understand its manifestation and its gradual progress toward self-knowledge in humanity, but reason insofar as it is the universal, true essence and substance of all things’ (S 6: 208). And to emphasize his distance from Kant and Fichte, Schelling does not call it a faculty of knowledge or even a form of knowledge, but always simply ‘knowing’ (Wissen) or ‘cognition’ (Erkenntnis), as when he asks the reader to consider ‘the opposition between reason and all other [limited] cognition’ (S 6: 142). In particular, he emphasizes that in contrast to reason’s self-recognition of eternal self-identity, ‘the universality of the understanding remains at all times only a relative universal, as indeed it is capable of uniting the manifold of sensibility only in a relative unity. Meanwhile, the imagination can rise to a totality only by proceeding from the sensible world’ (S 6: 142). ‘The sensible world,’ however, is a contradiction in terms, for sensation contains no principle of totality, but presumes itself to be a relation of external, fleeting particulars. Likewise, the understanding is purely synthetic (in the sense derided by Hegel in the Differenzschrift) insofar as it relates particulars only by incorporating them into an external unity. Thus while reason is not a special power of knowing but absolute knowing itself, the understanding and the imagination, as acts of thought that do relate to external objects, can still be conceived on roughly Kantian lines. Reason, however, is cognition of the eternal—or rather, cognition as the eternal—and thus infinitely supersedes and dissolves the fleeting representations of the faculties.
And yet, since ‘there is nothing eternal, immutable in knowledge except for the very identity of subject and object’ (S 6: 141), reason must also be emptier than the other cognitive faculties. Schelling goes on to present most of the propositions from the Darstellung about reason’s absolute simplicity, its indivisibility, and so on, but he adds a new determination, which shows nothing but reason’s indeterminateness. The A = A does not express ‘Subject is equal to object,’ but rather, ‘Affirming affirms itself.’ Reason, therefore, is nothing but God’s self-affirmation (S 6: 148). By invoking God here, Schelling dissolves the distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata. God, the absolute, ‘is an absolute totality of creative nature,’ and a natura naturata opposed to this creativity is inconceivable (S 6: 199). Amazingly, the Identity Philosophy’s solution to Spinoza’s riddle, how the infinite is to be connected to the finite, is that there is nothing finite, only the infinite totality. Finitude and difference belong to the non-being of things, and thus cannot be objects of reason. But since there is no cognition other than reason, difference and finitude cannot be thought at all (S 6: 156-7).8
Accordingly, Schelling leaves for the nonphilosophical disciplines the study of finite objects, which are only insofar as they are negations of the absolute (S 6: 178). Strictly speaking, however, the infinite cannot be negated, for if it is negated even in part, its being as absolute is as a whole annihilated. Thus the project of identifying the infinite and the finite is a nonstarter. Strictly speaking, the finite is not at all:
Hence there is nothing in the universe or in the absolute as regards its particularity or its mode; only that is proper to the universe which has been penetrated by the concept of the latter, saturated by infinity, and dissolved into totality. This dissolution is the true identity of the infinite and the finite. The finite is only in the infinite, yet precisely thereby it ceases to exist as the finite. (S 6: 182)
Any attempt to bring the infinite into relation with the finite would have to appeal to the imagination and understanding, faculties that can only obscure the pure thought of reason. Thus Schelling concludes ‘that what is genuinely real [das wahrhaft Reale] in all things is strictly their idea, or the complete ideality of the universal and the particular’ (S 6: 183). Here, even in collapsing Kant’s ornate epistemological edifice, Schelling preserves its steeple, reaffirming that the highest form of thought is the idea of reason. Kant was the first, he notes, to challenge ordinary reflection and realize that ‘idea’ means something other than ‘concept’ (Begriff) or ‘representation’ (Vorstellung) (S 6: 186). Specifically, whereas these latter call to mind something other than themselves when they think their object, the idea appeals only to itself. Still, Kant is unable to transcend ordinary reflection, and he cannot help but wonder whether the ideas are mere mental constructs (KrV A669-71/B697-9). It is quite expected, Schelling thinks, for a philosopher mired in reflection to ask this question, for any honest philosophy that does not begin with absolute knowing seeks a measure by which to ensure that it does not transcend what it is capable of knowing. Yet by asking this question, Kant puts more faith in his own ability to judge when his thinking transcends what it is capable of knowing than he does in the absolute. Rather than a restrained humility, Kantian criticism is the height of humanistic arrogance for not beginning with what is alone self-certain and absolute. Thus Schelling rejects the entire project of critique (at least as fundamental philosophy), calling it the ‘vain instinct of selfhood, which converts everything into its product’ (S 6: 187). True philosophy aims to overcome this instinct by appealing instead to the immediate certainty of the idea.
