While I have for the most part tried to keep my discussion of Hegel and Schelling focused on the suspension of reason and thus to avoid extrapolating grand claims about who they were as philosophers, it was perhaps inevitable that this multiyear project would worm its way into my interpretations of nearly every aspect of their respective philosophies. On those occasions when vanity exceeds scholarly restraint, it gives me no small pride to discover new ways that this project allows an entry into an unexpected area of their thought. Thus it pains me that my project has little to contribute to what was perhaps Schelling’s grandest and most vigorous period of philosophizing: his three drafts of The Ages of the World from 1811 to 1815. Since these works take the Freiheitsschrift’s decentering of reason as their starting point, they do not advance by showing the inadequacy of reason, but aim to build a philosophical system around the temporal structures of past, present, and future. Like the works of the Identity Philosophy, these drafts suspend the striving of reason at their outset, but now under the presumption of reason’s perverse fallenness rather than its absolute self-identity.
In presenting the elements of his late ‘Positive Philosophy,’ however, Schelling returned to his earlier preoccupation with reason and once again sought to work out precisely what was wrong or limited in a philosophy based solely in reason. In his 1842-3 lecture course introducing the Philosophy of Revelation as a central element of Positive Philosophy, Schelling insists that the need for a form of cognition beyond reason can only be grasped by traveling through reason’s own need for suspension. It would be absurd, he argues, to begin philosophy by insisting there be an object of cognition beyond reason. Instead, we must ‘completely immerse ourselves’ in reason ‘and recognize nothing other than what discloses itself therein’ (S 13: 74). While he will ultimately contend that ‘positive philosophy’ can release itself from the determinations of reason, he continues to maintain that its task (Aufgabe) must be grasped in relation to reason (S 13: 93). I find his work on The Ages of the World far too seductive to be able to say with any conviction that this reenlistment of reason was an unalloyed good, but it does give Schelling’s career a pleasing symmetry by applying a renewed intensity to the continual work of suspending reason. Once again for the late Schelling, to suspend reason is not to circumvent it, but to attempt to come to grips with how it has ensnared us.1
In his lectures on The Grounding of the Positive Philosophy, Schelling begins his reassessment of reason from a standpoint very similar to that of Hegel in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Although the rational capacities of human beings initially appear to be among the most astounding in nature, the senseless brutality of human history almost makes this gift appear a cruel joke. As Schelling puts it, ‘this world of history presents such a dreary spectacle that I completely despair of there being no purpose and therefore no true reason for the world’ (S 13: 6-7). Even minimal attention to the infelicities and injustices that plague human history should convince anyone that human ends and rationality do not give the world its ultimate meaning: ‘Thus far from man and his endeavors making the world comprehensible, it is man himself that is the most incomprehensible and who inexorably drives me to the belief in the wretchedness of all being, a belief that makes itself known in so many bitter pronouncements from both ancient and recent times. It is precisely man that drives me to the final desperate question: Why is there anything at all? Why is there not nothing?’ (S 13: 7). After restating the Hegelian conclusion that history does not present itself as following any rationally instituted order, Schelling warns us against the opposite conclusion, which Hegel, too, had criticized.2 In suggesting that the world might have no meaning at all, Schelling observes, he could be read as assuming that any meaning the world might have could only be found in its teleological unfolding. Schelling recognizes the temptation and danger of this reading and thus argues that accounting for the world’s development without resorting to abstract theodicy will require turning against some of our most customary instincts and beliefs. Accordingly, ‘the transition to this new consciousness cannot happen without a disruption, indeed without a momentary suspension [Aufhebung] of the earlier condition. In this general breakdown, there will be for quite some time nothing that is secure, to which one could subscribe, and on which one could build’ (S 13: 9-10). The apparent meaninglessness of the world is not intrinsic to its history, but is a symptom of the crisis that has shown reason its inadequacy.
