History of Modern Philosophy / From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time

by Richard Falckenberg

The philosophy of nature explained the products of nature teleologically, deduced them from the concept or the mission of nature, by ignoring the mechanical origin of physical phenomena and inquiring into the significance of each stage in nature in view of this ideal meaning of the whole. It asks what is the outcome of the chemical process for the whole of nature, what is given by electricity, by magnetism, etc.—what part of the general aim of nature is attained, is realized through this or that group of phenomena. The philosophy of spirit given in the System of Transcendental Idealism, 1800, finds itself confronted by corresponding questions concerning the phenomena of intelligence, of morals, and of art. Here again Schelling does not trace out the mechanics of the soul-life, but is interested only in the meaning, in the teleological significance of the psychical functions. His aim is a constructive psychology in the Fichtean sense, a history of consciousness, and the execution of his design as well closely follows the example of the Wissenschaftslehre.

Since truth is the agreement of thought and its object, every cognition necessarily implies the coming together of a subjective and an objective factor. The problem of this coming together may be treated in two ways. With the philosophy of nature we may start from the object and observe how intelligence is added to nature. The transcendental philosophy takes the opposite course, it takes its position with the subject, and asks, How is there added to intelligence an object corresponding to it? The transcendental philosopher has need of intellectual intuition in order to recognize the original object-positing actions of the ego, which remain concealed from common consciousness, sunk in the outcome of these acts. The theoretical part of the system explains the representation of objective reality (the feeling connected with certain representations that we are compelled to have them), from pure self-consciousness, whose opposing moments, a real and an ideal force, limit each other by degrees,—and follows the development of spirit in three periods ("epochs"). The first of these extends from sensation, in which the ego finds itself limited, to productive intuition, in which a thing in itself is posited over against the ego and the phenomenon between the two; the second, from this point to reflection (feeling of self, outer and inner intuition together with space and time, the categories of relation as the original categories); the third, finally, through judgment, wherein intuition and concept are separated as well as united, up to the absolute act of will. Willing is the continuation and completion of intuition;[1] intuition was unconscious production, willing is conscious production. It is only through action that the world becomes objective for us, only through interaction with other active intelligences that the ego attains to the consciousness of a real external world, and to the consciousness of its freedom. The practical part follows the will from impulse (the feeling of contradiction between the ideal and the object) through the division into moral law and resistant natural impulse up to arbitrary will. Observations on legal order, on the state, and on history are added as "supplements." The law of right, by which unlawful action is directed against itself, is not a moral, but a natural order, which operates with blind necessity. The state, like law, is a product of the genus, and not of individuals. The ideal of a cosmopolitan legal condition is the goal of history, in which caprice and conformity to law are one, in so far as the conscious free action of individuals subserves an unconscious end prescribed by the world-spirit. History is the never completed revelation of the absolute (of the unity of the conscious and the unconscious) through human freedom. We are co-authors in the historical world-drama, and invent our own parts. Not until the third (the religious) period, in which he reveals himself as "providence," will God be; in the past (the tragical) period, in which the divine power was felt as "fate," and in the present (the mechanical) period, in which he appears as the "plan of nature," God is not, but is only becoming.

[Footnote 1: With this transformation of the antithesis between knowledge and volition into a mere difference in degree, Schelling sinks back to the standpoint of Leibnitz. In all the idealistic thinkers who start from Kant we find the endeavor to overcome the Critical dualism of understanding and will, as also that between intellect and sensibility. Schiller brings the contrary impulses of the ego into ultimate harmonious union in artistic activity. Fichte traces them back to a common ground; Schelling combines both these methods by extolling art as a restoration of the original identity. Hegel reduces volition to thought, Schopenhauer makes intellect proceed from will.]

An interesting supplement to the Fichtean philosophy is furnished by the third, the aesthetic, part of the transcendental idealism, which makes use of Kant's theory of the beautiful in a way similar to that in which the philosophy of nature had availed itself of his theory of the organic. Art is the higher third in which the opposition between theoretical and practical action, the antithesis of subject and object, is removed; in which cognition and action, conscious and unconscious activity, freedom and necessity, the impulse of genius and reflective deliberation are united. The beautiful, as the manifestation of the infinite in the finite, shows the problem of philosophy, the identity of the real and the ideal, solved in sensuous appearance. Art is the true organon and warrant of philosophy; she opens up to philosophy the holy of holies, is for philosophy the supreme thing, the revelation of all mysteries. Poesy and philosophy (the aesthetic intuition of the artist and the intellectual intuition of the thinker) are most intimately related; they were united in the old mythology—why should not this repeat itself in the future?