In contradistinction to the self-same idea, all individual cognitions dissolve in the idea and exist only as ‘presentations [Darstellungen]’ of the universe (S 6: 183)—that is, as ‘mere appearance [Erscheinung] in contradistinction to the idea’ (S 6: 187). Though Schelling clearly wants to call attention to a certain falsity, Pfau’s ‘mere appearance’ does not adequately render the German Erscheinung. In addition to indicating appearance (and here we could even say mere appearance), the word, related to the German Schein and the English ‘shine,’ also plays a significant role in Schelling’s aesthetics. In short, it designates the artwork’s ability to present what is inaccessible not only to the understanding, but to all conscious striving for unity with the world. Beyond merely human activity is a type of presentation that presents an infinity untouchable by any determination. Thus we should not be misled into concluding that the System of Philosophy in General gives us only a night in which all cows are black. There is clearly some shining over this darkened plain. Schelling calls the relation between this shining and the true world of the idea ‘relucence9 or reflection [Widerschein oder Reflex]’ (S 6: 197). The world of finite, determined things, though nothing in itself, is not absolutely nothing, for such a determination would make no sense. Since the absolute can contain no negation, finite things can only confront it as images in a mirror, as representations that shine against it. The SPG’s central move is thus to replace the question, ‘How does the absolute become its finite expression?’ with ‘Why must the absolute be expressed as finite?’. While the former question is unanswerable, as it assumes the finite is determined by the absolute, which by definition cannot determine anything, the second question is relatively simple to answer: ‘the absolute positing of totality immediately implies a relative nonpositing of the particular as such, … whereby the universe is posited as totality and the particular as such is posited as not real in respect of the universe’ (S 6: 197). Because the absolute does not admit of an articulation of difference, difference must be articulated alongside it in parallel. And the very fact that the positing of nonbeing accompanies the positing of absolute being shows that the positing of nonbeing is itself an expression of the absolute, though in mediated, not in immediate, form. Schelling compares this self-positing with an eye seeing itself in a mirror:
Just as the eye, in beholding its reflection in the mirror, posits itself [and] has an intuition of itself only to the extent that it posits the reflecting [medium], the mirror, as nothing in itself, and just as it is effectively one act of the eye, whereby it posits itself, beholds itself, and does not posit or behold the reflecting [medium], so the universe, too, contemplates itself by not beholding or positing the particular discretely. (S 6: 197-8)
It is only because nonbeing reflects the light of the absolute that it appears at all; in itself, it does not shine. Reason is to be identified here not with the eye, but with the knowledge of the identity of the eye and its reflection; ‘Reason is, so to speak, God’s countenance [Antlitz] spread out over the entire universe’ (S 6: 207). By placing the shining in the absolute, Schelling self-consciously negates Kant’s doctrine of sensation. While Kant quarantines the supersensible from justifiable knowledge-claims, Schelling argues that the products of sensation are the negation of the pure knowledge of the absolute (S 6: 199). Knowledge, consequently, belongs in the supersensible, not in the sensible, though of course the supersensible is not to be determined as in Kant as the negation of the sensible, but as an original indifference to the contradictions that make sensation possible. All of this is not to deny the reality of appearance, but simply to point out that as appearance, it is negation.
Yet as Schelling’s discussions of the absolute’s presentation as relucence and reflection grow more intricate, they cannot help also becoming more imaginative, which in the SPG (given its preference for eternal verities preceding cognitive and intuitive determination) means irrational and unphilosophical. So long as the presentation of the absolute leads us to posit a mirror or anything else opposed to the absolute, it appeals to a synthesis of the finite and infinite and is thus reflective in the pejorative sense. Even provisional oppositions within the absolute are unacceptable, as reason excludes anything but the pure dissolution of the finite. Thus Schelling is forced to reject not only Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, but also his own synthetic method, as following the ‘vain instinct of selfhood’ he finds in critical philosophy. In general, any distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata (or activity and productivity, as the Nature Philosophy frames the opposition) must immediately dissolve. Indeed, it is not even right to call God’s self-affirmation an activity, for there is no distinction between God and his being (S 6: 170). His self-affirmation is pure substance and as such always already self-sufficient and pervasive. It is even less appropriate to conceive of God’s self-knowledge as a self-differentiation, for this would be synonymous with productivity, God positing something outside of himself with which he would then be immediately unified (S 6: 170). The absolute needs no mediation to affirm itself. For Fichte, of course, knowledge consists of nothing but the active striving of the self against opposition. Yet here Schelling is emphatic that God’s self-affirmative thinking is not an activity but in the idea (S 6: 170). The earlier distinction between activity and productivity is missing entirely. Gone is Schelling’s assurance that in contrast to products, activity can be something infinite. The Identity Philosophy thus suspends both the infinite productivity of Spinoza’s God and the infinite activity of Fichte’s practical reason by conceiving reason as preactive self-affirmation. This reason does not need to strive to be anything other than it is because it is already everything it could possibly be.
The Identity Philosophy can thus be read as a response to the need of philosophy that Schelling alludes to at the end of World-Soul and Hegel articulates in the Difference essay. Since any form of reason that aims to ground itself only through its infinite striving shows itself to be unstable, the Identity Philosophy responds to this instability by suspending this striving and taking reason to be self-sufficient by its very nature. In suspending the activity that had previously been taken to define reason, the Identity Philosophy thus raises it to a level beyond such unsatisfying striving. But Schelling ultimately came to see this suspension of reason as an abortive one. While he would remain convinced that reason could not be grounded in its own activity, but must instead subsist in an original indifference of thought and being, he was later forced to concede that his works of the first few years of the nineteenth century were themselves mere strivings of reason to uncover its ground.10 And for this the very fact that the Identity Philosophy required so many presentations should have been his first clue. To the extent that philosophical systematicity consists in the standing-together of form and content, a system whose sole content is the universality and indifference of reason would never have to work to make itself intelligible.