1 Derrida 2005: 118.
2 Jacoby 2008.
3 MacCormick 2005; cf. Schlag 1998.
4 Habermas and Ratzinger 2004.
5 Reich 2005; Gore 2007.
6 Confessions, Bk. VIII. iii (7); Augustine 1998: 138.
7 I first encountered this translation in H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf’s excellent translation of Hegel’s Differenzschrift. (See, for instance, Harris 1977: 12.) In recent years, it seems to be picking up steam as a replacement for the sterile ‘sublation.’ (See Williams’s translation of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit 1827-8).
8 Derrida 1982: 71.
9 In the Stuttgart Seminars Schelling denies that the transition from identity into difference is an Aufheben of identity (S 7: 424), apparently taking aufheben as a synonym for vertilgen, ‘negate.’ But the double sense of aufheben that Hegel popularized later became a basic element of Schelling’s vocabulary, so that he can proudly recount in his 1842-3 introduction to his Positive Philosophy how his early Identity Philosophy had suspended (aufgehoben) Fichte’s conception of the subject-object relation (S 13: 78).
10 Robert Williams expands on this resistance of Hegelian dialectic to collapse through his discussion of Hegel’s ‘double transition’ (Williams 2007: 43).
11 The most sustained effort to catalogue such failures for their own sake is probably Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, though Foucault also argues for the necessity of such a project (Foucault 1980: 80-1).
12 See, for example, Heidegger 65: 203-4.
13 Žižek 1996.
14 Nancy 1993: 36.
15 While my decision to treat Hegel and Schelling together is anything but arbitrary, the reader should not assign any special significance to naming them in this order. ‘Schelling and Hegel’ would reflect Schelling’s temporal priority in realizing the need for reason’s suspension but would hide the fact that Schelling continued to do serious work on this issue after Hegel’s death. In any event, I do not wish to imply with my word order that either thinker delivers the culmination of the other’s work.
16 Schulz 1975; Frank 1985; Wirth 2003; Krell 2005; Grant 2006.
17 Collins 2000; Harris 1997; Burbidge 2007; Magnus 2001.
18 See, for instance, Snow 1996: 174; Warnek 2005: 166. In contrast, for an account of the need to preserve reason in our reading of Schelling, see Lawrence 2005: 17.
19 As, for instance, Hegel calls art a ‘thing of the past’ in the Lectures on Aesthetics (Hegel 1970 13: 25).
1 S 10: 72; H 20: 423, §415.
2 See, for instance, Vater 1994 for an intriguing account of reason in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre of 1801-2.
3 See especially Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Hegel 1970 9: 151).
4 See, for example, Longuenesse 1998: 61.
5 Here, as in the table at the end of the Introduction (K 5: 198), Kant leaves out the power of imagination, with no explanation why he no longer includes it among the cognitive faculties.
6 Gasché 1995: 35; Sallis 2000: 144.
7 See Breazeale 1994a for an account of the flexibility of Fichte’s circular account of the striving of reason.
8 I use Fichte’s German instead of Heath and Lachs’s ‘Science of Knowledge’ not because I find problems with this translation, but because recent scholarship has taken to referring to Fichte’s philosophy either as ‘The Wissenschaftslehre’ or as ‘The Doctrine of Science.’ While Wissenschaftslehre literally means ‘doctrine of science’ and not ‘science of knowledge,’ I see nothing gained in insisting on the former. Fichte intends Wissenschaftslehre to refer to the project of philosophy as a whole, and he uses this neologism rather than ‘philosophy’ merely to avoid denying the title ‘philosopher’ to those who do not follow his principles. In Fichte’s language, a Wissenschaftslehre is simply an effort to ground knowledge. Indeed, the meaning of Wissenschaftslehre is so undetermined for Fichte that we could almost translate its two roots into the Greek epistēmē and logos and then transliterate these back into the English ‘epistemology’ without losing anything from the general and underdetermined sense that Fichte gives it.
9 Recognizing that Kant had denied the possibility of an intellectual intuition, Fichte clarifies that under his conception it is not some sort of extrasensory intuition into the thing in itself, but is nothing but action (F 1: 472). It is the form of cognition that allows one to be aware of the categorical imperative.
1 Cf. Beiser, who argues that Schelling was never simply a Fichtean disciple (Beiser 2002: 470).
2 When he published the first volume of his collected works in 1809, Schelling wrote of ‘Of the I’ that ‘It shows idealism in its freshest form, in a sense which it may have lost later’ (S 1: 159).
3 Pfau 1994: 26.
4 Schelling conveniently ignores the fact that most of Spinoza’s ethical claims in Parts Three and Four of the Ethics apply not to substance as a whole, but to individual bodies. To ground these propositions, the lemmata in Part Two seek to show how an infinite substance can be divided into individual bodies that have their own conatus. (A body is an individual if its parts remain in close spatial proximity and maintain a constant proportion of motion and rest to one another.) If Parts Three and Four represent the core of Spinoza’s ethics, then Spinoza is just as guilty as Schelling’s contemporaries of limiting freedom to individuals.
5 In a move whose significance will be more apparent when we turn to the Freedom essay, Schelling calls that which unifies a finite self ‘personality’ (S 1: 200). Personality, in contrast to the infinite scope of the I, seeks to ensure finitude while insisting on a unity of one’s conscious experiences. Thus, since the moral impulse of the finite self is to move away from finitude, ‘the ultimate goal of all striving can also be represented as an expansion of personality to infinity, that is, as its own destruction’ (S 1: 200).