Reason has reached this point, Schelling claims, because Kant’s critical philosophy thoroughly undermined the assumption that reason is presented with anything given. In precritical metaphysics, the understanding is the first source of knowledge, since it is only through the application of the laws of pure thought that experience becomes meaningful. Given this assumption, experience could only be something secondary, revealing not ‘what is universal, necessary, and unchanging, but rather only what is particular, contingent, and transitory in things’ (S 13: 36-7). But this very contingency is what allowed natural science to reveal nontrivial, productive truths about nature. In contrast to the knowledge of the understanding, Kant’s critical philosophy realized, ‘what we obtain directly from experience is something that we take but do not produce’ (S 13: 37). Unlike previous metaphysicians, Kant denies that reason has an infinite creative power, but he replaces it with an infinite receptive power. In the positing of the absolutely supersensible, reason still traces all knowledge back to its own open receptivity and calls this receptivity freedom. This advanced form of metaphysics thus understands reason as the capacity to deduce (Vermögen zu schlieβen) the contingent elements of experience from a reflection on the contents of the understanding (S 13: 37). But even here, reason is only delivering what Kant in the third Critique and Schelling in the System of Transcendental Idealism had called a ‘second nature.’ Once it confronts the question why there is something rather than nothing, reason can only recoil at its naïve systematizing.
The rationalist’s only refuge from this unsettling questioning is to immerse herself more deeply in this second nature, trying to delude herself into believing that reason is all that exists. Thus Fichte responded to the Kantian dilemma of a reason that cannot legitimately inquire into its own ground (hence the antinomies and amphibolies of reason) by positing reason as the sole principle of knowledge. This line of thought ‘had to lead to the concept of an unconditioned science of reason [Vernunftswissenschaft] in which no longer the philosopher, but rather reason itself, knows reason—where reason stands opposed only to itself and is the knower as well as the known’ (S 13: 57).3 In both precritical rationalism and post-Kantian idealism, reason is flummoxed by anything that exists without its mediation and thus has nothing at all to say about the simple thereness of existence. Indeed, as Sellars’ critique of the ‘myth of the given’ and Hegel’s account of the dialectic of existence (Existenz) show, discursive reasoning cannot speak meaningfully about simple givenness at all.4
Even an employment of reason as elaborate as that found in Hegel’s Logic finds the idea of being’s givenness incomprehensible. According to Schelling’s reading, Hegel’s system is no different from Fichte’s in its basic commitment to deducing all of existence from rational principles (S 13: 60). Where Hegel differs from previous philosophers is in admitting that reason cannot provide the particular forms of nature, but only general categories. Reason cannot deduce the necessity of a tulip, for instance, but it can show why there must be organisms or even (if we ascribe as much deductive power to Naturphilosophie as Schelling does) plants.5 Unlike the metaphysics of precritical empiricism, Hegel’s reason ‘does not have experience as its source, but it does indeed have experience as its escort [Begleiterin]’ (S 13: 62).6 Too proud to accept any gifts from nature, Hegelian reason is nevertheless insecure enough to solicit a guide. As its Virgil (or perhaps its Beatrice), experience is contracted to provide the actual (wirklich) correlates to what reason already foresees. If this escort were not necessary, if reason could produce all of reality solely from itself, then it would have to acknowledge that its knowledge is innate and thus must somehow be given, which would contradict reason’s self-understanding as the mediator of all reality. Reason eventually learns not to be fooled by the apparent otherness of the second nature it has created. It becomes obsessed with the contingency of beings, simultaneously attracted to their alienness and committed to stamping it out.7 Since any being that it itself creates is not free in itself, the only beings that matter for it become those that have been released from the control of the concept. But since reason wants above all to know the world, it gains nothing in their escape except the fleeting awareness of the necessity of their escape.
