When Schiller[65] reshaped Kant’s moral philosophy he was not concerned, as might be supposed, merely with æsthetic results, but with conduct, history, and the whole system of metaphysics. The problem always uppermost in Schiller’s mind was the place of art and beauty in the whole system of things. So when he tried to reconcile Kant’s theoretical reason and Kant’s practical reason, he naturally looked to art for such reconciliation. What is there that is both necessary and free? Beauty! “Beauty is freedom in phenomenal appearance.” Æsthetic contemplation apprehends the beautiful object, and yet in so doing it transcends all the trammels and bonds of experience. The artistic ecstasy is freedom in necessity. It is independent of moral as well as intellectual rules. Beauty is as little an objectof sense as of will. It does not have the quality of need that belongs to sense phenomena, nor of earnestness that accompanies morality. Sense is obliterated; the stirrings of the will become silent. That which appears was called by Schiller the “play impulse.” Toward the education of man Schiller thus offered art, while Kant had presented religion. Art refines the feelings, tempers the sensuous will, and makes room for the moral will. Yet the moral will is not the end; for art is not only the means of education, but the goal as well. Complete life comes when the conflict between morality and sense disappears in artistic feeling. “Only as man plays is he truly man.” The ideal that Schiller formulated for this Romantic age was the “schöne Seele.” While in the soul of man the Kantian rigoristic moral law exists when sense stands in opposition to duty, the “beautiful soul” does not know conflict because its nature is ennobled by its own inclination. This æsthetic humanism Schiller expresses for his time in antithesis to Kant’s and Fichte’s rigorism. Goethe impersonated this ideal in his life and represented it in his works. The Romanticists carried this conception to its extreme both in their practice and in their literary productions. Thus they came to stand for an aristocracy of culture, and in them “ethical geniality” culminated. The Romanticist contrasted himself with the “Philistine” who lives according to rules. The Romanticist would live out his own individuality as valuable in itself. He substituted the endless play of the imagination for Fichte’s moral law, and was frequently very wayward and capricious. This is seen in Schlegel’s Lucinde. Schleiermacher the preacher tried to preserve the purity of Schiller’s doctrine.
In his construction of his own philosophy of mind Schelling adopted completely Schiller’s theory of the æsthetic reason in what he called Transcendental Idealism. He looked upon the Fichtean antithesis between theoretical and practical reason as the same as that between the unconscious and the conscious activity of the Self. Theoretically, or from the point of view of the understanding, consciousness is determined by the unconscious; practically, or from the point of view of the will, the unconscious is the creation of consciousness. The practical or willing Self re-shapes the products of the nature world. For a thinking being is not merely a reflector or re-presenter of events as they occur in the nature world—as nature produces them. Thinking man is not merely passive. He re-shapes and transforms nature through the freedom of his morality.
But neither the series of passively apprehended events, nor the series of events transformed by the active moral will, is ever complete. Neither as a passive product of nature nor as a moral will is man a perfected being. In either condition man perpetually feels the contradiction, since he is neither wholly passive nor wholly active. The antagonism between will and sense is ever present. Man realizes the fullness of his Ego, when he transcends both will and sense, both morality and science, in the conscious-unconscious activity of artistic genius. This is the highest synthesis. In Schelling’s lectures delivered at Jena on the philosophy of art, after he had written his Transcendental Idealism, he developed and applied this theory and it determined the subsequent development of æsthetics in the Jena circle. Kant had previously defined genius as intellect that works like nature; Schiller had defined it as playing;Schelling looked upon it as æsthetic reason and the climax of the philosophy of mind. Art, and not logic, is the instrument by which the reason develops. Artistic reason is the goal toward which the reason aims.
The System of Identity. Schelling published his Transcendental Idealism in 1800. In the next year he published his System of Identity in the hope of finding some common ground for his two preceding points of view. For Nature is not absolute, but is a limited objective Ego; and Mind is also not absolute, but is also limited, although subjective. The Self perceives the object as other than itself, and in subsequent reflection it sees the object as a form of its own deeper Self. Subject and object, mind and nature, are one in reality. The question then is, Does the absolute Self exist? Yes, but outside the conditions of existence and beyond all contradictions. It is itself the highest condition, the unconditioned condition. But what is the basis of these two antithetical aspects of life? The most suitable name that Schelling could give it was Identity or Indifference; for other names would imply conditions. In this attempt to construct an absolute Idealism, Schelling shows the influence of Spinoza. Identity reminds us of Spinoza’s substance,—a reality that is absolutely indifferent to both mental and nature phenomena, and yet is the reality of both. It is absolute reason undetermined in its content. It was this turning to Spinozism on the part of Schelling, that made Hegel break with him and call his Identity “the night, in which all cows are black.” Schelling even came so much under the influence of Spinoza as to imitate Spinoza’s form of presentation in the Ethics. But Schelling regarded the objective and subjective worlds not after the manner ofSpinoza as independent of each other. On the contrary he looked upon every phenomenon as both ideal and real, and as having its logical place according to the degree in which the two elements are combined. Differences are what constitute phenomena; the Absolute is the Indifferent. Schelling illustrates this by the magnet, which is itself an indifference of opposite poles of varying intensity.