6 Like Hegel, Schelling does not reject thinking about the thing in itself wholesale, but only the assumption that the thing in itself is unknowable. As George di Giovanni has helpfully explained, Kant actually makes two mutually exclusive claims about the thing in itself. On the one hand, the central discovery of critical philosophy is that the conditions of consciousness can be delineated a priori without reference to any object of consciousness, which still assumes something given—which Hegel and Schelling ultimately cannot deny (di Giovanni and Harris 2000: 5-6). On the other hand, Kant also contends that in knowing an object in its phenomenal character, we do not know how it is in itself at all. As we will see in Chapters 4 and 5, Hegel and Schelling rightly take this conclusion as untenable.
7 Spinoza, E1P29Sch.
8 In fact, Schelling also describes this productivity in terms of externalization. In a passage remarkably similar to the penultimate paragraph of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Schelling writes, ‘We will thus think the soul as an activity that continually strives to produce [hervorzubringen] something finite from the infinite. It is as though the soul comprised an infinity that it is constrained to present outside itself. This cannot be explained any further, except by referring to the constant striving of the spirit to become finite for itself; that is, to become conscious of itself’ (S 1: 382, my emphasis). Here Schelling makes explicit what is already implicit in the German word hervorbringen: production is an externalization, a bringing-to-the-fore-out-of. The I’s production of itself through becoming conscious of itself, which Schelling here calls the activity of the soul, is thus an externalization of the infinite through presentation—precisely the lesson of the Phenomenology’s ‘Absolute Knowing.’
9 But already in the ‘Treatises’ Schelling indicates that the designation of the understanding as a faculty is not an absolute one. It is only from ‘the standpoint of consciousness,’ Schelling writes, that ‘understanding and sensibility are two altogether distinct faculties [Vermögen], and intuition and concept are two altogether distinct activities [Handlungen] (S 1: 423). Prior to the reflection of consciousness (i.e., the conceptual representation of the products of intuition), neither these faculties nor these activities are distinguishable as constituents of cognition.
10 As Schelling here conceives it, the imagination is not a separate faculty, but just a designation for theoretical reason, insofar as it is subordinated to practical reason (S 1: 431). The imagination is thus as little distinguished from other faculties as theoretical reason is separable from practical reason.
11 Schelling does not hold fast to Kant’s terminological distinction between the products of the understanding (concepts) and the products of reason (ideas), but his meaning is nevertheless clear. The problem with the brand of idealism he is attacking is not just that it seeks to reduce subjectivity to mechanical concepts (Schelling thinks that Fichte avoids this trap), but that it never allows the freedom of reason to unify itself with the necessity that always confronts it.
1 For reviews of Schelling’s reception of contemporary natural science, see Engelhardt 1984a and Engelhardt 1984b.
2 See Snow 1996: 67 and Esposito 1997: 9 for lengthier discussions of this poor reception of Schelling’s Nature Philosophy.
3 In no uncertain terms, Hegel reportedly described Schelling’s Nature Philosophy as ‘a procedure which was as fantastic as it was pretentious, which itself made a chaotic mixture of crude empiricism and uncomprehended thoughts, of a wholly capricious exercise of the imagination and the most commonplace way of proceeding by superficial analogy, and which passed off such a hodgepodge as the idea, reason, philosophical science, and divine knowledge, and pretended that the complete lack of method and scientific procedure was the acme of scientific procedure’ (Hegel 1970 9: 9, §244z).
4 Snelders 1990: 232.
5 In the introduction to the Ideas Schelling argues that organic bodies present a combination of necessity and contingency: ‘Necessity, because their very existence is purposive, not only their form (as in the work of art); contingency, because this purposiveness is nevertheless actual only for an intuiting and reflecting being’ (S 2: 47). For further discussion of the ambiguity of the Ideas on questions of the actuality of reason in nature, see Beiser 2006: 167.
6 There are ways, however, that the Ideas go beyond the methodology Schelling presents in the Introduction. The affinities of chemical bodies, for instance, seem to be not just objects of reason, but expressions of it. Given Schelling’s methodological modesty, however, it would be going too far to conclude with Wolfgang Förster that Schelling presents a materialist dialectic of nature (Förster 1984: 179).
7 Though they are certainly related, we should not confuse these forms of striving with the first two potencies (Potenzen). In the Ideas, at least, reason and the understanding are introduced independently of the potencies, before Schelling attempts to incorporate them into a history of spirit through intuition. At this stage of his career Schelling’s doctrine of potencies is loose and undeveloped. Later, Schelling will in his Identity Philosophy seek to define the potencies without reference to striving at all (S 4: 124).
8 The mixed metaphors here should not be taken merely as a sign of inconsistency or of Schelling’s youthful exuberance—he was, after all, only 22 when the first edition of the Ideas appeared. Rather, we should recognize in these metaphors the inexhaustibility of meaning continually reproduced in the striving of reason and the understanding. Though reason and the understanding are formally limited by their grounding and guiding urges, neither a discourse of life and death nor one of light and shadow can have a monopoly on the sense of their respective striving.