The same dialectic also plays out in the practical sphere. Just as theoretical reason takes itself to be the origin of all knowledge, practical reason takes the will to be the absolute origin of its own actions, even if it may sometimes require an external stimulus to become active. The crudest and most indeterminate form of willing is to want everything, including ‘a multitude of things that, in fact, are not worthy of the will, and not only these but a multitude of things that only make his will confused, burdened, and unfree. In a manner of speaking, it only wants in order to want, to show its wanting’ (S 13: 68). In an echo of the Phenomenology’’s dialectic of active reason, Schelling finds pure practical reason to be empty in itself, which turns it toward all kinds of perversion to justify its continuous activity. Just as an unchecked theoretical reason tends to annihilate any form of givenness, an unchecked will tends to renounce any external determination of its striving.8
In both the theoretical and the practical spheres, then, reason runs away from the fact that things simply are by interposing itself between being and what counts for it as being. Its purported allowance of otherness is a mask for its flight from givenness. Its final and most cunning move is to treat this otherness itself as constitutive of the appearance of beings. Reason claims to know its limits by sacrificing its pretention to determine all reality and thus allows pure otherness to appear as the indeterminacy of what reason is not (S 13: 70). But contrary to what Hegel claims in the transition from phenomenology to science, the self-suspension of reason does not yield being, but nothing. In all its shapes from precritical rationalism through Hegel’s system, reason has been concerned only with the capacity to be (Seinkönnen), not with being itself. Schelling thinks this is belied by the fact that, unlike so many of his other philosophical innovations, his central conception of a potency (Potenz) never caught on among his less rigorous contemporaries (among whom he no doubt includes Hegel): ‘For this word “potency” reminds us that in the science of reason, or, what is the same thing, the pure a priori science, only the possibility of things, not the reality, is comprehended’ (S 13: 75). But to say with Fichte, Hegel, and the early Schelling that the content of reason is the identity of subject and object is nothing other than saying that this content is ‘the infinite potency of being’ (S 13: 78). A philosophy centered on reason will always only be able to produce the possibility of being, not its actuality.
For this reason, Schelling had, in his lectures in Munich On the History of Recent Philosophy, judged Hegel’s system as contributing only to negative philosophy, which seeks to understand what beings must be like, given that they are, but offers no explanation for the fact that they are at all (S 10: 126). In the terminology of the 1842-3 lectures, Hegel’s is a philosophy of whatness, not of thatness. But Schelling now concludes that this is not Hegel’s primary fault. Since philosophy must have both negative and positive sides, any system that produces insights regarding the negative side is a valuable contribution to philosophy as a whole. Schelling himself labored on this side for much of his career, and he would not think of abandoning all that hard work. Hegel’s true fault lies in denying its very negativity: ‘The philosophy that Hegel presented is the negative driven beyond its limits: it does not exclude the positive, but thinks it has subdued it within itself’ (S 13: 80).9 Schelling contends that Hegel’s system aims to deduce the necessity of all natural and spiritual development from logic and thus has no place for the contingency of creation.10
Contrary to this claim, we saw in the previous chapter that Hegel takes great pains to allow for the contingency of natural and historical development. But Schelling’s point is that to grasp this contingency as that which has been released from reason is not to grasp it at all. Hegel’s Entlassen brings no peace, but traps reason in the restlessness of the negative.11 Hegel’s God, Schelling argues in the Munich Lectures, never finds the Sabbath because his externalization is a perpetual oscillation between going out into the world and returning into himself (S 10: 160). A purely negative philosophy would rest content with the development of all logical relations and leave questions of reality to positive philosophy; ‘In this way, reason is stilled and completely satisfied in all its legitimate claims, no longer feeling the temptation to break into the territory of the positive’ (S 13: 81). Schelling does not specify what this completion of negative philosophy consists in, but if his model is the Identity Philosophy, then attributing such a tranquility to it is highly dubious. There is a certain aesthetic appeal to the Darstellung’s stark exclusion of all difference from reason, but Schelling has already shown that reason could not remain content with such lack of difference and thus threw itself into the progressive perversions of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel’s philosophies. Such an unnatural trimming of reason’s striving produces something closer to a Disney topiary than a full and thriving system of philosophy.