In the nature series the objective factor predominates, and in the mental series the subjective factor. The universe is the most perfect work of art, the most perfect organism, and the best expression of God.
Schelling’s Religious Philosophy. Romanticism took a religious turn at the beginning of the eighteenth century under the influence of Schleiermacher.[66] The motive of this movement was the thought that religious feeling lies below art. Reason can be completed only in religion, by which is meant not dogma, nor morality, but an æsthetic relation to the world-ground, a pious feeling of absolute dependence. It is the feeling of being permeated by the Absolute. Schleiermacher taught in the true Romantic spirit that religion is an individual matter and is different from church organization. Thus in this time of quickly passing shades of imaginative thought Schiller idealized Greece and Schleiermacher the Middle Ages. Susceptible as he was to every idea of his time, Schelling embodied this teaching of Schleiermacher in his later teaching. With the other Romanticists he expected that the concept of religionwould furnish a final basis for the solution of all problems, overcome all antitheses in an inner harmony, and bring about the eternal welfare of all.
Schelling now no longer called the Absolute Indifference, but God or Infinity, and he conceived Him as possessing modes and potencies. In the development of this new line of thought he introduced the neo-Platonic doctrine of Ideas as God’s intuitions of Himself, and as intermediaries with the world. Later Schelling passed through another change, and this doctrine grew under his hands into a theosophy and a theory of the irrational. The influence of Schelling was eclipsed by Hegel after Schelling retired to Munich; and Schelling saw his rival in control of German academic thought for many years. But he had the satisfaction in his old age of being called by the authorities to Berlin as the official spokesman against the Hegelian doctrine.
Hegel and the Culmination of Idealism. We have divided the philosophers after Kant into two groups; (1) Fichte, Schelling and the Romanticists, and Hegel; (2) Herbart and Schopenhauer. In this first group, which we have at present under our eye, Fichte is the ethical exhorter, Schelling the Romantic nature-lover, and Hegel the intellectual systematizer. Fichte’s conception of Reality is always an ethical ideal unrealized, in whose cause men are called to fight for conviction’s sake. Schelling points to the beauty of nature’s productivity as a reality that lies hidden in mystery. Both these theories show profound insight into life and both are expressive of the period in its attitude toward life. Fichte is the type of the Puritan idealist; Schelling the type of the sentimentalist. Yet both, even from the point of view of the Idealism of the period, were partialexpressions. Idealism was a social movement; and like all social movements must run its course. It would not stop until it had culminated in a full and systematic formulation. This was found in the philosophy of Hegel. The social forces of the eighteenth century had been gathering a momentum, which naturally came to a magnificent climax. On its political side this movement culminated under the leadership of the greatest of all political idealists, Napoleon Bonaparte, in 1815 at Waterloo. On its intellectual side it reached its completion in the philosophical system of Hegel. Hegel died in 1831, and his intellectual kingdom, like the political kingdom of Napoleon, was immediately shattered. But the observer of the currents of history will find much significance in the stubborn persistence of the intellectual phase of the Idealistic movement long after its political dominance had gone. Hegel ruled the intellectual world of Germany from Berlin for sixteen years after the battle of Waterloo, and his philosophy was officially recognized by the Berlin authorities. This stubbornness of the realm of ideas can be exemplified throughout history, for it requires more than one political earthquake to demolish a well-organized intellectual theory.
Hegel may be said to have drawn the scattered threads of the preceding idealists into a system. Like them, he firmly grounded his philosophy on the Kantian epistemology. Like them also, he sought to find absolute reality by means of the conscious Ego. This only means that all three were idealists. But Fichte’s conception of the Ego was only partially formed. It could not be an absolute reality, since it needed to be confronted by a non-Ego in order to assert itself andlive. Hegel was discerning enough to see that Reason was more fundamental than either action, purpose, or consciousness itself. To him both the Ego and the non-Ego were in essence Reason. The Ego could not know that it had created the non-Ego unless the Ego was in the beginning rational. To distinguish the Ego from the non-Ego, there must be some ground of similarity upon which both are based. In his search for this ground Hegel at first allied himself with Schelling. The brilliancy of Schelling’s thought dazzled him. Then he saw that Schelling only led back to the abstract universal of Spinoza. A mystical “black night” Identity was not actual nor did it explain anything actual. It merely said that the Absolutely Real is unknowable. This is too easy a solution of the complexity of life. Having neither meaning nor actuality, it cannot explain the actual concrete and meaningful things. The Absolutely Real must be a universal, but it must also be concrete. History has been the Reason in its toil and travail. The Absolutely Real must include history and it must be Reason. With Fichte the “deed act” had primacy, with Schelling the æsthetic feeling, with Hegel the Reason as an articulated series of concepts.
Why Hegel remains to-day the Representative of Kant. There were several reasons why Hegel remains the representative of Kant:—