9 Kant gives us a version of this principle when, in the Critique of Judgment, he notes the wisdom of those who dissect living beings with the assumption that ‘nothing in such a creature is gratuitous’ (K 5: 376). Unlike the self-assured scholar who thinks that it is up to science to decide whether and what parts of nature are vestigial, the dissectionist perceives the compulsion that self-organizing beings present to reason.
10 ‘Letter on “Humanism,”’ Heidegger 9: 147.
11 Its full title is On the World-Soul, a Hypothesis of Higher Physics toward the Explanation of the Universal Organism. With an Essay on the Relation of the Real and Ideal in Nature, or Development of the First Ground of Nature Philosophy into the Principles of Gravity and Light.
12 Schelling uses this awkward construction to indicate that this basic force of nature is not identical with the shining of light itself, but with the expansive becoming that underlies all shining. It is not the essence or being of light, however, because essence only becomes possible through the interaction of light and gravity. It could be said to be the ground of light, but this is an underdetermination, since it is also the very becoming of light. Similarly, what Schelling means by gravity is not the attraction of heavy bodies in Newtonian space itself, but that which makes this attraction sensible. In the Erster Entwurf he argues that gravity is distinct from the attractive force that Kant makes primary (along with expansive force) in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (S 3: 264).
13 Schelling draws a connection between the absolute speed of light-essence and Homer’s description of swift movement as the atemporality of thought (S 2: 369). Only thought, which happens outside of time, can approximate the speed of light-essence.
14 See Beiser 2006: 157.
15 Ethics VP24.
16 Cf. Schelling’s lectures On the History of Recent Philosophy, where he argues that Hegel’s God is unable to reach such a Sabbath (S 10: 160).
17 Peterson 2004: xiii-xxii.
18 Sexuality appears rather suddenly on the scene of the Erster Entwurf without sufficient explanation of why it must be nature’s first inhibition. Here we see the impasse which Schelling ultimately came to see as unavoidable for the Nature Philosophy: while Nature Philosophy can show how inhibitions give shape to the absolute, it cannot show why inhibition comes to be in the first place.
19 To further the point in the previous note, it does seem that there is a relevant inhibition here, which would mean that sexuality is not organic nature’s first inhibition. To take a bacterium as an example (and if one wanted to avoid anachronistic empirical criticisms, a similar point could be made with ferns and other asexual multicellular organisms), it seems that the cell membrane does provide an inhibition to nature’s continual reproduction in the organism. Only that which can pass through the cell membrane can be incorporated into the organism’s productivity, which would imply that the bacterium is an individual. Similar cases could perhaps even be made for individual free-floating nucleic acids, which would further push back the question of nature’s first inhibition.
20 Schelling first introduces this distinction in Von der Weltseele (S 2: 566).
21 Though Schelling praises Brown for being the first to produce a theory of life that is neither vitalistic nor mechanistic, he claims that Brown failed to deduce this theory systematically, but merely stumbled into it through ‘a lucky grasp’ (S 3: 91n).
22 None of this means, however, that Schelling is dismissive of efforts to find evolutionary continuity in nature. Indeed, he calls for an empirical study of ‘natural history’ to supplement his own project, the system of Nature Philosophy (S 3: 68). Whereas system must be guided by reason’s drive to unity, the understanding’s search for continuity is perfectly suitable for natural history.
23 According to Schelling’s theory, the ultimate purpose of nutrition is neither to replace body parts lost through friction nor to provide fuel for the body’s chemical processes, but instead to provide a constant source of internal difference. To the friction theory Schelling provides the counterexample of plants, which move very little but nevertheless require nutrition. The fuel theory, on the other hand, assumes that life is essentially a chemical process, which would fail to explain the possibility of activity in organic nature (S 3: 172). Of course, organisms are composed of chemicals, for otherwise they would no longer be a part of nature. But insofar as organisms pull themselves out of nature, they are also more than mere amalgamations of chemicals. Nutrition is merely one form of intussusception, and as such its main function is to stimulate the organism to contract in on itself and strive to overcome its own internal differences.
24 In the Sämtliche Werke edition of Schelling’s works, Schelling’s son Karl notes Schelling had inserted the chapter on disease slightly earlier in his lectures on the book, but he gives no indication why (S 3: 205n1). Krell suggests that Schelling perhaps should have placed the section far earlier, as disease is at issue almost from the beginning of the Erster Entwurf (Krell 1998: 100). At any rate, Schelling clearly could not find a satisfactory place in the First Projection for a consideration of disease, as it calls the entire project of Naturphilosophie into question.
1 For more on STI’s concept of intuition, see Goudeli 2002: 96-7.
2 See Frank 2004: 108 for a discussion of Schelling’s early immodesty.
3 The World, Chapter 6 (Descartes 2000: 35).
4 Cf. Heidegger 42: 109.
5 The ambivalence of this position can be seen in the fact that the work in which Schelling makes this declaration, Philosophy and Religion, is not itself a dialogue.
6 Showing how freedom can exist outside of time is one of the major tasks of the Freedom essay (S 7: 385) and was vital for the argument of Kierkegaard’s Concept of Anxiety. In both cases, the importance of space reemerges as the determinacy of time is suspended (cf. Kierkegaard 1980: 85). For an excellent discussion of the relation of Kierkegaard’s concept of time to Schelling, see Hühn 2003: 133.