But even if this sharp demarcation of the place of reason falls away from the rigorous dialectical attentiveness of the Freiheitsschrift and Phenomenology of Spirit, there is still something unique and valuable about Schelling’s division of positive and negative philosophy. Schelling is right to maintain that the need for this distinction ‘has been present for some time, and indeed even in the rational systems that have attempted to unite what cannot be united. We have not, therefore, just created this antithesis and, on the contrary, by means of strict separation we intend to suspend [aufzuheben] it forever’ (S 13: 94). Here Schelling clearly does not mean aufheben in the sense of ‘cancel,’ since it is precisely the separation of positive from negative philosophy that he wants to preserve. Instead, this is a suspension of reason that elevates and maintains the separation of purely rational philosophy from its positive other. Positive philosophy’s suspension of reason in no way denies its importance, but holds it up alongside a new and radical empiricism.
With this new understanding of what it means to suspend reason, Schelling also reworks his earlier definition of a system of philosophy. Recall that in the System of Transcendental Idealism Schelling argued that a system standstogether in the sense that it presents simultaneously the content of philosophy and the necessity of its emergence. A true system is thus one that presents the very freedom upon which all philosophizing depends (S 3: 376). As we have seen in previous chapters, neither the STI nor any of the works of the Identity Philosophy could survive the strain of these two demands, so in the Grounding of Positive Philosophy they are transformed into different criteria for different types of philosophical system. On the one hand, Schelling is willing to call a purely negative philosophy a system provided that we define a system as ‘an entirely self-enclosed science that has arrived at an unchanging conclusion’ (S 13: 133). An exploration of all forms of rational implication can rightfully be said to stand-together in the sense that it does not rely on anything outside of it for its content. But even still, it does not live up to the systematic task of presenting the world in its actuality. A completed negative philosophy is free from external determination, but not free to make concrete affirmations about the world. On the other hand, a developed positive philosophy would be free to make positive assertions about the world and thus would not have its domain restricted to the realm of logical implication, but it will never have the thematic closure that delimits a negative system (S 13: 133).
The transition from negative to positive philosophy is not complete, Schelling argues, until negative philosophy has grasped the otherness of positive philosophy, ‘but by positing this it only makes itself into the consciousness of the positive, and is to this extent no longer outside the positive’ (S 13: 152). In the same way, Hegel’s absolute knowing moves beyond science by ‘knowing its limits,’ which means ‘knowing to sacrifice itself’ (H 9: 433, §807). Just as Schelling holds that negative philosophy brings itself into union with positive philosophy by recognizing the otherness of the latter’s task, Hegel argues that the science of the experience of consciousness only becomes absolute knowing when it releases (entläßt) its claim to determine nature and history. Schelling mocks this conception of the Naturphilosophie’s Entlassen from logic as nothing but a pale mime of a theosophical insight (S 13: 121-2), but he speaks of positive philosophy detaching (ablösen) itself from negative philosophy in almost identical terms (S 13: 161). He and Hegel are even in agreement on the essential violence of this transition, with Schelling describing it as the creative violence of any true action (S 13: 124) and Hegel comparing it to the sacrifice at Golgotha (H 9: 433-4, §808). For both philosophers this development both leaves reason at peace to develop itself internally and constitutes its complete and constant overthrow (Umsturz) (S 13: 152). Reason is, in Schelling’s words (just as in the image of spirit on the cross), ‘set outside of itself, absolutely ecstatic’ (S 13: 163).