%2. System of Identity.%

The assertion which had already been made in the first period that "nature and spirit are fundamentally the same," is intensified in the second into the proposition, "The ground of nature and spirit, the absolute, is the identity of the real and the ideal," and in this form is elevated into a principle. As the absolute is no longer employed as a mere ground of explanation, but is itself made the object of philosophy, the doctrine of identity is added to the two co-ordinate disciplines, the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit, as a higher third, which serves as a basis for them, and in Schelling's exposition of which several phases must be distinguished.[1]

[Footnote 1: The philosophy of identity is given in the following treatises: Exposition of my System of Philosophy, 1801; Further Expositions of the System of Philosophy, 1802; Bruno, or on the Divine and Natural Principle of Things, 1803; Lectures on the Method of Academical Study, 1803; Aphorisms by way of Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature, Aphorisms on the Philosophy of Nature (both in the Jahrbücher für Medizin), 1806. Besides these the following also bear on this doctrine: the additions to the second edition of the Ideas, 1803, and the Exposition, against Fichte, 1806.]

Following Spinoza, whom he at first imitated even in the geometrical method of proof, Schelling teaches that there are two kinds of knowledge, the philosophical knowledge of the reason and the confused knowledge of the imagination, and, as objects of these, two forms of existence, the infinite, undivided existence of the absolute, and the finite existence of individual things, split up into multiplicity and becoming. The manifold and self-developing things of the phenomenal world owe their existence to isolating thought alone; they possess as such no true reality, and speculation proves them void. While things appear particular to inadequate representation, the philosopher views them sub specie aeterni, in their per se, in their totality, in the identity, as Ideas. To construe things is to present them as they are in God. But in God all things are one; in the absolute all is absolute, eternal, infinitude itself. (Accord-to Hegel's parody, the absolute is the night, in which all cows are black.)

The world-ground appears as nature and spirit; yet in itself it is neither the one nor the other, but the unity of both which is raised above all contrariety, the indifference of objective and subjective. Although amid the finitude of the things of the world the self-identity of the absolute breaks up into a plurality of self-developing individual existences, yet even in the phenomenal world of individuals the unity of the ground is not entirely lost: each particular existence is a definite expression of the absolute, and to it as such the character of identity belongs, though in a diminished degree and mingled with difference (Bruno's "monads"). The world-ground is absolute, the individual thing is relative, identity and totality; nothing exists which is merely objective or merely subjective; everything is both, only that one or other of these two factors always predominates. This Schelling terms quantitative difference: the phenomena of nature, like the phenomena of spirit, are a unity of the real and the ideal, only that in the former there is a preponderance of the real, in the latter a preponderance of the ideal.

At first Schelling, in Neoplatonic fashion, maintained the existence of another intermediate region between the spheres of the infinite and the finite: absolute knowing or the self-knowledge of the identity. In this, as the "form" of the absolute, the objective and the subjective are not absolutely one, as they are in the being or "essence" of the absolute, but ideally (potentially) opposed, though one realiter. Later he does away with this distinction also, as existing for reflection alone, not for rational intuition, and outbids his earlier determinations concerning the simplicity of the absolute with the principle, that it is not only the unity of opposites, but also the unity of the unity and the opposition or the identity of the identity, in which fanciful description the dialogue Bruno pours itself forth. A further alteration is brought in by characterizing the absolute as the identity of the finite and the infinite, and by equating the finite with the real or being, the infinite with the ideal or knowing. With this there is joined a philosophical interpretation of the Trinity akin to Lessing's. In the absolute or eternal the finite and the infinite are alike absolute. God the Father is the eternal, or the unity of the finite and the infinite; the Son is the finite in God (before the falling away); the Spirit is the infinite or the return of the finite into the eternal.