7 This is a proposition that Schelling will seek to disprove in the Freiheitsschrift, where he will argue that being and freedom can be equally primordial so long as being is not seen as the ground of freedom. Schelling will thus deny the connection he draws in the System between grounding and determining.
8 ‘What the form of intellectual intuition concerns has already been discussed; there is nothing more convenient than this cognition for positing immediate knowledge of whatever comes to mind’ (HV 9: 180).
9 Schelling does not explain what he means by ‘transcendent,’ but by reaffirming that his is a transcendental idealism in the next sentence, he recalls Kant’s distinction in the first Critique between transcendent and transcendental uses of reason (A296/B352-3). We can thus infer that a ‘dogmatic transcendent idealism’ is one that takes itself to have knowledge beyond the limits of pure reason.
10 Consciousness will repeat this process, overcoming its oscillation between expansion into the not-I and contraction back into the I by positing matter, the oscillation between cause and effect by positing the organic, and so on, all of which actions comprise what Schelling calls ‘productive intuition.’
11 Six years earlier, in the first of his surviving Erlangen Lectures, Schelling took a more straightforwardly negative approach to dialectic, dismissing a focus on competing philosophical systems as ‘mere dialectic, which is in no way science itself, but instead its preparation’ (S 9: 214).
12 Though Schelling will later identify this second nature with the realm of laws, wherein punishment follows infringements on freedom as if by a natural necessity (S 3: 583), he intends it here in a more general sense. The second nature is a world of free willing, in which intelligences are limited not by natural laws, but by each other. (Cf. S 3: 596, where Schelling identifies the second nature with a ‘moral order.’)
13 Here we see an equivocation in Schelling’s terminology. Whereas he had earlier defined self-consciousness as a pure act of intuition preceding all consciousness, here he indicates that it is something whose continuation needs to be strived for—a relation to oneself that is not timeless and absolute, but temporally mediated by the will.
14 Schelling’s claims in the concluding pages of Part Six that ‘we recognize in [nature] the odyssey of the spirit’ (S 3: 628) and that the STI is complete because it has been ‘led back to his starting point’ (S 3: 628) are optimistic exaggerations. While the art object does promise in intuition a unity of subject and object, by holding the art object outside of the system Schelling fails to develop the sense in which the system has returned to itself. In the Freiheitsschrift, Schelling will ultimately question the need for a system to return to itself in general. By placing reason on the periphery of the system, Schelling undermines the role of homecoming in the necessity of system.
1 While the article was unsigned and Schelling later took credit for its ‘main ideas,’ Harris argues that the article was likely written mostly by Hegel (di Giovanni and Harris 2000: 273).
2 It should be noted that in the Differenzschrift Hegel is not relying solely on STI, but is also concerned with Schelling’s 1801 Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie and his response to Eschenmayer’s article ‘Spontaneität = Weltseele oder das höchste Prinzip der Naturphilosophie.’ While I have chosen to discuss the Darstellung in my next chapter to show how it addresses some of the concerns Hegel raises and departs from the humanistic ideal of the STI, it should nevertheless be born in mind that Hegel is also relying on this more developed version of Schelling’s Identity Philosophy.
3 Hegel underlines this irony in the Phenomenology of Spirit by calling reason’s object, ‘the unity of self-consciousness and being,’ the ‘category’ (H 9: 134, §235). The devices that Kant attempts to use to reflect on the nature of reason are themselves the very essence of reason, and their separation from reality (which reason refuses to see) is the basis for reason’s ultimate perversity and undoing.
4 A few pages later (H 4: 16), Hegel will suspend this claim that philosophy begins with the understanding, for the absolute must be the source of all knowledge. The narrative wherein the understanding gives birth to a need which reason then fulfills is therefore itself merely reflective (i.e., not speculative).
5 Here it is important to recall that Hegel was most familiar with the Wissenschaftslehre of 1794 and The Vocation of Man. It would thus be unfair to read this as an indictment of the project of the Wissenschaftslehre as a whole.
6 Briefe von und an Hegel, 159-62 (May 1, 1807).
7 Wirth 2003: 185; Deleuze 1994: 190-1.
8 De Boer shows how Hegel’s reception of Schelling’s dual-sided conception of philosophy ultimately served as a model for the structure of his own system (de Boer 2000: 14).
9 The metaphor comes from the study of magnetism. Halfway between the negative and positive (north and south) poles of a magnet is a point at which the two poles meet. If the magnet is broken in half at this point, two new magnets will be formed, each with its own negative and positive pole. In an article in his Zeitschrift für Spekulative Physik, Schelling expands the concept of the indifference point into a general phenomenon at every level of nature. Whenever there is an opposition in nature (of attractive and expansive forces, for example), there will be a point at which the opposition is suspended, where the activity of the opposites is in equilibrium, and there is the possibility of each becoming dominant (‘Algemeine Deduktion des dynamischen Prozesses oder der Kategorien der Physik,’ v. 1.1: 110-11).
1 Showing the biting wit that makes his reading of Schelling so pleasurable, Tilliette likens Schelling’s later favorable references to the Darstellung to ‘the sort of affection one feels for a sickly child’ (v. 1: 263).
2 ‘Die Vernunft ist schlechthin Eine und schlechthin sich selbst gleich.’
3 ‘Actual’ here translates both the German wirklich and Latin actu, which Schelling uses interchangeably (cf. S 4: 129).