Their difference lies in what comes after this suspension of reason. Whereas Hegel takes the philosophical studies of nature and history to continually reconstruct the origins of their own reason at the same time that they acknowledge the essential contingency and irrationality of their subject matter, reason in Schelling’s Positive Philosophy ‘becomes silent’ and ‘bows down’ before being in its utter simplicity (S 13: 161). For Hegel, the suspension of reason could never yield simple being, since this would dissolve the rich structure of a form of spirit that is for-itself into logic’s most primitive in-itself. Hegel believes, in short, that nothing can be purified of reason. There is thus vastly more to say about the divergence of Hegel’s Realphilosophie from Schelling’s Positive Philosophy, which would require detailed analyses of both the structure and content of each. But this very divergence is illuminating, for it shows that two markedly different approaches to logic and philosophical methodology can both identify and mobilize the same structural lack in reason. While both agree that the striving of reason is inseparable from particular individuals motivated by particular aims developed in particular historical communities, they nevertheless show the indifference of reason’s need to be suspended.
The most reasonable sequel to this project would be an exploration of the extent to which Schelling and Hegel each manage to uphold this suspension in their respective treatments of reason’s successor. There is certainly much more work to be done in determining both whether Schelling is as much of an empiricist as he claims in his late discussions of mythology and revelation and whether Hegel truly follows the development of nature and spirit without an artificial imposition of concepts. I would like to linger, however, on the suspension of reason itself. We might recall that Hegel ended the Phenomenology not by triumphantly announcing the standpoint it had reached or summarizing its contents, but instead by simply pointing back to them, asking that they be reviewed and appreciated as if in a gallery. While he also later threw off this speculative restraint and reworked the moments of the Phenomenology in accord with his conclusion that phenomenology should become science, he made sure to leave a place for such indifferent contemplation.
At work here, I would like to suggest, is the converse of Schelling’s resistance to ‘dogmatic transcendent idealism.’ In Chapter 4, we saw Schelling criticize the fallacy that mistakes consciousness’s need for determination in general for the grounds for a particular sort of determination. Although nothing at all could be if the subject were not determined to be in some particular way, this fact by itself does not permit us to deduce spatiality, temporality, or any other structure limiting cognition (S 3: 410). To prevent a system of reason from overstepping its bounds, we must allow reason’s self-certainty to come into question through its confrontation with something it genuinely cannot encompass. If, on the other hand, the absolute is not the beginning of our philosophical endeavors, but the end, then the aim is not to show how the need for general determinacy in the absolute yields specific determinacy, but to preserve a general determinacy amid the gallery of individual determinate moments of spirit. While presenting this general determinacy as a science forces us to abandon spirit’s recognition of the spacing of its moments, neglecting to present it at all would ignore the need for absolute spirit to posit a science in the first place. A community that has passed through the dialectics of morality and religion and seen the need for universal recognition and forgiveness can respect individual differences even when there is no commonality underlying them, but so long as we fail to conceive what difference itself is, this respect is at risk of dissolving. In the absence of a single substance or telos underlying every moment of spirit, we need to show what it means for them to lie alongside one another such that they do not waste away in pure individuality. In other words, we need an adequate expression of indifference, of the equilibrium of the centripetal force that keeps reason’s unifying impulse from abandoning thinking entirely and the centrifugal force that prevents it from installing the concept as the alpha and omega of thought.
To recall Schelling’s negative expression from the Erlangen Lectures, this equilibrium, this indifference, is the priority of thought (though not any particular thought) to all errancy, perversion, and sickness (S 9: 241). But since (as Hegel had already suggested in the Differenzschrift and worked out more fully in Chapter 5 of the Phenomenology and Schelling brings to full explicitness in the Freiheitsschrift) the possibility of errancy is constitutive of knowledge, just as perversion is of the moral law and sickness is of life, this indifference is never something known, enacted, or lived. As such, all the localized indifferences we experience when, for example, we subordinate the drive for recognition to life itself or rise above the pettiness of the spiritual animal kingdom to respect work itself do not even approximate the indifferent love that makes liberal spacing possible. Accordingly, the movement to this spacing is incomprehensible on the model of previous dialectical transitions, and a positive definition of indifference must be sought. Since the negativity of time determines spirit’s movement from one moment to the next, reconceiving these movements as free interrelations among spatially related moments calls for a philosophy centered around freedom rather than reason.
But as the Freedom essay’s wriggles and tremors so palpably demonstrate, expelling reason from philosophy’s center risks reinstating the one-sided errancy that reason criticizes. For along with dogmatic transcendent idealism and transcendent employments of the understanding in general, reason strives to correct all forms of disease and perversion. And indeed, as Schelling’s Nature Philosophy and Transcendental Idealism show, reason does not just grow out of need and lack, but makes need and lack conceivable in the first place. While sickness cannot exist without a substratum of life to pervert, life is equally dependent upon disease, as the basic striving that defines life would be unintelligible without a separation and conflict of forces. In establishing reason’s place in philosophy, we must be careful not to renew the understanding’s mistake of absolutizing this conflict. While perversions are inevitable in reason’s striving for unity, this does not justify reducing thought to an abyssal conflict of forces, for such a move would merely replace the tyranny of reason with the anarchy of the understanding. Both reason’s nostalgia for the lost age before its fissure and the understanding’s zeal to carve up the past according to its own artificially imposed constraints imagine that they can determine the relation of reason to its ground—and are, as such, ‘evil’ in Schelling’s terminology, attempting to place their individual, peripheral striving at the center of life. The effort to expunge this evil by restoring the proper relationship of center to periphery will always tend either to multiply the evil by instating reason as the arbiter of claims to the center or to banish reason from the center forever. Schelling’s challenge, only partially met, is to confront this evil with indifference, to specify how reason can remain active yet respectful of its distance from the center. By showing that reason is neither entirely self-grounding nor grounded in nature’s circulation of forces, the Freedom essay begins to carve out a place where reason can be positively determined as freely given.
In Wharton’s The House of Mirth, there is a moment in which Lily ‘held out her hand with a charming gesture in which dismissal was shorn of its rigour.’ In his later philosophy, Schelling hopes to stretch such a gesture out into a lasting reminder of the prerational givenness of things. Like the Darstellung’s formalized model of presentation, this positive presentation would have to suspend the tiresome work and constant striving of a synthetic or dialectical method. As Schelling shows in the System of Transcendental Idealism, reason sustains itself not by simply positing its separation from the world so as to precipitate a homecoming, but by allowing demands to be placed upon it (S 3: 541). Reason’s unique form of freedom arises from the fact that a demand’s origin is simultaneously internal and external. Practical reason is free because it takes its self-determination as arising externally while recognizing that all demands made upon it can only arise from within. By denying any externality in reason’s activity from the beginning, the Identity Philosophy ceases to be structured by an external demand and thus opens for reason a space of play. While Hegel derided this irresponsibility to the ‘labor of the negative’ as ‘love playing with itself’ (H 9: 18, §19), he still recognized in Schelling’s Nature Philosophy a counterweight to the obsessive seriousness of observing reason (H 9: 166, §297). By suspending the sense of responsibility that internalizes every demand, a playful approach to nature offers rest from reason’s incessant striving. But reason could never be satisfied with such an indeterminate vision of its activity, and it is difficult to conceive how either formalistic self-absorption or shirking the labor of the negative could suffice for an adequate presentation of indifference. Nor does it help to think of indifference as an alternation between responsibility and irresponsibility, to demand, as it were, a 40-hour rational workweek. Such a move would merely reintroduce the negativity of time with no more attention to the liberality of space than a purely negative dialectic.
To set reason into a loving free play with its other, the key is not to oscillate between reason and nonreason, but to establish a kind of spacing that preserves reason neither as suspended nor as self-certain. What we are looking for is a formalization that is given in reason, not taken by it, an understanding of how reason not only constructs itself (in) a second nature, but is at home in this one. Such an understanding could only be presented in the conclusion Hegel and Schelling never managed to write. Concluding their work on the ascension, life, and suspension of reason would call for a superfluous review of its striving to overcome original separation, an inappropriate mixture of work and play, and the misleading implication that reason has earned its place through a life of striving.