4 In the Identity Philosophy, a quantitative difference is ‘a difference that is not posited according to essence … a difference that is rooted purely in a difference of form’ and not of substance (S 4: 127n). Since all things are identical in reason, all differences are only quantitative or formal. Schelling’s intention in using the modifier is thus to remind the reader that the difference between subject and object is not prior to reason. Esposito calls this point ‘one of the most crucial and perplexing’ in the Darstellung (94), and it is difficult to see how the distinction explains the relation between the infinite and the finite any more clearly than Spinoza’s distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata.
5 Beach works out some of the implications of this metaphor at Beach 1994: 32.
6 For one account of the metaphor, which I am not sure how seriously Schelling intended, see Bruno, S 4: 264-6.
7 For an account of how Hegel took up this schematic representation of indifference, see Redding 1996: 62.
8 Schelling goes on to argue that the absolute totality of God’s self-affirmation is not simply a foundational concept to make the rest of philosophy intelligible, but is the content of philosophy itself: ‘Philosophy, then, is the presentation of the self-affirmation of God in the infinite fertility [Fruchtbarkeit] of its consequences; that is, the presentation of the One as totality’ (S 6: 176-7). But the mention of fertility introduces an odd discontinuity into an otherwise continuous line of thought. Suddenly and inexplicably, God’s self-affirmation not only begins to consort with something outside of itself but becomes productive in the process.
9 Pfau’s translation. It is unclear what, if any, distinction Schelling wishes to draw between Widerschein and Reflex.
10 See di Giovanni and Harris 2000: 43.
1 See Harris 1997 1: 50 for an argument that takes this passage as conclusive that Schelling was not intended in the Phenomenology’s criticism of lifeless formalism.
2 H 4: 509-14.
3 Esposito argues that Schelling was right to be offended given the ‘hypocrisy’ of Hegel’s letter (Esposito 1977: 167).
4 Here it is just as important not to make the error of assuming Hegel is simply criticizing Schelling. It is manifestly unfair, for instance, for Beiser to claim that Hegel departs from Schelling by arguing that the absolute is not only identity, but the identity of identity and difference (Beiser 2005: 65), since it was Schelling who introduced Hegel to this insight. Likewise, Hyppolite’s blanket statement that Schelling eliminates duality from the absolute is simply false (Hyppolite 1974: 31).
5 Compare, for instance, Hegel’s repudiation of the formalism of a Naturphilosophie that ‘teaches, say, that the understanding is electricity, or the animal is nitrogen, or that they are the equivalent of the South or North Pole’ with Schelling’s Darstellung, for example, §152: ‘The animal is therefore southerly; the plant, northerly’ (S 4: 207).
6 See Beiser 2002: 523 for a discussion of why this accusation ought not to be applied to the whole of Schelling’s early work.
7 Harris claims that since Friedrich Schlegel’s original criticism of Schelling’s absolute as ‘the night in which all cats are grey’ was aimed just as much at Hegel, Hegel could not possibly be taking it seriously as a criticism of Schelling, but must instead be attempting to show the validity of Schelling’s answer (Harris 1997 1: 53). But Hegel’s broader point about the necessity of reason moving toward the absolute is incompatible with Schelling’s claim that it is the immediacy of reason’s cognition of the absolute that brings it out of the dark night of absolute indifference (S 4: 403).
8 Following the critical edition, H. S. Harris argues that Hegel’s primary philosophical target in this paragraph is Spinoza (Harris 1997 1: 56). Habermas, on the other hand, links this criticism to Schelling’s 1806 Aphorisms on the Philosophy of Nature, specifically the latter’s claim that the absolute is the ‘All-blessed outside of all conflict’ (Habermas 2004: 51).
9 See also C. Lauer 2006-7.
10 In addition to this opposition of play and work, it should be noted that Hegel also notes the pain (Schmerz) of the negative, which he elsewhere argues is constitutive of life itself (H 12: 187).
11 Cf. Schmidt 1988: 88.
12 This is what I take Hegel to mean when he states that ‘forceless beauty hates the understanding’ for exposing it to an infinitely superior force (H 9: 27, §32). A form of life utterly content with itself will recoil from the assignment of any further tasks. Note that Miller’s translation is misleading in suggesting that beauty recoils from being asked to do the work of the understanding, when the German can only mean that it is beauty’s own work that it cannot do.
13 See Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, H 20: 248, §258. Hegel’s language (‘der Alles gebährende und seine Geburten zerstörende Chronos’) suggests that he might be conflating Chronos and the Titan Kronos, but the destructive image is apt in any case.
14 See Nancy 2002: 14-18.
15 Merold Westphal, for instance, claims that once absolute knowing is reached, ‘So far as we are concerned, nothing remains to be done’ (Westphal 1998: 211). Michael Murray is even bolder, claiming that in ‘Absolute Knowing’ ‘no new content gets introduced’ (Murray 1981: 699).
16 For an alternative account of this structure, see de Vos 1989: 232.
17 Thus while I do not think it is adequate to every moment of the dialectic (such as the movement from observing to active reading, I am sympathetic to Hyppolite’s claim that the Phenomenology as a whole takes its structure from the unhappy consciousness.
18 See, for example, H 9: 433, §808. See Verene 1985: 3-5 for further discussion.
19 Stephen Houlgate has done a great deal of work explaining the necessity of this movement. See especially Houlgate 1998; 2005: 101; 2006: 29. For my criticism of the hermeneutic implications of Houlgate’s reading of absolute knowing as science (which should not be taken to invalidate Houlgate’s reading), see C. Lauer 2006.
20 See Hyppolite 1974: 586 for further discussion of the distinction between phenomenology and science.
21 Pippin’s Hegel’s Idealism gives one of the most sustained arguments to this effect, and Lumsden 1998 advocates a version of this position in his reading of ‘Absolute Knowing.’
22 Miller translates this as ‘to know one’s limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself’ (emphasis added). The German, ‘Seine Grenze wissen, heißt, sich aufzuopfern wissen,’ does not necessarily suggest that this is a knowing-how. And while it is clear that Hegel believes knowing one’s limits implies knowing that one must sacrifice oneself, it is unclear how such knowledge gives it any more know-how regarding self-sacrifice.
23 See Harris 1997 2: 746 for a discussion of the differences between the end of the Phenomenology and the beginning of the Naturphilosophie.
24 See Miller 1998: 453.
1 See Dahlstrom’s review of the chapter’s neglect (Dahlstrom 2006-7: 36-40).
2 I take this extension of Hegel’s reason as organism metaphor from Krell 1998: 165. But while I, too, find that Hegel does not always give the reader enough time to digest his new and surprising additions to his system, I disagree with Krell’s claim that it is Hegel’s intention to incorporate all difference into a unitary system. In its investigation of organic nature, reason finds that acting is something qualitatively different from organic striving.
3 Thus I agree wholeheartedly with William Maker’s assessment that ‘Hegelian thought turns the traditional notion of identity inside out. Unlike traditional metaphysicians, he does not fetishize identity, and unlike postmoderns, he does not fetishize difference’ (Maker 2007: 19).
4 See also my article on the place of childishness and play in the dialectic of reason (C. Lauer 2006-7).
5 Since this idealism is ultimately suspended in the dissolution of reason’s self-certainty, we should therefore note that the Phenomenology cannot be taken to show the truth of idealism any more than it shows the truth of, say, the Kantian thing-in-itself or animism. All present moments of spirit’s unfolding, but none are able to present its absoluteness.
6 Two paragraphs earlier, Hegel clarifies that in reason, ‘we can, strictly speaking, no longer talk of things at all, i.e. of something which would be for consciousness merely the negative of itself’ (H 9: 135: §236). Thus reason’s search for itself in the things of empirical nature contradicts its own assumptions. The lone postulate of observing reason, that it is identical with all reality, assumes that there is no such thing as a thing. In taking itself to be identical with a thing like the skull, reason ultimately sacrifices this postulate and allows that it, too, is in some ways a thing.
7 Dahlstrom finds ‘potentially troubling’ Hegel’s assumption that observing reason must turn first to the differentiating acts of finite individual organisms rather than universals or species (Dahlstrom 2006-7: 45). While I find it natural to begin with these finite differentiations, since claws and membranes are the most salient forms of active natural difference, I agree that Hegel should have found room to consider the sorts of universal self-differentiations through inhibition that Schelling traces in the Erster Entwurf. But against Dahlstrom’s larger point that Hegel is sending ‘mixed signals’ by showing the impossibility of reason fully finding itself in nature and yet building a system around reason’s complete self-unification (Dahlstrom 2006-7: 55) I believe that this impossibility is precisely Hegel’s point, and we must adjust our understanding of absolute knowing accordingly.
8 Unlike Popper, Hempel identified a positive side to the acts of positing and testing hypotheses. While this is difficult to express formally, reason does experience a kind of satisfaction when its hypotheses are confirmed, even if it cannot infer anything conclusively from this confirmation (Hempel 1966: 11).
9 A version of the following discussion appeared in volume 38 of The Owl of Minerva (C. Lauer 2006-7). My thanks to Ardis Collins of The Owl for allowing it to be reprinted here.
10 See Arendt 1993: 265.
11 I take this example from Robert Stern (Stern 2002: 108).
12 For further discussion of Hegel’s reception of Brownian medicine, see Engelhardt 1984a: 126.
13 Hegel suggests these drives exist only inchoately in plants (H 9: 150, §266).
14 Since it concerns the concept’s release into nature, this passage could also shed light on the transition from the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature. Collins takes it more generally to show reason’s inability to incorporate nature without remainder (Collins 2000: 784).
15 Given Hegel’s own dalliances with drawing fanciful connections across the natural sciences both before and after he wrote the Phenomenology, he must not have been completely opposed to this ‘friendly approach’ and its ‘limitation to the description and narration of the “meanings” and fanciful conceits of nature’ (H 9: 166, §297). His discussions of the five elements in the First Philosophy of Spirit (H 6: 277-9) and of clairvoyance in the 1827-8 Philosophy of Spirit (HV 13: 101) come immediately to mind; see also Verene 1998.
16 This does not, to be sure, imply that Schelling gives himself license to impose the form of reason upon nature. He notes in the (1799) ‘Introduction’ appended to the First Projection that ‘every idealistic mode of explanation dragged out of its own proper sphere and applied to the explanation of nature, degenerates into the most adventurous nonsense, examples of which are well-known’ (S 3: 273).
17 Cf. Gadamer 2002: 107.
18 Conversely, the same could be said of Dahlstrom’s suggestion that the earth is at work annihilating the entire human species, reason and all (Dahlstrom 2006-7: 53). While an asteroid or the sulfur dioxide produced by an immense volcanic eruption could very well end human life, reason would still not be able to say anything universal about its relation to the earth, for asteroids and volcanic eruptions are contingencies, and reason has been given no reason to posit a universal intention behind natural processes.
19 Though Hegel was skeptical that they had any scientific worth at all, the fact that these were pseudosciences (i.e., studies that fail to yield falsifiable predictions) is not the basis of their inability to observe self-consciousness. In fact, physiognomy and phrenology could be replaced in the Phenomenology by evolutionary psychology and magnetic resonance imaging, respectively, and yield the same dialectical conclusion. Even if we could discover extensive and reliable connections between an individual’s genes and his disposition, and even if we could find correlations between his thoughts and activations of certain neural clusters, such observations would still fail to come to terms with the individual’s interiority.
20 Indeed, Hegel himself seems to have been distracted by phrenology’s many failings as a science, spending as he does 20-full paragraphs on detailing its failures.
21 Reid 2004: 107.
22 Kojève 1947: 41; Marcuse 1987: 305; Hyppolite 1974: 190; Gadamer 1976: 35; Deleuze 1994: 43; Taylor 1977: 171.
23 See Gadamer 1976: 35 for a discussion of the place of the esoteric in the dialectic of the inverted world.
24 See Shapiro 1998: 231.
25 See Q. Lauer 1993: 171.
26 Ardis Collins explains how this movement is carried on into the dialectic of revealed religion: the counterpart to reason’s perversion in the natural world is what Hegel calls evil. Whereas reason shows itself to be perverse in its continual, fruitless striving to be its own ground, religion takes nature to be evil in the sense that it cannot be drawn up into the tranquility of pure thought (Collins 2000: 786). Schelling’s Freedom essay will unite these two movements.
1 Joseph Lawrence argues that the Freiheitsschrift does not so much displace the centrality of reason in earlier works by Schelling and Hegel as renew and reformulate it (Lawrence 2005: 19). While Lawrence’s reading is preferable to those that label the philosophy of Schelling’s middle period a kind of irrationalism, it is contradicted both by Schelling’s direct statements that his is no longer a system of reason and the movement of the Freiheitsschrift, in which the appearance of the unground forestalls any possibility of a rational return to self. His caution that a philosophy completely unmoored from reason ‘is a drunk, lost reason’ is, however, a useful corrective to those readings that celebrate this decentering of reason (Lawrence 1989: 6).
2 See Leibniz 1875-90 6: 122, Leibniz 1875-90 4: 455.
3 Cf. Jantzen 1995: 77.
4 While he claims that these resources were already available in the Darstellung’s account of light’s emergence from gravity (S 7: 358n), he is probably being too generous to himself, given that the Identity Philosophy makes no room for the free development of subjectivity.
5 For a discussion of anthropomorphism in the Freiheitsschrift, see Heidegger 42: 124-5.
6 It should be noted that the etymology of the German word Sucht, ‘addiction,’ is distinct from the false cognate Suchen, to seek, and derives instead from a root denoting illness—hence its English cognate ‘sick.’
7 In his 1802-3 lectures on the philosophy of art, Schelling describes his age in general as ‘longing for the center’ which is to be found through a kind of art that can gather the spirit into a unity (S 5: 504—for more, see Krell 2005: 194). Here a similar sort of gathering into unity takes place on the level of the understanding. The ground of God has no original desire to know itself, but only a vague longing for unity.
8 As Paul Tillich puts it, ‘Freedom is the power to become disunited from oneself’ (Tillich 1974: 48).
9 See Lawrence 1989: 7 for further discussion of the dangers of a nostalgia to return to one’s ground in nature or myth.
10 Distaso reminds us of the importance for the early Schelling that the Hebrew name ‘Eve’ simply means ‘life.’ There is something intrinsic to the structure of life that allows it to be solicited by sin (Distaso 2004: 9-10).
11 Literally, ‘stand in one another’ (stehen ineinander).
12 The reference to false imagination (or bastard reasoning, as it is more literally translated) is to Plato’s Timaeus, 52b.
13 For this reason, Wirth’s claim that for Schelling ethics is first philosophy in something like a Levinasian sense (Wirth 2005: 7) is untenable. If philosophy begins with the acknowledgment of responsibility to the other, then we overlook the possibility of suspending responsibility that is so vital to Schelling’s new conception of philosophy’s task.
14 For a provocative offhand reflection on the difficulty of specifying whether this center is empty or full, see Krell 1988: 17n3.
1 For this reason it is misleading for Pippin to speak of ‘the subjectivity presupposed by the Logic, the subject presumably determining for itself, in Hegel’s ideal reconstruction, its own fundamental Notions’ (Pippin 1989: 170). While Hegel did believe in a kind of preconscious subjectivity, the movement of the Logic is based neither on subjective self-determination, nor on our conception of its necessity (see Houlgate 2006).
2 For example, at H 20: 45, §6.
3 See Houlgate 2006: 380.
4 In a discussion of Hegel’s famous identification of the rational and the actual, Yirmiahu Yovel notes that when Hegel makes such general ‘Heraclitean-sounding’ claims that unite disparate elements of his system, he usually does so ‘in nonsystematic texts, such as prefaces and Zusätze. The role of such sayings was rhetorical and didactic; they were not meant as genuine philosophy but as “mere talk” about philosophy’—usually for pedagogical purposes (Yovel 1996: 27).
5 In all four versions of his Logic (H 20: 214, §209) and reportedly in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Hegel 1970 12: 49).
6 Hegel 1970 7: 24.
7 See Burbidge 2007: 5-7 for a discussion of this term.
8 For an account of Schelling’s contrasting view of divine providence in historical divine providence, see Beach 1994: 158.
9 ‘Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklick; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig’ (Hegel 1970 7: 24).
10 Yovel 1996: 27; Fackenheim 1996: 46; Dudley 2003-4: 36.
11 Badiou 2006: 4. Badiou cites Prigogine as attempting to carry through Hegel’s ‘still-born’ project of finding concrete instantiations of the idea in the world.
12 See Reid 2004 and Maker 1998 for solutions to this antinomy. See Stone 2005: xi-xii for a review of authors who have dismissed Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature as a whole.
13 Reid analyses this deciding (entschliessen) as an ent-schliessen, a desyllogizing. Insofar as logic moves from the universality of being through the particularity of essence to the universal singularity of the absolute idea, the move to nature is a desyllogizing that breaks the continuity of this directed movement (Reid 2004: 104).
14 See the Munich Lectures, S 10: 153.
15 Burbidge 2007: 106-30.
16 Thus Maker makes the point that while Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature lacks empirical physics’ ability to predict concrete manifestations of nature, empirical physics cannot explain why there must be such contingency and inexplicability (Maker 2007: 17).
17 HV 13: 4. See Burbidge 2007: 108.
18 Stone 2005; Burbidge 2007. See also Kalenberg 1997.
19 Witness, for instance, Hegel’s interest in Helmont’s experiments with hallucinogens (HV 13: 95).
20 Devos 1998: 44.
21 Burbidge 2007: 143-52.
22 Harris 1996.
23 Grier 1996: 227-8.
24 Houlgate 1991: 39.
25 Phaedo, 97b-99d.
1 Cf. the Munich Lectures: ‘The whole world lies, so to speak, in the nets of the understanding or of reason, but the question is how it entered these nets, since there is obviously something other and something more than mere reason in the world, indeed there is something which strives beyond these limits’ (S 10: 143-4). See also Žižek 1997: 3.
2 For example, in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel 1970 7: 23-4.
3 While this reading of Fichte would seem to be contradicted by Fichte’s conception of the Anstoss, Schelling has a few pages earlier explained that it was Fichte’s desire to popularize his philosophy that led him to such anthropocentric and tyrannical conclusions as his claim that air exists only so that human beings may be in discourse with one another (S 13: 52). Presumably Schelling would make a similar argument about Fichte’s move from an infinitely striving reason to an infinitely perfect reason.
4 Sellars 1997: 77; H 11: 324-40.
5 Schelling argues that the existence of plants follows from the existence of anything at all, but does not follow merely from the concept of a plant (S 13: 59). I remain noncommittal on whether this was Hegel’s understanding of the Philosophy of Nature as well. As I discussed in the previous chapter, Stone argues that Hegel deduces the necessary existence of certain natural categories like plants, while Burbidge (1997) argues that the Philosophy of Nature merely seeks experiential correlates for logical categories.
6 Habermas argues that Schelling’s ‘empirical’ investigations of mythology are plagued by the same flaw: an attempt to read a priori conceptions into empirical investigation (Habermas 2004: 72-5). Cf. Beach 1994: 150.
7 See Schulz 1975: 314n for an illuminating connection of Schelling’s discussion of contingency to Heidegger’s notion of thrownness (Geworfenheit).
8 Here Schelling ignores his own earlier efforts (along with those of Fichte and Hegel) to show that reason, unlike the understanding, is unique in its ability to incorporate external inhibitions into its own form of striving. Thus when the will is checked by external forces (such as punishment for wrongdoing) it incorporates the goals of its community into its striving. In order to give a complete proof of the need for a suspension of reason, Schelling would have to explain the inadequacy of more complex redirections of reason’s striving.
9 Protesting the charge that his rejection of Hegel’s system stems from jealousy at the success of his former protégé, Schelling responds with a backhanded complement: ‘While others just floundered about [taumelten], he at least held tight to the method as such, and the energy with which he carried out a false system—although mistaken, it was nonetheless a system—had it been turned to what is correct could have contributed a priceless largess to science’ (S 13: 87). He goes on to answer Hegel’s accusation of childishness by attributing Hegel’s success to the fact that ‘there are many who want to be finished [with philosophy] at any cost and feel childishly delighted to subscribe to a system, thereby elevating their own importance’ (S 13: 87).
10 In the Munich lectures, Schelling gives a slightly more nuanced version of this claim. Hegel’s error, he states, lies in failing to disclose that his analysis of the world’s development is guided by a hidden understanding of the reason guiding it. Thus Hegel claims to find a necessity underlying all the contingencies of history, but he can only do so by assuming a historically contingent understanding (S 10: 132). As I wrote last chapter, I think this poses a legitimate challenge to Hegel and underlies his work in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right to reaffirm the historical contingency of reason.
11 Cf. Nancy 2002.